Austin

Sunset red granite from Granite Mountain near Marble Falls, quarried and hauled down for a building the state could not afford to pay for in money. Read more The deal instead was land: three million acres of the Panhandle, handed to the contractors and turned into the XIT Ranch, at the time the largest fenced cattle ranch in the world. Built between 1882 and 1888 to Elijah E. Myers's design, after fire took the previous capitol in 1881. It stands 302.64 feet to the tip of the Goddess of Liberty's star, which is 14.64 feet above the United States Capitol in Washington and, despite what you will hear, only sixth among the states. Free, self-guided, open daily, and the rotunda floor is worth the walk in on its own.

One hundred and sixty five feet of iron truss on a downtown corner, holding six carbon arc lamps that lit a circle 1,500 feet across brightly enough to read a watch by. Read more Austin bought thirty-one of them secondhand from Detroit in 1894 and put them up over the following year, an entire municipal lighting scheme from the brief window before streetlights got small. Every other city that had them took them down. Austin is the only place on Earth that still has any: seventeen survive, fifteen of them standing, and they are on the National Register. The one in Zilker Park becomes the city's Christmas tree each December.

Edwin Waller laid this street out in 1839 as the spine of a fourteen block grid, running from the river straight at the hill where the capitol would go, and it has never moved. Read more Jesse Driskill, a cattleman with money and ambition, opened his Romanesque pile a block off it in December 1886 and meant it to embarrass New York. It is still a hotel, and Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson had their first date in its cafe. At Sixth and Congress, a bronze woman is firing a cannon: Angelina Eberly, who in December 1842 caught men loading the Republic's archives onto wagons for Houston and woke the town up with a six pounder. Austin kept the records, and kept being the capital.

Nobody planned this. The bridge was rebuilt in 1980 with deep, narrow expansion joints in its underside, and the crevices turned out to be almost exactly what a Mexican free-tailed bat wants… Read more sixteen inches deep, an inch wide, and still warm from the sun at dusk. Roughly 1.5 million of them now spend the warm months here, the largest urban bat colony in the world, arriving from central Mexico in late March and gone by about October. It is a maternity colony, and some 750,000 pups are raised under the traffic each year. They come out around sunset and the emergence can run forty-five minutes. Watch from the bridge sidewalk, the hike and bike trail, or the water.

Two museums three hundred feet apart across Martin Luther King Boulevard, and one stop because nobody drives between them. Read more The Bullock has the original Goddess of Liberty: nearly sixteen feet and 2,050 pounds of zinc, cast in more than eighty pieces in a foundry rigged up in the Capitol's own basement, hoisted onto the dome in 1888 and flown off it by helicopter in 1986 when an aluminium copy took her place. She has stood indoors here since 2001, at eye level, which is the only way anyone has really seen her face. Downstairs is La Belle, the ship La Salle lost in Matagorda Bay in 1686, excavated inside a steel cofferdam built out in the bay and reassembled plank by plank. The Blanton's reason to stop is Ellsworth Kelly's Austin, a small stone building with a barrel vault and thirty-three hand blown coloured glass windows, where the building is the artwork. He designed it in 1986; it was built only after his death, opening in 2018, and it is the only building he ever made. Go on a sunny morning, because overcast weather costs you most of it.

Paul Cret's 307 foot limestone tower opened in 1937 as the university library stack, and it was lit for the first time that October. Read more The lighting is a language: white for ordinary evenings, burnt orange for a win or a commencement, the windows set to spell out a number. At the top is a 56 bell carillon, the largest in Texas, which rings the quarter hours over the whole campus. In August 1966 a gunman fired from the observation deck for ninety six minutes, and the deck stayed shut for most of the next three decades. A memorial garden was dedicated at the base on the anniversary in 1999, the same year the deck reopened. You can go up; book ahead.

Johnny Holmes opened this place on East Eleventh in 1945, for Black servicemen coming home to a city whose other clubs would not have them. Read more It became a stop on the chitlin' circuit, the network of venues that carried Black performers across the segregated South, and the Kovac Room that Holmes added in 1951 put B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland and Big Joe Williams on a stage a few blocks from the Capitol. It went on the National Register in 1998. East Eleventh and East Twelfth were the commercial heart of Black Austin for fifty years, and they are also the clearest place in the city to see what the 1928 plan did and what has happened here since.

Two Republic-era institutions a quarter mile apart on the same rise east of downtown. Read more The French Legation is the oldest documented building in Austin still standing where it was built, put up in 1841 for Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, whom France had sent to decide whether the Republic of Texas was worth recognising. He barely lived in it: his neighbour's pigs got into his stables, his servant killed several of them, and the quarrel that Texas has cheerfully recorded ever since as the Pig War helped get him recalled with the house unfinished. Up the hill, the Texas State Cemetery has been burying the state's own since 1851. Stephen F. Austin is here, brought up from Peach Point in 1910 under a Pompeo Coppini monument, along with Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, J. Frank Dobie, Bob Bullock and some two thousand Confederate soldiers under plain forty dollar headstones the state bought in the 1870s.

Look north up Congress from the 1300 block and the Capitol dome is framed dead centre at the end of the street, which is the single best free photograph in Austin and the reason for the crowd on the corner. Read more The Continental Club at 1315 has been on this block since the mid 1950s, which is as precise as anyone can honestly be: the club dates itself to 1955 and the Handbook of Texas says 1957. It opened as a private supper club with touring big bands, spent the early sixties as a burlesque house, and has been a roots and rock room for decades since. The rest of the strip has gone from motels and pawnshops to boutiques in about twenty years, and opinions locally remain mixed.

Three acres of pool in the middle of Zilker Park, fed not by a pump but by four openings in the limestone where the Edwards Aquifer comes to the surface, which holds it at about 68 degrees every day of the year. Read more It is cold enough in August to make people shout and warm enough in January that regulars swim laps in it. The whole known world range of the Barton Springs salamander is these four outlets and their immediate surroundings: it was listed as endangered in 1997 and exists nowhere else on the planet. Andrew Zilker owned the springs and used their water to make ice; he sold the land to the city in stages from 1917 and gave the proceeds to the public schools.

A limestone bluff 775 feet up over a bend in Lake Austin, with about a hundred stone steps to the top and the whole western half of the county laid out from it. Read more George W. Bonnell, a journalist who came to Texas for the revolution, wrote the hill into his diary in 1838 and published the name in 1840. It has been the city's viewpoint ever since: after the Civil War it was the standard outing, Custer and his wife picnicked here to band music, and local legend held that a couple who climbed it three times would be married by the third. The 5.36 acres on top are Covert Park, deeded to the county in 1939 in memory of Frank M. Covert, Sr.

This is the one that actually made modern Austin possible, and it is the reason there is an LBJ library across town. Read more The Colorado flooded catastrophically and often; a dam at Marshall Ford was the answer, and in 1937 it was half built and unauthorised, with Congress having never approved the money. Lyndon Johnson, twenty eight years old and a congressman for a matter of weeks, got it funded that July with Roosevelt's personal backing. It was finished in 1942, and after a severe flood in 1938 the dam was raised mid-build to hold more water back. Lake Travis behind it is the only one of the six Highland Lakes specifically designed to hold floodwater, with a flood pool of 776,062 acre-feet sitting above the level at which it counts as full, which is why it rises and falls further than visitors expect.