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Austin travel guide

about Austin

Austin is the capital of the state of Texas, within the United States of America. As of Census 2000, the population of 656,562 people (metro area population of over 1 million people) made Austin the fourth-largest city in Texas (behind Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio), and the 17th largest in the U.S. Austin is the county seat of Travis County and is situated in Central Texas.

Austin was founded in 1835 and was first named Waterloo. In 1838, Mirabeau B. Lamar renamed the city in honor of Stephen F. Austin. Its original name is honored by local business establishments such as Waterloo Ice House and Waterloo Records.

Austin is also the home of the University of Texas at Austin, aka "UT," the flagship campus of The University of Texas System. Other institutions of higher learning include Austin Community College, Concordia University, Huston-Tillotson College and St. Edward's University.

Austin has a heady mix of educators and their students, politicians and lobbyists. It is also the self-proclaimed "live music capital of the world," with a vibrant live music scene revolving around many nightclubs on 6th Street and a yearly film/music/multimedia festival known as "South by Southwest." Austin City Limits, the longest-running concert music program on American television, is videotaped on the University of Texas campus.

Austin's biggest employers include the State of Texas, the University of Texas, Dell, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor (spun off from Motorola in 2004). Other high-tech companies in Austin include Vignette, AMD, Cirrus Logic, Apple Computer, and National Instruments. The proliferation of technology companies has led to the region's nickname, "the Silicon Hills," and has spurred rapid development that has greatly expanded the city to the north and south.

The University of Texas has an outstanding Radio, Television, and Film (RTF) department and, partly because of this, Austin has been the location of a number of movies, including Secondhand Lions, Waking Life, Spy Kids, Dazed and Confused, Office Space, The Life of David Gale, and Slacker. Austin is home to several well-known directors, including Robert Rodriguez and Tim McCanlies. Austin hosts the annual Austin Film Festival, as well as the South by Southwest Festival, which draw films of many different types from all over the world.

Austin is situated on the Colorado River, with three lakes within the city limits: Town Lake, Lake Austin, and Lake Walter E. Long. Additionally, the foot of Lake Travis, including Mansfield Dam, is located within the city's limits. Town Lake, Lake Austin, and Lake Travis are all on the Colorado River. The city is also situated on the Balcones Fault, which, in much of Austin, runs roughly the same route as the MoPac expressway. The eastern part of the city is flat, whereas the western part and western suburbs consist of scenic rolling hills on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Because the hills to the west are primarily limestone rock with a thin covering of topsoil, the city is subjected to frequent flash flooding from the excessive runoff caused by thunderstorms. To help control this runoff and to generate hydroelectric power, the Lower Colorado River Authority operates a series of dams that form the Texas Highland Lakes. The lakes also provide venues for boating, swimming, and other forms of recreation within several parks located on the lake shores.

The Congress Avenue Bridge houses the world's largest urban bat population. In the summer, the colony has up to 1.5 million Free-tailed Bats; in the winter they migrate to Mexico.

At night, Austin is lit with "artificial moonlight." Several Moonlight Towe, built in the late 19th century and recognized as historical landmarks, illuminate the central part of the city. The towers were prominently featured in the film Dazed and Confused. The Zilker Tree (http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/tol/tree.htm) is a Christmas tree made of large lights strung from the top of a moon tower. It stands all year in Zilker Park and is lit in December along with the Trail of Lights.

Among the professional sports teams in Austin are the Austin Ice Bats of the Central Hockey League and the Austin Wranglers of the Arena Football League.

Austin is served by the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

Residents of Austin are called "Austinites."

Austin geography

According to the 2000 United States Census Bureau, Austin is located at 30°18'01" North, 97°44'50" West (30.300474, -97.747247). The city has a total area of 669.3 km² (258.4 mi²). 651.4 km² (251.5 mi²) of it is land and 17.9 km² (6.9 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 2.67% water.

Austin history

Before the arrival of European settlers, the area around present-day Austin was inhabited for several hundred years by a mixture of Tonkawa, Comanche, and Lipan Apache Indians, who fished and hunted along the creeks, including present-day Barton Springs.

In the late 1700s the Spanish set up temporary missions in the area, later moving to San Antonio.

The first Anglo settlers arrived in the area in the 1830s when Texas was still part of Mexico. They founded the village of Waterloo along the banks of the Colorado River. According to local folklore, Stephen F. Austin, the "father of Texas", negotiated a peace treaty with the local Indians at the site of the present day Treaty Oak after several settlers were killed in raids.

In 1839, Waterloo was chosen to become the capital of the new Republic of Texas, and the town was renamed Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin.

A grid plan for the city streets was surveyed by Judge Edwin Waller (after whom Waller Creek was named). The grid survives nearly intact as the streets of present-day downtown Austin. The north-south streets of the grid were named for the rivers of Texas, following an east-west progression from Red River Street to Rio Grande Street. The exception was the central thoroughfare Congress Avenue, which leads from the far south side of town over the river to the foot of the hill where the new Texas State Capitol was to be constructed.

The east-west streets of the grid followed a progression uphill from the river and were named after trees native to the region, with Pecan Street as the main east-west thoroughfare. The east-west streets were later renamed in a numbered progression, with Pecan Street becoming Sixth Street. The original tree-named streets survive in nostalgic names, including Pecan Street, which is the name of a locally-produced beer.

In October 1839, the entire government of the Republic of Texas arrived by oxcart from Houston. By the next January, the population of the town was 839 people.

After Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, two statewide elections were held that attempted to move the capital elsewhere, but Austin remained the capital.

In September 1881, the city schools admitted their first classes. That same year, the first institution of higher learning, the forerunner of Huston-Tillotson College, opened as the Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute.

The Texas State Capitol was completed in 1888 on the site specified in the 1839 plan. At the time it was billed as the "Seventh largest building in the world."

In 1893, the Great Granite Dam on the Colorado River was constructed, stabilizing the river's flow and providing hydroelectric power.

In the 1930s, the original dam was replaced by a series of seven dams built by the federal government which created the string of reservoirs that now define the river's course through Austin. Lyndon Baines Johnson, then a member of the House of Representatives, was instrumental in getting the funding authorized for these dams.

On August 1, 1966, Austin was terrorized by Charles Whitman who shot and killed 16 people with a high-powered rifle from the clocktower of the Main Building on the University of Texas campus. The event is considered the most traumatic event in the city's history.

In the 1970s, Austin became a refuge for a group of Country and Western musicians and songwriters The best-known artist in this group was Willie Nelson, who became an icon for the local "alternate music industry." In the following years, Austin gained a reputation as a place where struggling musicians could come and launch their careers in informal live venues in front of receptive audiences.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the city experienced a tremendous boom in development that temporarily halted with the Savings and Loan collapse in the late 1980s. The growth led to an ongoing series of fierce political battles that pitted preservationists against developers. In particular the preservation of Barton Springs, and by extension the Edwards Aquifer, became an issue which defined the themes of the larger battles.

In the 1990s, the boom resumed with the influx and growth of a large technology industry. Initially the technology industry was centered around larger established companies such as IBM, but in the late 1990s, Austin gained the additional reputation of being a center of the Dot-com boom.

In 2000, Austin became the center of an intense media focus as the headquarters of presidential candidate and Texas Governor George W. Bush. Ironically the headquarters of his main opponent, Al Gore, were in Nashville, thus recreating the old Country Music rivalry between the two cities.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Austin, Texas".

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