Donn's Depot

This bar is an actual railroad station. It stood at McNeil, north of Austin, for ninety years, and when the building was condemned an Austin engineering consultant named Bob Ogden bought it for two hundred dollars, then paid two thousand more in 1970 to have it hauled fifteen miles down to the corner of West Fifth Street and West Lynn. At the time that corner was a thinly settled edge of town. A year after opening he added two railroad cars to the building. One of them, a caboose painted in red and white stripes, was fitted out as the ladies' room, and it still is. The rest of the interior is stained wood, railroad fittings and low light, and it has the specific quality of a building that was made for one purpose and adapted for another without anyone trying to hide the seam. Donn Adelman had been playing piano around Austin since 1961, with a spell working in Las Vegas, when he took over the business in 1978 and renamed it Donn's Depot. He played the room for decades afterward with a bass player and a drummer, and the crowd it draws is older, dances properly, and has in many cases been coming since the seventies. It is a few minutes from downtown and it does not resemble anything else there.