Keep Austin Austin

Austin is divided, north and south, by the Colorado River, which is dammed to make Lady Bird Lake. 

The Colorado serves the same purpose as the Seine in Paris, as a cultural divide. On the north bank are downtown, the state capitol, and the University of Texas—anchors of a city historically made up of teachers and bureaucrats. The south bank has Tex-Mex restaurants and dance halls. 

Austin is on the tail end of the dance belt, which starts in Louisiana with New Orleans R&B, and runs through Cajun zydeco, enters conjunto territory in South Texas, and then encounters the Czech waltzes and German polkas of Central Texas. The medium that the dance music travels through is Catholicism. In North Texas, the Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ hold sway. There’s an old joke that the reason Baptists won’t screw standing up is that somebody might think they were dancing.

When we arrived in Austin in 1980, there were drug dealers and prostitutes along South Congress Avenue. The women stationed themselves in front of the seed and feed store, where you could still buy dyed baby chicks for Easter. That’s all been cleaned up now, but there’s still a defiant residual funkiness that is pretty much all that remains of the city’s unofficial slogan, Keep Austin Weird. We bought a duplex on the south side, in a neighborhood called Travis Heights. Our next-door neighbor sold appliances, and next to him was Terrence Malick, the filmmaker, who occasionally walked our kids to school.

From “God Save Austin” by Lawrence Wright for Austin Monthly; Illustrations by Ala Lee

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