Austin's Historic Streets. Austin's Republic Tower Celebrates City's Historical Street Names with New Mural

Hey everyone, Thursday lunchtime. This is Gary for City vibe. I'm downtown. Uh, this is 3rd Street. I'm between Colorado and Guadalupe. I'm standing right at the base of the new Republic Tower, and I've just noticed something really quite endearing about the graphic of a map that's on the back wall here. This is the south side of the Republic Tower. Uh, those of us who've been in Austin for a while have figured out that the, uh, city grid was set up so that streets running north south were named after Texas rivers. You can see we got Rio Grande, Nurces the Guadalupe River, of course the main exception to that is Congress Avenue. You got the Brazos River, Trinity. Red River and they're actually laid out east to west, the same as they would appear on a map of the United States. But what's really endearing about this map is that the east west streets that are now on a number system were originally named after native Texas trees. So, uh, 4th Street was called Cedar Street, 5th was Pine. And 6th Street was Pecan Street, and there are still references to that now in Austin culture, you know, the Pecan Street Festival. Although it's not shown on the map, I think down here somewhere, maybe 3rd or 2nd was originally called Live Oak Street. So Austin's newest building, uh, paying homage to a little bit of Austin history.