Transport
The Veloway
A three point one mile asphalt loop in southwest Austin, twenty three feet wide, one way clockwise, with no cars and no pedestrians on it at all. Only bicycles and skaters are permitted, which makes it a genuinely unusual piece of public infrastructure: when it was built in the early 1990s it was the first facility of its kind in the United States.
Entertainment & Sports
The White Horse
A honky tonk that opened on Comal Street in December 2011 and immediately became the centre of gravity for country music in East Austin. Nathan Hill and Denis O'Donnell built it deliberately: O'Donnell had managed the Hole in the Wall for years, and the idea was a room where the honky tonk players they most respected could work several nights a week rather than occasionally.
Entertainment & Sports
The Zilker Eagle
A miniature train has run through Zilker Park, on and off, since the twenty second of April, 1961, when a toy store owner and a railroad worker put the first one on the ground and called it the Austin Eagle. It hauled generations of children on a slow loop past Barton Springs and along Barton Creek, and it retired in 1996 after thirty five years.
Education
Thinkery
Austin's children's museum stands on what used to be a runway. Robert Mueller Municipal Airport handled the city's commercial flights from 1930 until 1999, close enough to downtown that jets came in low over the eastern neighbourhoods, and when it closed the seven hundred acre site was redeveloped as the Mueller district.
Quirky
You're My Butter Half
A slice of bread on one side, a pat of butter on the other, a red heart between them, and a pun underneath. John Rockwell and the team from the Austin agency Creative Suitcase painted this on the east wall of the United Way for Greater Austin building on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard in 2012, as part of a rebranding job for the charity. They volunteered two days to do it.
Entertainment & Sports
Zilker Hillside Theater
A grass amphitheatre on the slope above Barton Springs Road, with a stage built in 1938 and a summer musical running on it every year since 1959. The first production was a show called Seventeen, cast largely with high school students, and about four hundred people watched it. The audience now runs to more than sixty five thousand across a season, and it has never cost anything to attend.
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.
