Austin is not exactly a college town anymore. Every now and then, it rears back to that era, but today it is mostly other things.
Nevertheless, the city still operates on a college schedule. Fifty thousand students don’t come and go without their presence and absence being felt. The surge in remotely working young professionals adds to this. So does the tourism cadence, which peaks in the spring and again in October. In March, April, and May, the city is packed, and then once more in the early stages of what passes for fall. In January—especially in January, when the possibility of chill keeps folks out of downtown—the city can be downright empty. Most urban places surge to life in the first weeks of the new year. Austin takes its time waking up.
This, too, calls back to an earlier age. Austin used to be a hippie town, but like the college town thread, the hippie streak holds less space than it used to occupy. It perks its ears up a few times a year. Then, it takes us right back to sleep. Identities don’t really go away in Austin. They just condense into smaller pockets.
One of those smaller pockets is West Campus. Maybe half a square mile in footprint, with a population density which on a big football weekend approaches that of the island of Manhattan, West Campus is not a part of the University of Texas’s campus, but rather—as its name implies, once you’ve shaken the notion that it should be the western part of campus—the neighborhood next to campus on the western side. Bounded by campus to its east and by Shoal Creek’s ravine sloping down from its own west, West Campus can look stately from a certain angle. It is not stately. Up close, it looks like a neighborhood built for undergraduate college students. Frat houses intersperse with high-rises intersperse with deteriorating smaller apartments which we imagine were deteriorating when they opened, at least a few decades ago by now. This appearance is exactly what West Campus is. West Campus is a place to age out of, often before one even graduates. If you find a block in West Campus that feels inhabited by adults, you’re about to cross 29th Street. Society awaits on the other side.
West Campus is a mess. It’s full of one-way streets and it’s packed with dead ends. These dead ends move around, too. What is a dead end one day might not be a dead end the next, because like those of any thriving university, UT’s territorial waters are full of construction fencing, rubble, and dust, all sprouting gleaming half-inhabited jewels in their own little subset of that magnificent, spanning skyline. West Campus is a cradle of motion. I think it’s the ideal gas law which says it must therefore expand, lest it overheat.
The inhabitants of West Campus epitomize independent adolescent living. Especially the less Greek the block. West Campus locals are clear-eyed, physically invincible youths in the process of discovering from first principles and Instagram what we all must discover around that age: How to survive without direct supervision. They tend smart and resourceful, and they’re capable of operating in the aftermath of heavy chemical ingestion and a light dose of sleep. There are two broad types of UT students, and the better by far lives independently in West Campus, improvising innovative modes of trash disposal while they budget around a takeout market whose pricing verges on commoditized. West Campus is the most chaotic and alarming part of Austin most Austinites will ever see. It is also comfortably familiar to anyone who has ever been 20 years old. West Campus is home to the best of us. They march through it in waves, migrating to and from classes, never slowed down by torn up streets or construction closures or any of the other natural landmines which make traversing that neighborhood nearly impossible as a full-blown adult.
West Campus doesn’t have as many bars as you would expect. There are a few around the edges, one bar’s bar in the heart of it (Cain & Abel’s), and some snazzier ones in glittery hotels which are not intended for the core West Campus demographic. There aren’t as many food trucks as its marketers would have had you believe back when food trucks were electrifying the travel blogging world. But there are some food trucks, and there is that thriving takeout scene, and near the epicenter—near the mouth of 24th Street, where it plunges its fare out across Guad and into cleaner waters—there is a Starbucks in a short, squat building with a wraparound second-story porch, a building more responsible than any in Austin for reminding you that you are in a state which borders the state that is home to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. We’re here to talk about that Starbucks.
January is a good month for dinner reservations in Austin. It’s also a good month—or it has the best two weeks—to go into that Starbucks on a warm, lazy, sunny day, preferably after sleeping in. Set up shop against the window overlooking San Antonio. Watch the cars realize too late how San Antonio is a one-way street.
There isn’t much urgency in Austin, but there especially isn’t much in January. There’s even less on a good, warm, sunny winter day. Time won’t stop. But some parts of town will take the afternoon off. If this city had a snooze button…it would use it.
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This is the third essay of a 52-essay series: The Courier’s Guide to Austin.
