Dead Horses
This is a story about Austin’s changing environment and a terrible episode of how a flood displaced an entire urban neighborhood, but it’s also a story about horses, and so … Continue reading
R.I.P. “WEIRD”
TEOA is always attuned to the great Austin lament about weirdness drying up as quickly as our increasingly parched lakes. Native Austinite Riley Triggs adds his voice to the chorus of those worried … Continue reading
Community Preservation and the “Value” of a Bad Guy
How does a community preserve a threatened treasure? In 2010, Austin citizens and University of Texas students joined forces in a popular uprising that saved the Cactus Cafe, the much-loved … Continue reading
Familiarity in (Sub)Urban Form: The Death of Highland Mall?
Where do malls go when they die? They go to deadmalls.com, or, alternatively, Facebook. In 2009, deadmalls.com visitor “Susan” warned that Austin’s Highland Mall was one foot in the grave: … Continue reading
The End of Education
Oh, Austin. The world has been witnessing your gentrification from all angles. When we look back as recently as Richard Linklater’s early filmography, we see a more desirable city than … Continue reading
Austin Seen, in progress…
I originally started documenting Austin in 2006 shortly after I relocated here from Boston. Feeling community-less and curious of my new surroundings, I hopped on my bike and started photographing. … Continue reading
Between the Windshield and the Rearview
Driving in Austin suggests a metaphor: this town always has one eye on the windshield and one on the rearview. Everywhere you look things are being built, while others … Continue reading
Memorial Wall
“It started out as something smaller, a Day of the Dead thing,” Henry Gonzalez explains, standing before the Memorial Wall at the South Austin Popular Culture Center on Lamar, “but … Continue reading
Ann Richards and the Future of Austin
When Texas Monthly writer Jan Reid published his well-received biography of Gov. Ann Richards in late 2012, TEOA couldn’t help notice some moving passages about her death in 2006 and legacy. We … Continue reading
A Conversation With Thor
About halfway through Thor Harris’s A Post Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship (2010), a mutilated and deformed figure hauls a shark-filled aquarium through a desert populated by wilted flora and equally … Continue reading
The End of Oz-Town
Just before the Austin housing bubble went POP! and Code Compliance hassled the Cathedral of Junk into becoming a permitted structure, the Cathedral’s creator, Vince Hannemann, brought me by his … Continue reading
The End of Austin 