There’s a ghostly story they like to tell about Speakeasy, in Austin’s Warehouse District. Ghosts have haunted its historic home in the Kreisel building since July 1916, when a fire trapped a fireman and two women in its antique elevator (now suspended above the main music stage). Most patrons today take it easy on the rooftop terrace while […]
It takes a certain knack to make the Vanishing Austin list and actually do the unthinkable—Vanish. That’s what Little City did on May 13, 2011, after 18 years on Congress Avenue as an original, independent, Austin-style coffee house. Only by necessity, though, when it found itself homeless after the historic building at 916 Congress Avenue […]
I have long been fascinated by juxtapositions, and this one always grabs me as I approach downtown in the early evening on West 6th Street. Despite all of the other condos rising high above the Frost Bank building, its lighted tower top seems to always find a spot in my photographs of Vanishing Austin. With […]
More than a year before a corporate giant’s expansion plans doomed Las Manitas, I enjoyed my first breakfast there amid the late Saturday morning hub-bub and was greeted as warmly as a regular by Cynthia Perez, one of two sisters who’ve owned the Congress Avenue café for over 25 years. She took note of my […]
Progress overtook a humble little bar on Austin’s West 5th Street, but the bar is still intact.
At a much-loved Austin coffee shop on West 6th Street in Clarksville, a young man behind the counter handed me my biscotti, looking on in astonishment at my Vanishing Austin series. “All these places are gone??” he asked, seeming a bit dumbfounded. “No no no,” I told him hastily. “This series of photographs is my […]