Every morning, we send you a free email packed with Austin news, business, and entertainment. Join 16,000+ readers who wake up to Austonia's newsletter.
Featured
austonia newsletter
Most viewed
Austin's skyline is changing and growing upwards with a leaked new 74-story mixed-use building downtown that promises to be the tallest in the city, possibly even tallest in Texas, once it is completed.
On the corner of West Cesar Chavez and Red River Street, Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential are developing what will be called "Waller Creek," a roughly 1,024 foot tall tower on the edge of Lady Bird Lake. The tower will qualify as a "supertall" skyscaper because it will be more than 984 feet.
Reports of the tower were first discovered by Towers, which saw renderings leaked by a user named Paco Jones on a Houston Architecture forum depicting a giant mixed-use building on land currently owned by WeWork. Seth Johnston, senior vice president for LPC's Austin office, confirmed with Towers that the posted details are "relatively accurate."
The tower will consist of a five-star hotel, 25 levels of office floors, 34 levels of residential space, and a parking garage with three underground levels and 12 above levels. The lot, which is on approximately three acres of land, is currently a parking lot and has been for around 20 years.
(Paco Jones)
The tower is poised to become the tallest skyscraper in Texas, followed by The Independent on 301 West Ave., lovingly known as "the Jenga Tower," which stands at 685 feet. The 6X Guadalupe, located on 400 West 6th St. and also by LPC and Kairoi, is next in line to be the tallest building, which will stand 845 feet once it is completed.
Currently, the tallest building in Texas is the JP Morgan Chase Tower, standing at 1,002 feet in Houston.
- An Austin builder challenges her industry, and the industry responds ... ›
- No halt to construction, but Austin insists on workers' safety - austonia ›
- See Austin's new Apple campus under construction - austonia ›
- New skyscraper "6x guadalupe" to become second-tallest in Austin - austonia ›
- TikTok eyes office tower in downtown austin - austonia ›
- A new office tower is coming to North Austin's Domain area - austonia ›
- Tower with luxury hotel, condos coming to Downtown Austin - austonia ›
- Mixed-use community coming between Austin and San Antonio - austonia ›
Popular
(Pexels)
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
