The Austin Motel

The twenty five foot neon sign in front of this motor court has been lit on South Congress since 1938, and it has outlasted every version of the street beneath it. Jennie Eck Stewart inherited land in the twelve hundred block from her parents in 1925; she and her husband Earnest built up the row of stores there, then added the motel and its sign in 1938, catching the first great wave of American automobile travel. The sign is the same one. What happened around it is most of the history of the neighbourhood. South Congress went from a highway approach into Austin, to a rough stretch that visitors were told to avoid, to one of the most expensive retail blocks in Texas, and the motel stayed open through all of it. The Dean family owned it from 1993. In 2017 they sold it to Bunkhouse, the hospitality company founded by Liz Lambert, which repainted the rooms in bold colours and left the sign and the kidney shaped pool alone. That restraint is why it still reads as a 1930s motor court rather than a new hotel wearing one as a costume. The building is a plain two storey L around a courtyard, the pool is in the middle of the courtyard, and the neon out front is the single most recognisable object on the street.