Slowly

Whoever designed these signs needs a grammar lesson. But, this is Texas where we had a motto for the highways: "Drive Friendly." For the record, slow and friendly are adjectives and modify nouns! So, please drive slowly in a friendly manner or something. In any case, they are trying to eliminate some through traffic to give people a safer place to walk and such (as you see FFP doing) during the pandemic.

Ah, our tax dollars at work.

Some street traffic expert decided that having these roundabouts in the middle of a busy street makes sense. I wish someone would maintain the vegetation in the middle of the thing.

Oh, yeah, that ADA thing

On this street leading to the newly opened Walter Seaholm Drive there were no curb cuts for the sidewalk. Our friend Jackie took this picture as they worked on correcting this. If I'm not mistaken this street was recently done when the apartments nearby went up, but I don't suppose doing things right the first time was a priority.Our friend who uses a wheelchair will find the trip up to Third Street much less harrowing now.

Standpipe by me

Here is our entry for the "Worker" City Daily Photo Theme Day. As long as half the streets in downtown Austin are torn up, I figured we might as well take a few photos of the activity. It takes some skilled people to make these projects happen.This standpipe near our building will last a long time, I hope.

Click here to see other theme interpretations from around the work.

Street art

Someone went to a lot of trouble making this street sign in South Austin look fancy.

Bettie Naylor Street

They gave a part of Fourth Street the honorary designation of Bettie Naylor Street in honor of a dear friend of ours who died recently. She was a longtime advocate of women and gays. After the speeches and ceremony folks posed with the sign. She's only a couple of blocks from Willie's Honorary Way (Second Street).

Theme Day: Numbers

Today is theme day at City Daily Photo. Numbers is the theme. Austin has some numbered streets and building numbers are great ways of divining directions. But our building is a bit confusing. It occupies all of the north side of the 500 block of W. 3rd Street and all of the west 300 block of Nueces. The building's developers thought calling the building 'The 360' (as in a 360 degree view of things!) was clever. However, if they'd used an address on Third Street it would have been something like 500 W. Third. It would be cooler, they decided, to give it the address 360 Nueces since they could pick any even three hundred number on Nueces. The downfall of all this is that the front door, on Third Street, has the building name (360) which is also the street address but on Nueces. The Nueces side has only a resident only entrance. This makes it hard for people to find the front of the building using the street address and there aren't clear signs anywhere on Nueces. Not to mention that Third Street is so much more intelligible than Nueces especially on the phone. Numbered streets are great. I live on one and I wish it were my address!!

The photo above is the giant 360 on the front of our building (in the 500 block of Third) and an inset of our cross street (3rd and Nueces).

Check out the facebook page for City Daily Photo for other cities on the theme of numbers.

Sidewalk Art

On one of our walks a few days ago, we came upon these new pieces of art in the sidewalk not far from our residence. Nothing like brightening up the street scene!

Everybody says that there's no car greener. . .

Linda and I had a good time yesterday afternoon checking out the Car2Go demos at Republic Park, a block away from our building. In fact, Linda has one of the cards that allows her to use these vehicles. She took a test ride on the little course they had blocked out on 4th Street. She also downloaded an app that lets her see where an available car is, close to her current location. A sweet concept! We often dream about being able to reduce our car inventory. (Oh-- a KVUE TV crew was there and interviewed her after her test drive.)

Over Her Shoulder

There has been a bit of renaming downtown in the last few years. We have to remember to call Town Lake something else: Lady Bird Lake. The solution, though, is to just tag on the names so you will still be right I realized yesterday. Hence we have Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge. Peeking over her shoulder on the plaque is our condo building with the confusing name, The 360. (Because there is a highway officially called "Capital of Texas Highway" that we all call 360 because its number name used to be the only name. It is nowhere near our building.) Now if they'd only named First "Cesar Chavez First Street" and 19th "MLK 19th" we wouldn't have lost track of the numbering scheme. Of course, nothing would save us from having a South First and a South Fifth south of the river (really Town, er, Lady Bird Lake) when numbered streets are normally east and west. And, after all, the numbered streets used to be tree streets so we have Old Pecan Street Restaurant on East Sixth. We joke that all this confusion is intentional but of course it's really not. Never attribute intention when mere ineptitude will explain everything.

Capitol View

There is much talk about retaining views of the Capitol Building. From just south of the Congress Avenue Bridge, it appears to be struggling to be seen. Driving up Congress from the South remains one of the most dramatic ways to encounter the Capitol.

Life Surrounds You

"Life Surrounds You" is the motto for the condo complex we hope to live in starting sometime next year. Their sales office is on Rio Grande between 5th and 6th. The building itself is on Nueces. (Between Third and Fourth and, apparently, it will have the address 360 Nueces.) The picture was taken from Sixth Street looking south and a little east at the building from the sales office. This was taken last Sunday. Compared to the photo in the title layout you can see that it continues to rise. (I keep intending to replace the title photo. The 360 is taller and the Intel shell shown there is completely flattened and waiting for ground-breaking for a new Federal Court House. But I do like the energy the picture gives off.)

A little aside about street names. Most of the downtown east-west streets have numbers but used to be named for trees. (See here.) But the downtown north-south streets are named for some of the major Texas rivers. And the river streets that are further west are further south in the state. This means that they logically proceed from Rio Grande (where this sales office is) to Nueces, San Antonio, Guadalupe and Lavaca to Colorado. Here we are interrupted by Congress. Then we have Brazos, San Jacinto, Trinity, Neches and, finally, Red River. So, if you know the rivers you know a little street geography and if you don't you soon will by traversing the streets. Of course, there are more rivers than this in Texas. The Texas Parks and Wildlife department has given names to 11,247 rivers and streams! The Rio Grande is the longest and the next longest is the Red River. They form a good deal of the boundary of the state. Our Colorado River, however, is not the one that courses through the Grand Canyon but a smaller river that actually flows through Austin and is formed into a series of man made lakes. Town Lake is downtown. Lake Austin is the next one north and is shown here.

A Capital Idea

We are already on our 54th post and even though we live in the Capital City of Texas, we have been remiss in featuring pictures that reflected that.

This was taken on Congress Avenue which effectively wraps itself around the Capitol Building after wending its way north from deep in the south of Austin on the other side of the river (which is really Town Lake in the downtown area). Congress Avenue north of the Capitol is ho-hum with state offices but it is Main Street Austin from the Capitol (at 11th Street) to the Congress Avenue Bridge (which has a seasonal population of a million or so Mexican free-tailed bats) and is a hip emerging neighborhood for a dozen or so blocks south of there.

The historic sign identifies the old name for 10th Street. Once streets running east and west had tree names. The famous 6th Street (famous for bars with a propensity for young drinkers now) was once Pecan Street. Apparently 10th was Mulberry. The sign had for some reason lost the 'E' in Mulberry so I sort of edited it in to satisfy my sensibilities. FFP was distressed as we stood there looking at the sign yesterday. He's an editor at heart. (I also turned up the light on the sign itself since the Capitol was so bright in the setting sun.)

For those of you interested in more obscure views of the city, they are sure to come soon! But we just had to show the Capitol since we are in the Capital City. (And we also needed to clear up that capital and capitol thing. And it seems that sometimes capitol is lower case if you aren't referring to the Washington one. But this is Texas folks. And, even though the building was built after we became part of these United States and left for the Civil War and joined up again, we never forget we were an independent nation. So, yeah, we give it a capital 'C.' It's a capital idea. And there are lots of banks downtown so if you need a little capital...you get the idea.)