Tag: austin history center

March music madness, food and follies

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Above: Bottlecap Mountain playing at The Highball

Not sure how many people were registered officially for the first four days of SXSW 2024 (SouthBy ’24), but there were more than 75,000 from 100 countries in 2023. Those are mainly the techies. Add in the film and music festival attendance throughout the week, and the number doubles. There were somewhere in the range of 1,500 acts scheduled, not counting the unofficial ones rippling across music venues throughout the city.

In other words, Austin was hopping.

We are among the fringe attendees who avail themselves of a couple of the many free or low-cost events not requiring badges. Some snapshots from those, several at The Saxon Pub, are found below, along with a snippet of Bottlecap Mountain’s new “I’ve Got Something for You.”

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Women belt out the blues to help preserve Austin history

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Clifford Antone (1949-2006) slung sandwiches as his first Antone’s endeavor in Austin, but by 1975 the blues had taken over. He opened Antone’s downtown to showcase the best blues artists around. Susan Antone recalls her brother always wanted Antone’s to be a place where you could take your little baby or your grandmother.

The blues slingers came, and, in the early days, Susan would fill them up with a home-cooked meal before they went on stage. For posterity, she made sure to photograph them as well, creating a lasting story of the blues in Austin.

Susan Antone was the honored guest at a benefit Friday night presented by Songwriters across Texas for the Austin History Center Association – Women of Antone’s. The association is a nonprofit organization raising funds for the Austin History Center. Dedicated to preserving the history of Austin and Travis County, the center is a division of the Austin Public Library and is located in a 1933 building on Guadalupe Street that once housed the main library itself.

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Most precious part of Zilker Botanical Garden reflects the spirit of one man

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The drawing-rooms of one of the most magnificent private residences in Austin are a blaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet, on which the delicate feet of the guests may tread. The occasion is the entrance into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown.

“Tictoca,” William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), The Rolling Stone, October 27, 1894

Clara Driscoll Sevier, who loved flowers to the point of promoting a rose garden next to the Alamo as more desirable than saving its historic convent walls, found Austin lacking a garden club for women. To remedy this, she invited a group of ladies to Laguna Gloria, her home that is now The Contemporary Austin, to establish one in 1924. O. Henry’s reference to the violet-crowned hills of Austin inspired the name for the new group, the Violet Crown Garden Club.

Annual flower shows were the primary focus of the club until 1946 when members set aside modest seed money of $50 to initiate efforts to seek space in the city’s Zilker Park for a botanical garden. The Violet Crown Garden Club recruited six other garden clubs to join its quest and their persistence finally resulted in the 1964 completion of the Austin Area Garden Center building in what became the Zilker Botanical Garden.

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