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(Laura Figi/Austonia)
South Congress is undoubtedly an Austin icon, attracting tourists from all over the world and delighting even native Austinites with its weirdness and charm. While South Congress seems as if it has stood the test of time, the street's past is rife with squalor and change; today's South Congress is a far cry from what it was just 50 years ago.
In fact, South Congress is experiencing a bit of a resurgence right now. New Austinites might be surprised to find what this part of town used to be, but those that have lived in the city for decades still remember a very different South Congress experience.
(Austin History Center/Austin Public Library)
South Congress used to be the main road to enter Austin from the south before I-35 was built. From the 1910s to the early 1940s, South Congress experienced a period of growth and development centered around businesses that catered to automobiles: hotels, restaurants and tourist destinations began to crowd the street.
After I-35 was built in the early 1950s, businesses started to gravitate to the newly-minted highway. From there, South Congress saw a period of decline, and by the 1960s the street was mostly shuttered.
With rent at an all-time low and empty buildings galore, the street became a hub for drugs and sex workers in the 1970s. However, the low cost of living also made it a hot spot for musicians and artists.
Randy Eckels, who has been selling handmade jewelry on South Congress since 1976, started living on South Congress in 1984, when he said the area was really worse for wear and sometimes dangerous.
"It was really rundown," Eckels said. "Rent was really, really cheap, but there were a lot of high-crime areas, an awful lot of prostitutes, so I kept a pretty low profile."
Eckels, who has spent time living in Oklahoma and even a ghost town in Colorado, said his time living on South Congress introduced him to a lot of great music via The Continental Club, which has been operating on the street since 1955.
Randy Eckels has been selling his jewelry on SoCo for nearly 50 years.(Laura Figi/Austonia)
The area remained pretty seedy until the late 1990s, bleeding into the 2000s .
After quitting her Manhattan law job and moving back to Austin in 1994, native Austinite Liz Lambert took advantage of the low real estate prices when she bought the Hotel San José on the cheap. Even though she started running the hotel as a low-rent residential option, Lambert had bigger plans.
Lambert has since expanded her empire on South Congress. Now her Bunkhouse Group hospitality company covers Jo's Coffee, the Hotel Saint Cecilia, the Austin Motel and the Hotel Magdalena, which just opened, all on or near, South Congress.
Similarly, in 1995 Rob and Cathy Lippincott bought the building that would become Güero's Taco Bar, a South Congress Mexican food staple.
Ever since, the street has been in a period of growth.
Alan Barnett, owner of Prima Dora gift shop on 1912 S. Congress Avenue, has been living in the South Congress area for the last 20 years. Barnett, who is a native of south Texas, said he was drawn to Austin because it had a small town feel. South Congress offered the added benefit of feeling like its own little city.
"I live my life in this neighborhood. I go to the jazz club down the street. I go to eat at all these restaurants, and they know my name," Barnett said. "If you stay south of the river in this area, it feels like a little town."
When Barrett arrived on South Congress in 2000, it still had unsavory traits. He recalls seeing prostitutes every day and rent-by-the-hour motels.
Austin Motel has been around since 1938 but did not rent rooms by the hour.(Laura Figi/Austonia)
Now that the area is more family friendly, Barnett said the area has been in a golden era of sorts for the past few years, but he does worry about the area losing its personality.
"Up until probably the last two or three years, it still maintained this kind of small town coolness that everyone moved here to find," Barnett said. "I think it's starting to change now. I'm sure there's bigger financial interests coming in because that's what they do—they find the place that's happening and cool. And then come in and change it."
South Congress is already missing some relics of the past: famous dance hall Armadillo World Headquarters was located just off South Congress and closed in 1980; longtime restaurant Night Hawk, also closed in 1980; and Sfanthor House of Wax Museum, which closed more recently, in 2016.
Eckles said South Congress just isn't what it used to be.
"I think the quality of life has gone down a great deal," he said. "It used to be really easy to live well here without a lot of money, and that's not true anymore."
Eckels used to live inside the building that would become Uncommon Objects. Uncommon Objects, as well as other former South Congress favorites like South Congress Massage and Turquoise Door II, have moved due to high rent costs. Now, it costs on average $1,500 monthly to rent an apartment on South Congress.
He is also worried many of the historic, defining businesses around Austin aren't going to make it due to COVID-19 regulations.
While many beloved Austin businesses, like Cap City Comedy, Threadgills and Barracuda, have closed down due to COVID-19, most South Congress businesses are hanging in there, in part due to the Paycheck Protection Program. Prominent businesses on South Congress like Hopdoddy Burger Bar, Birds Barbershop, Austin Motel, Home Slice Pizza and Güero's Taco Bar all received PPP loans.
South Congress has certainly changed in the past 50 years, but it has yet to lose its weirdness. Sheri Hope has been selling her art on South Congress for about two months. Hope moved to Austin from Houston because she had always been told Austin was where her art belonged.
Artist Sheri Hope has been selling her art on SoCo since she moved to the city.(Laura Figi/Austonia)
"People have been very appreciative of my art and I think it's an acceptance thing," Hope said. "My art is very raw and real and people can relate to it."
Hope said she wasn't sure she was going to stay when she arrived, but after a few days, she felt like she had found a home in Austin and on South Congress.
"People are very accepting of differences here, it seems to me," Hope said. "I think their minds are a little bit more open to different possibilities."
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Bruce McCandless II's untethered spacewalk made history in 1984. The red stripes above his knees were the only way that NASA could determine which astronaut was Bruce and which was his fellow spacewalker, Bob Stewart. (NASA)
'Wonders All Around' is a new book by Austinite Bruce McCandless III about his dad, the astronaut Bruce McCandless II. (Bruce McCandless III)
I met McCandless III, who lives in Austin with his wife Pati, for a coffee a few months ago, thanks to the introduction from a mutual friend. As we talked about losing our dads, being writers and parents and living in Austin while still dealing with COVID, his dad's famous flight didn't come up, but the process of writing such an epic biography of a complex, only recently passed man was something worth unpacking over coffee.
I hadn't read the book yet, but over the next few weeks, I got to know the McCandless family in such a sweet way that I wanted to write a little about the book here to perhaps inspire you to seek out a copy of "Wonders All Around."
As much as this is a book about space, it's also a book about grief. And persistence. And stoicism. And masculinity and maternality.
The elder McCandless died in 2017, just a few years after losing his wife, Bernice, to cancer.
This passing of the torch from father to son left the younger McCandless inspired to take on this decades-long narrative. McCandless III sets the tone for the book with a memory of the family sitting around the dinner table at their home outside Johnson Space Center near Houston in the mid 1970s, when his dad, who joined NASA in 1966 at the age of 28, wasn't sure he'd ever actually make it to space.
"Our dinners were somber affairs. We ate around a rectangular Formica table in the breakfast nook. Tracy and I sat on benches padded with orange vinyl cushions. Mom and Dad occupied faux-Spanish style chairs with green felt upholstery. Despite the informal, Howard Johnson's-at-the-airport feel of the furnishings, there was a tension in the air that set in right around the time the frozen string beans started steaming. I had the feeling that my sister and I had forgotten to do something important, though I couldn't figure out what it was, or that judgment had been rendered on us and we'd been found guilty of … something — again, it was unclear what. Horseplay was prohibited. The TV and all sources of music or other frivolity were turned off, and singing was strictly forbidden. The only sound came from the aquarium pump. My father had a 100-gallon tank along the wall behind his chair. Sometimes the big plecostomus would attach itself by its mouth to the glass facing us, and I imagined it sucking all the oxygen out of the room."
Imagining what it must have been like to require oxygen to survive, not in outer space but in the living room with your family, sets up the story of the McCandless ancestors, including a guy who was killed by Wild Bill Hickok and the author's grandfather, who was an admiral in the U.S. Navy.
No pressure, Bruce.
It was fascinating to read about the 18 years that Bruce McCandless II worked for NASA before he finally had his first flight, which debuted the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-fueled backpack that he and Ed Whitsett Jr. spent so many years developing. (That's the joystick-controlled machine he's wearing in that mind-bending poster that hung on millions of Americans' walls over the following decade.)
The author McCandless has the unenviable task of trying to put into words what that flight must have felt like. His dad flew 150 feet away from the shuttle Challenger, which would, of course, break into a million little pieces just a few years later.
When President Reagan called the shuttle to congratulate the astronauts that day in 1984, the command center set up a demonstration space walk to give the president a live view of McCandless through the shuttle window.
Bruce McCandless II, trains with Kathy Sullivan, right, in preparation to launch the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
The only problem was, there wasn't much fuel left. McCandless went out anyway, trying to stay within 10-15 feet of the spacecraft. He got into position and turned off the unit to preserve propellant. After the president said a few words and the video switched off, McCandless turned on the unit and "looked for the closest piece of the orbiter, pointed at it, put the hand controller in +X (and) got a sort of sighing noise as it accelerated in that direction." He ran out of fuel just as he grabbed onto a rail on the orbiter. Hand over hand, he brought himself back to the donning station.
It's that kind of suspense that made this book so thrilling to read.
There's space tension like when McCandless is operating as CAPCOM, the only person talking to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they are walking on the surface of the moon, and his commander wants him to break protocol and call them back early, even though there are no signs of distress.
The book is also so touching. I cried while reading about the declining health of Bernice, who survived so many astronaut wife struggles over the years and at the end of her life remained a loving partner and mother.
Bruce McCandless was a Navy pilot who was picked to join NASA in 1966. His first space flight wasn't until 1984. (NASA)
It's easy to forget that McCandless II had an entirely other memorable historic moment—launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990—and this one seems to have struck an even deeper chord with McCandless III.
The Hubble launch was McCandless' second and final flight. He was 52 and had worked at NASA for 24 years.
McCandless II spends the last chapters of the book making a compelling case that his dad's work to fix and update the Hubble are among the greatest achievements to science. He continued to work on Hubble for another two decades after retiring from NASA through his work at Lockheed Martin.
Bruce McCandless, left, and the flight crew that launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. He was 52 years old. (NASA)
He was the "nuts, bolts, screws, and wires guy," the auto mechanic rather than the scientist, who kept the telescope going 340 miles above Earth for more than twice its life expectancy. The Hubble has been cited in more than 18,000 scientific papers and has revealed countless secrets and unsolved mysteries from around the universe and beyond.
"The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images boggle the imagination and make prophets and dreamers of us all," McCandless writes toward the end of "Wonders All Around. "Some of us pay therapists to tell us we're important and unique. Then we check in with Hubble so the satellite can inform us just how galactically marginal we all are. The truth is somewhere in the middle."
What a beautiful reminder.
