Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > October > 18 > Entry
Out & About in Zilker and Barton Hills
The return of cool weather means time to explore Austin on foot.
Today, your flâneur wandered the Zilker and Barton Hills neighborhoods, close to our base camp in Bouldin, but in some ways stubbornly alien.
Nora the Explorer (otherwise known as Nora the Willful Chocolate Lab) joined me for the seven-mile jaunt.
The defining topographic feature is a north-south ridge that comes close to splitting Barton Hills from older Zilker. To the east, the land falls gently toward West Bouldin Creek, to the west, north and south, the drop is precipitous down to Barton Creek and Lady Bird Lake.
The tidy urban grid in Zilker inscribes evolving commercial density along Lamar, humble cottages and flashes of contemporary infill. Roads in more remote Barton Hills — developed in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s — curve around the terrain. The street names actually fit the physical features, which is unusual for Texas. Elms, for instance, do grow on shallow Elmglen Drive.
Since spring is our fall, flowers — plumbagos, lantanas, fall asters, Mexcian sage and, especially, yellow bells — blazed. Those trees not wrung dry by the drought shimmered. Butterflies, and not just mobs of white snouts, drifted over landscape.
Not many people outside, except in or near the fantastic nearby parks, including playscapes next to horizontal Zilker Elementary and more vertical Barton Hills Elementary.
Not as many aggressive, new home designs as in Bouldin, but also virtually no McMansions. The only one I spotted fit its pie-slice lot comfortably.
It struck me that I knew very few people here. Or not well. Former state Sen. Ray Farabee — profiled in the space last week — and his activist wife Mary Margaret live in Barton Hills; mystic masseur Bruce Christman and his midwife wife Barbara resided in Zilker, but are moving west of the Balcones Fault. The family of late newspaperman John Bustin grew up in one of those perfectly poised mid-century moderns up above Zilker Park.
I’ve roamed the tree-sheltered streets of Zilker with dogs many times before, but more westerly Barton Hills, through nobody’s fault but my own, might as well have been the wilds of Idaho. (In fact, it more resembles suburbs in Colorado, Georgia and, of course, California.) There’s an odd, though nicely landscaped concrete ditch, for instance, bisecting Barton Parkway. Years ago, I encountered one very similar splitting the redundantly named Arroyo Seco north of Koenig Lane.
It was broad Barton Hills Boulevard, however, that stumped me. How had I never walked or driven past this arcing strip of green suburbia slap dab in Central Austin?
Most strange to me were the apartments shelved above the popular greenbelt, some clumpy (like an inwardly-oriented New Orleans-style garden complex), others campy (a set of Hollywood haciendas). Even the prominent placement of striking sculptures out front could not banish the suspicion that some of these complexes were in the wrong place.
In the rest of Zilker and Barton Hills, one finds neat, tiny slip-in apartments, duplexes and condos (proof of ancient condo mania). They tend to fit the character of the neighborhoods, which are long-settled.
Taken as a whole, both hoods are handsome, walkable, relaxed and close to countless amenities, not the least, superior parks. I’m sure I know scads of people living behind those crazy-quilt lawns, but just haven’t been invited inside yet. The folks I do already know in Zilker and Barton Hills are open, kind and, well, typical Austinites.
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By Michael Barnes
October 18, 2009 7:20 PM | Link to this
Barbara, Your tone suggests you think I was judging your neighbors because I didn't see many people outside in their yards or on the street. Simply reporting, not judging. And note that I reported they grouped near the parks that you praised. And anyone who reads my column regularly knows I'm not into the "exclusive" thing either. Neighbor, I live in Bouldin. That should tell you how far off that concept is. Best, Michael
By Barbara Emmert-Schiller
October 18, 2009 7:12 PM | Link to this
So sorry to read about Michael barnes walk through the Barton Hills main streets. If he saw few people it was because most of them were outside on the creek side of their homes, or on the hike and bike trail that wends its way for miles on one border of the 'hood. What binds the neighborhood together perhaps more than anything is the park and trails themselves. What a shame the large part of Zilker south of Lady Bird Lake is closed to the public due to ACL. Even more sad is the movement of children and adults playing fall games on the playing fields to other suburban locations. The people in the homes of Barton Hills, young and old, even apartment dwellers, live here because of their attachment to nature--the land, the springs, the fragrance, the bird songs and frog choruses that echo up and down the Barton Creek valley. What do these people do for a living? The ones I know are physicians, singers, writers, artists,professors,attorneys architects, nurses, retirees,restaurant owners (some of the finer ones like the new"Olivia",)inventors, & techies all of whom work in their own way to make the world a little better. A pity that you don't know them. They don't seek the limelight, though it often finds them. I will be happy to introduce you sometime, as the wide variety of folks this way are not interested in the "exclusive club" mentality, but are in fact the strong, colorful threads in the fabric that makes Austin Austin.