Watson Wire: The Story of City Hall

Austin City Hall officially opened for the people’s business 20 years ago in November 2004. I was quoted at the time saying that our new copper-clad, pointy-angled, limestone-stacked, window-dominant seat of municipal government would be “looked at by people all over the world.”

Turns out, once again (yeah, it never gets old) I wasn’t wrong all those years ago. Austin City Hall has become an architectural icon, featured in books and articles and celebrated for being a little different – just like Austin. Over the past 20 years, the City Hall origin story has typically featured the struggles of the famous architect who lamented Austin’s “terminal democracy” and then used that notion to influence the design. That world-renowned architect, who was a pretty good guy, passed this year at the age of 87. Austin’s penchant for long, highly opinionated public hearings doesn’t appear to have contributed to his demise.

The less-shiny version of the City Hall story really started decades earlier, around 1973, when the City of Austin picked up several prime downtown blocks for a steal. Then-Mayor Roy Butler had designs on putting a new City Hall on the property between First Street (now César Chávez) and Second Street overlooking Town Lake (now Lady Bird Lake). The city converted the Calcasieu Lumber Company building to serve as the “temporary” council chambers, which featured ugly yellow seats and worn-out wood paneling, according to the Statesman.

The City Council was still operating out of those so-called “temporary” chambers almost a quarter of a century later when I was first elected mayor in 1997. And the area around it, much of it also city owned, looked abandoned.

An old warehouse immediately east of the council chambers and proposed City Hall site had a big tree growing up in the middle of it and we just treated that as normal. That same block housed some of the city staff that dealt with land development. The building was a constant source of complaints, by city employees and the public who went to do business there, because of the rats.?

The block just west was the home to the J.P. Schneider Store. This brick structure was built in 1873 and had housed the first dry goods store that folks crossing the river from the south would encounter as they came into Austin proper. Rather than doing something with that historic building, the city boarded it up.

A little further to the west was a water treatment plant, the Seaholm Power Plant and a pole yard for Austin Energy — yeah, we were storing utility poles on the edge of our Central Business District.?

I used to tell folks, “If you walk through your downtown and point out the ugliest property, you probably own it.” All of it was ugly and none of it was on the tax roll.

Downtown Spark

Downtown Austin had been hit particularly hard in the 1980s by the collapse of the savings and loan industry and the real estate bust. Though a few new downtown office towers had gone up at the time, demand had plummeted and left several vacant, “see-through” buildings. Urban design experts recommended sparking downtown redevelopment starting with the city’s waterfront properties, envisioning mixed-use residential along with public uses — including a City Hall.

For our downtown to thrive, we needed the new economy to live and work there. We needed what was happening in Austin to be reflected in our downtown. I even tried calling it “Austin 3D,” the Digital Downtown District. The name never caught on but the idea did, eventually.?

In 1999, I got a call one day that Computer Sciences Corporation was planning to locate a sprawling suburban campus in Austin — directly over the aquifer. Instead, we turned it into an opportunity to lure a major employer away from an environmentally-sensitive area, and we had some downtown city land to use as bait.

We put on the hard sell, traveling to California to sit down with the CEO of Computer Sciences Corporation. He really wanted a suburban campus so I countered with a “campus” across the street from a lake and a hike-and-bike trail that is second to none.

CSC prepaid a 99-year lease for three of the downtown blocks while the city maintained ownership. The cash from the prepayment enabled us finally to build our new City Hall in the heart of what we envisioned, named and developed as the new Second Street retail district that included ground-floor retail, residential and commercial uses on what had been a downtown dead zone.

In the end, CSC turned one of the blocks back over to the city, which opened up a location for the W Hotel and a new home for Austin City Limits. A few blocks away, the site of the former water treatment plant provided a home for the new Austin Central Library and the adjacent Seaholm Power Plant became a mixed-used development anchored by a Trader Joe’s. In 2005, CSC sold its lease to Austin’s own Silicon Labs, which now maintains its headquarters there.

There were very few places to live in downtown back then. We hoped and were happy to see that efforts like building City Hall encouraged more people developing residences.?

Back then, I said that downtown was the “living room of our entire community.” That wasn’t original with me, but I don’t remember where I first heard or saw that description of a downtown. It stuck with me because that’s what our downtown is.

Right now, our living room needs some updating and remodeling. To be sure, it’s a highly successful downtown, but we need to focus on it and prepare it for the next decade. That will include doubling the size of our convention center over the next four years, assuring we can build caps across I-35 through downtown, and reviving our music scene by uplifting places like the Red River Cultural District and Sixth Street. And we’ve started better addressing public safety, but we need even greater action. Count on all of this in the next four years.