The East Sixth Street entertainment district — boisterous, authentic and unique — helped remake sleepy, backwater Austin into the destination city it has become. Now city officials want to remake those several blocks of historic buildings and decaying infrastructure, fashioning a curb-free “festival street” with wider sidewalks that would be at the same level as the street surface. Retractable bollards — short posts — would be in place most of the time, when vehicles are using East Sixth, to separate people from cars. The posts would sink out of sight when the street is closed to vehicles during events such as this week’s South by Southwest. City of Austin officials are considering a $19 million makeover of the East Sixth Street entertainment strip that includes widening the ... Read More East Sixth, which now has parallel parking on both sides and four car lanes most of the way between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35, would have parallel parking on its north side, a bike lane and three travel lanes. The lane on the south side would be open to vehicles only during morning rush hour, converting to a second lane of parallel parking the rest of the time. That vision, however, has been a tough sell to a number of East Sixth business owners. They say the new look would make East Sixth too much like the rest of downtown, adding that such comprehensive change would require a lengthy construction process potentially devastating to owners’ bottom lines. “My biggest fear is that Sixth loses its character, and it loses what makes it unique,” said Shawn Cirkiel, owner of Parkside restaurant at East Sixth and San Jacinto Boulevard and owner of the Backspace pizza parlor at the rear of the main restaurant. “If we lose our history, what do we have left?” East Sixth Street proposal What the city has now, Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League told an Austin City Council committee is December, is an iconic street. But, League said, it has chronic problems with electrical circuits, drainage, cracking sidewalks and other elements critical to business. “The infrastructure is failing,” said League, immediate past chairman of 6ixth Street Austin, one of several business associations in the district. “New businesses have a very hard time moving on to the street. … It’s long overdue, honestly. East Sixth doesn’t feel like a street that should be adjacent to the convention center in one of the greatest cities in America. “The plan is a humdinger. Full speed ahead, in my book,” League told the council committee. But a competing group of East Sixth business owners, the Pecan Street Merchants Association, has a plan of its own. They want East Sixth to have just two vehicle lanes in this stretch, with angled parking (the traditional kind, not back-in parking) that would yield more spaces per block than parallel parking. Howard Lazarus, the city’s Public Works director, pretty much shot down both of those ideas at the December committee hearing. He said the volume of morning rush-hour traffic is too great for two lanes to handle. The head-in parking, he said, “has safety concerns.” Meaning, for bicycles. Back-in angle parking, city officials have said in justifying on South Congress and other places, makes it less likely that a car will pull out and hit a cyclist. Nonetheless, Lazarus conceded that “we still don’t have consensus” and said talks with merchants and city officials will continue before his department begins spending the bulk of $1 million in design money on a more detailed plan. The planning process has more or less ground to a halt since December, officials said. Beyond a firm, and firmly supported plan, what the city also doesn’t have at this point is the estimated $19 million needed for what amounts to a seven-block project. City officials in 2011, when the project was still in its infancy and the festival street approach had not yet surfaced, talked about including construction money for it in a 2012 city bond election. That didn’t happen. Susan Garnett, a program coordinator in Public Works, said it’s possible it could be included in a bond election in the fall, when the city is likely to ask for several hundred million dollars of bonds for rail, or in 2016. No matter what plan emerges — the festival street that city officials prefer or some variation — all parties involved are adamant that the construction be done in a way to minimize the impact on businesses. League suggested it could be done a half-block or block at a time. But Mark Hill, owner of two Roppolo’s pizzerias on East Sixth, said the closures have to come down to lanes, not blocks. Shut down entire blocks, he said, and cabbies coming from the airport will cease to go down the street on their way into downtown. The result of losing that free marketing, he said, would be a year or two of many tourists choosing to spend their dollars in other emerging areas of downtown. “Once people leave an area, they don’t come back very quickly,” Hill said, pointing to a lingering 60 percent revenue drop for his food trailer near West Fourth and Colorado streets where a city street overhaul over the past couple of years took far longer than originally envisioned. And while Hill agrees with League that the street’s underlying infrastructure is lacking and needs an upgrade, he cautions against using that as a pretext to make wholesale, unrelated changes such as the festival concept. “I sure wouldn’t want that to just be an excuse to put in this grand street,” Hill said. “Let’s make sure what we’re doing absolutely has to be done, and let’s do it so we minimize the effects on businesses.” mystatesman/news/news/local/festival-street-plan-for-east-sixth-a-hard-sell-fo/nfFbQ/
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:14:44 +0000
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