Roadside Attractions in Travis County
Texas·31 places·Page 1 of 2
Music History
Antone's Nightclub
Clifford Antone opened a blues club on Sixth Street on the fifteenth of July, 1975, and Clifton Chenier played the first night. It was an eccentric thing to do. Disco was ascendant, the Chicago and Delta players who had made the music were ageing and largely unbooked, and Antone spent his own money flying them to Texas to work. That is the reason the club matters.
Military
Bergstrom's Bomber Base
Austin's airport is a converted bomber base, and the runways beneath the airliners were laid out in 1942. It opened that September as Del Valle Army Air Base, on three thousand acres leased from the city, and in March 1943 it was renamed for Captain John August Earl Bergstrom.
Quirky
Casa Neverlandia
This is a one storey house from 1906 that its owner has spent decades building upward and covering in mosaic. The artist James Edward Talbot turned it into a three storey structure faced in stone and broken tile, and he has set into that facade stones from an Austin building he once worked on, from houses he lived in in Turkey and Paraguay, and from his mother's birthplace, so the outside wall is…
History
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.
History
Doug Sahm Hill
The highest point in Butler Park is a grassy mound with a paved spiral path to the top, and from it you get the postcard view of downtown Austin across Lady Bird Lake. In 2008 the city named it for Doug Sahm, and a permanent marker was later installed at the summit by his sons Shawn and Shandon. Sahm is the most under celebrated major figure in Texas music.
Quirky
Greetings From Austin
The most photographed wall in South Austin is a postcard. Todd Sanders and Rory Skagen painted it in 1998 on the side of Roadhouse Relics, Sanders's neon sign shop at South First and Annie, copying the format of the large letter postcards American towns sold in the 1940s: the city name in block capitals with a scene painted inside each letter.
Museums & Art
Hi, How Are You Mural
The "Hi, How Are You" mural by singer-songwriter Daniel Johston, is one of the most recognizable and cherished pieces of public art in Texas. Painted in dark ink against a brick wall, the mural depicts a wide-eyed, stalk-eyed cartoon frog greeting passersby with an unassuming speech bubble asking: *"Hi, How Are You?
History
Historic Scoot Inn
There has been a business on this corner of East Fourth and Navasota since 1871, when Sam and Nancy Wilson opened a grocery and mercantile to serve the traffic arriving on the newly built railroad. The current front dates from 1889.
Music History
Hole in the Wall
This bar opened on Guadalupe Street across from the University of Texas in 1974 and was never meant to be a music venue. Its owner Doug Cugini has said as much: musicians drank there, so he let some of them play, and the stage grew out of that rather than from any plan. It turned fifty in 2024, and something like ten thousand musicians have worked it.
Quirky
I Love You So Much
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.
Quirky
Museum of the Weird
Behind a souvenir shop on Sixth Street is a deliberate revival of a form of entertainment that died out a century ago. Steve and Veronica Busti opened Lucky Lizard Curios and Gifts here in 2005, and Steve began filling an unused room at the back with the oddities he collected, on the model of the dime museums P. T.
Entertainment
Peter Pan Mini-Golf
Three brothers, Glenn, Jack and Clifford Dismukes, opened a miniature golf course on this sloping corner where Barton Springs Road meets South Lamar in 1948, and it has been in the same family ever since. It was called Varsity Links at first.
History
Philosophers' Rock
Three men in bronze are arguing at the entrance to Barton Springs Pool, and they are life size, unheroic and mostly undressed. Glenna Goodacre's sculpture was installed under the pecan trees here on the twenty first of November, 1994, commissioned by the Austin nonprofit Capital Area Statues. It shows the folklorist J.
Entertainment
Pinballz Arcade
Darren and Mikki Spohn opened this arcade on Research Boulevard in November 2010, at a point when American arcades had been closing for twenty years and they were told repeatedly that the business could not work. The stock came from Darren's own pinball collection, which had outgrown the house. It worked.
Music History
Sam's Town Point
A dance hall in deep South Austin that began as one woman's specific ambition. Penny Grossman left Chicago in 1979 wanting to run a dance hall, bought four rural acres out near Slaughter Lane and Manchaca Road, and opened Sam's Town Point in 1981.
Music History
Stubb's Amphitheater
Christopher B. Stubblefield, known to everyone as Stubb, ran a barbecue joint in Lubbock from 1968 where Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock played Sunday night jam sessions in a room with a few tables and a jukebox.
History
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…
Museums & Art
The Blanton Museum
The University of Texas has one of the largest university art museums in the country, holding more than twenty two thousand works across nearly a hundred and ninety thousand square feet, and it is free to enter. It was founded in 1963.
Nature
The Congress Bridge Bats
When the state highway department rebuilt the Congress Avenue Bridge in 1980, its engineers set the deck on concrete box beams and left narrow gaps between them, roughly three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half wide and sixteen to eighteen inches deep. Nobody planned it, but that is almost exactly the roost a Mexican free-tailed bat wants.
Music History
The Continental Club
This narrow room at 1315 South Congress opened in February 1955, in a building that had been a laundromat, and it has been in more or less continuous operation ever since. Its original owner Morin Scott ran it as a private supper club with a doorman and a dress code.
Music History
The Elephant Room
A basement jazz club under Congress Avenue, and the name is literal. During the downtown building boom of the late 1980s the skeleton of a mastodon was dug up on the site of a high rise going in at the south end of this block.
Nature
The Mayfield Peacocks
Peacocks have had the run of this hillside garden above Lake Austin since 1935, when friends gave Mary Frances Gutsch and her husband a pair of them as a Christmas present. The birds bred, and the ones fanning their tails at visitors today are descended from that gift. They are not confined and not shy, and they roost in the live oaks and on the roof of the cottage.
History
The Moonlight Towers
These are the last ones anywhere. In the 1880s and 1890s a number of American cities tried lighting themselves from above, with arc lamps hung on towers tall enough to wash a whole neighbourhood at once, and every one of those cities pulled its towers down by about 1910 in favour of streetlights at street level. Austin kept going, and seventeen of its towers survive, fifteen of them standing.
Quirky
The O. Henry Pun-Off
The longest running pun competition in the world is held on the lawn of a small Victorian cottage in downtown Austin, and it has been going since 1978. The house was rented by William Sydney Porter in the 1890s, before he was convicted of embezzlement, served three years, and emerged writing short stories as O. Henry.
History
The Ritz On Sixth
The Ritz opened on the thirteenth of October, 1929, built by J. J. Hegman, and it was the first theatre in Austin constructed specifically for sound pictures. It ran first run westerns at the cheapest ticket in town, often with a country act playing live before the film.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
