Eight words in red spray paint on a green wall, and they were not meant to be public art. In 2010 the musician Amy Cook wrote them on the side of Jo's Coffee on South Congress in the middle of an argument with her partner Liz Lambert, who was the majority owner of Jo's. It was a private apology written in the most public place available, in daylight, on her girlfriend's own building. South Congress already had heavy foot traffic, and the wall was absorbed almost immediately into the city's photographic routine. It is now one of the most photographed spots in Austin and appears in a great many engagement announcements, which is a strange fate for a line written during a fight. In January 2011 someone painted over it. The wall went back to plain green, and after a few weeks Cook and Lambert restored the message exactly as it had been. Since then it has been retouched rather than left to fade, and there is generally a short queue of people waiting their turn in front of it. Jo's is still a coffee window with a patio rather than a gift shop, and it sits beside the Hotel San José, another Lambert project and one of the buildings that started the transformation of this stretch of South Congress in the 1990s. Amy Cook is a working songwriter with a substantial catalogue of her own records. The wall itself is the ordinary side wall of an ordinary single storey building, which is worth noticing, because the entire attraction is eight words of hand sprayed paint that no one commissioned, approved or planned.
Getting there
30.2510, -97.7494
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
