The lake, a treacherous river in the old days, is more crowded than ever, but still an amazing downtown amenity, and Hippie Hollow has managed to hang on and is now officially Texas's only clothing-optional swimming hole. There's also Zilker Park and Barton Springs — in Wilson's vernacular, "our G-spot."
No, Austin is not a truly gorgeous geographical Shangri-La, like San Francisco, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Seattle or even Chattanooga, Tennessee, but it's pretty enough and easily the beauty queen of Texas. What's more, its violent-crime rate is a merciful fraction of those of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Photos by John Anderson
Fats, Jerry Lee and Van the Man were but three of the touring legends to have radiated the Armadillo piano's 88 keys; above, a portrait of the iconic Austin shrine as it appeared in its heyday.
John Anderson
While Austin has recently developed a new tier of high-end restaurants, it's still a town where you can eat fast, cheap and tasty meals tailored for a student budget. Most recently, the city has seen an invasion of over 2,300 food trucks like this one from Franklin BBQ.
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While the music scene isn't quite what Austin's boosters would have you believe, it does have its moments, day in and day out, week after week. "I'll start on a Thursday at five o'clock at happy hour at Continental Club, and then go from there to the early show at the Saxon, and then maybe go over to the East Side to TC's, and then end up between midnight and two in the morning at Antone's, perhaps with Del Castillo," says Wilson. It's a concentration of reasonably compressed world-class talent Wilson can drive to in minutes. "My friend from L.A. tells me it would take him approximately 18 months to see that much world-class talent in L.A.," he says.
As an eating town, Austin was once home to little more than sausage wraps and brisket and breakfast tacos, nachos and guacamole — cheap fare to fill the bellies of UT students while leaving them a few extra bucks for partying. Today, that tradition of cheap eats lives on in the 2,300 hipster food trucks that patrol the city, and they offer much more diverse fare than what was available in the past. And while Austin has not yet caught up to Dallas or Houston in fine or ethnic dining, it has made strides, especially in high-end eats. UT grad and former Austin and Houston food critic Robb Walsh says that Austin has developed whole new foodie-tiers in recent years. "Recently, some really good and really expensive restaurants have opened and been able to survive," he says, citing examples such as Uchi and Vespaio. "It's very competitive on that level, but you can make it now."
However, in many, many other areas, Austin is mired in an intermediate stage between overgrown town and true metropolis. To Wilson, the Austin of today is "like a good-lookin' chick who got knocked up and can't get into her britches anymore." What's more, a great many of the citizens can't seem to see the way forward.
Austin is home to precious few top-rate museums and little in the way of high art or fashion. The only international flight out of its airport goes to Cancun. Austin is America's largest city with no pro sports teams (though some would debate the amateur status of the Texas Longhorns). While the real estate market is a bargain to Californians, by Texas standards it is both costly and cramped.
Above all that, there's traffic, the "sheer hell trying to get around that city," as Greg Ellis, a former Dallasite and Houstonian and now the manager of Sundance Records in San Marcos, puts it. Austinites have a curious attitude toward their clogged roads. In a recent poll, 70 percent of them said it was their city's top concern, and a 2010 study conducted by Texas A&M's nationally renowned Texas Transportation Institute, one that used the latest high-tech GPS devices and even iPhone data to measure travel times, concluded that in all of America, Austin trailed only Los Angeles and Washington D.C. in average travel times.
Yet when you read the Austin American-Statesman's article about the study, there's this weird parade of denial in the online comments. Yes, traffic is bad, dozens of the commenters say. They will all admit that I-35 is a nightmare from Williamson County to San Antonio, and that it does suck being America's largest city with only one interstate. They'll grant that Highways 183 and 290 are hell-paths, and that MoPac is an inadequate north-south conduit, and that major arterials such as Lamar, Airport, Burnet and Manor all have poorly synchronized traffic lights.
And yet still, even given all that, they will insist that traffic in Austin is "not as bad as it is in Dallas and Houston." (Others, like Wilson, just shrug it off and say things like "That's why you are supposed to smoke a joint in your car.")
That denial is typical, according to Julia Youssefnia, a 28-year-old accountant who graduated from UT and has since lived in both Houston and Dallas, and it's not limited to traffic. "Austin is a city with tons of problems — segregation, gentrification, problems with affordable housing — but most people there tend to ignore them," she says.
Indeed, some in the city seem to celebrate their woes. That's what makes Austin weird, they claim.
But Houston blogger Lou Minatti points out that so much of what Austin touts as being weird is actually ordinary. Bats under bridges? Houston has those. A large population of panhandlers, or "dragworms," as they are called in Austin? Both Houston and Dallas have them.
