Pulling strings: Austin Opera House revival reflects city in flux

Decades after its final show, debate over famed venue's potential resurrection provides a look into Austin's past and future

Willie Nelson, Ray Charles and Stevie Ray Vaughan (Getty Images)
Willie Nelson, Ray Charles and Stevie Ray Vaughan (Getty Images)

Three decades after the final twang of a steel guitar at the Austin Opera House, a debate over its potential resurrection offers a window into the Texas Capital’s musical past — and its future.

Once owned by Willie Nelson, the storied venue with a Gold Rush saloon vibe that showcased artists ranging from Ray Charles to Patti Smith is a symbol of the old Austin, a city more about music than Big Tech and electric cars.

Millions of dollars of investment by technology firms has transformed the city into a high-end destination. Some off-season hotel rooms start at almost $600. Traffic gridlock is endemic. 

Now, the plan to rethink the Opera House as part of a bigger project including a retail and residential complex has musicians, developers, architects and homeowners up in arms.

Proponents sell the promise that the venue will once again play a central role in the city that bills itself as the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Neighbors, including some musicians, bemoan the potential return of unruly after-hours activity — such as the time a homeowner turned a hose on a couple who were getting a little too intimate on his front lawn.

What both sides miss is that the entire fabric of Austin, and particularly of the music hall’s neighborhood, has been almost completely transformed. And it’s not coming back.

To the Opera House’s north and east are the Hotel Magdelena and Hotel Saint Cecilia, where off-season rooms start at $589 per night. They’re part of the Bunkhouse boutique hotel group that sparked the area’s metamorphosis in the early 2000s with the opening of Hotel San Jose, a radically reimagined, former low-rent motel. Over the next two decades, the gritty motel and bar strip known as South Congress became SoCo, a buzzy social and tourist destination. The Saint Cecilia Residences penthouse recently sold for a record amount per square foot. 

The venue’s immediate neighbor is the Music Lane office and retail complex, part of a 15-acre group of properties that Turnbridge Equities recapitalized to the tune of $500 million in January. Turnbridge will use the funds to renovate two multifamily properties on South Congress. In Travis Heights, the residential neighborhood to the east of the property where owners are upset about the potential revival, the median home price jumped 25 percent from a year ago to $1.3 million.

A few blocks away, a $2 billion redevelopment is being planned to transform the former site of the Austin American Statesman into the South Central Waterfront, covering 118 acres and 32 separate private properties adjacent to the South Congress Bridge. The vision includes everything from residential and retail to offices and restaurants, including several tall towers. 

Opera House owner Chris Wallin, who bought it in 2018, wants to whittle down the music hall’s 42,000 square feet to 17,000, preserving the 3,000-square-foot stage and lobby for a 1,200-person venue with underground parking. The new complex, dubbed 200 Academy, would retain Arlyn Studios, where musicians who laid down tracks have ranged from the Butthole Surfers to Frank Ocean, not to mention a museum with “4,000 artifacts of Texas music.”

The rest would be multifamily housing, retail storefronts and a park. According to the developers, the property — which won’t even have a site plan until a zoning issue is resolved — would have a “residential buffer” between it and its neighbors. Freddy Fletcher, Nelson’s nephew, and partner Will Bridges have a five-year lease on the studio. 

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The plan has gone through months of city consideration and public input. Supporters include musicians Charlie Sexton, Gary Clark Jr. and Nelson, who won control in 1977 partly by repaying a previous owner’s poker debt before cashing out a decade later.

The zoning change that the plan needs isn’t just a “nostalgia request,” Sexton said. The “heart of the city still beats” in the Opera House.

City council members also like to flex their Austin music bona fides. They’ve recalled fond moments like watching Stevie Ray Vaughan shred or easily slipping backstage to get Nanci Griffith to sign an album. Locals recall a commodious dance floor with riser seating in back and great sightlines—although the ones from the “cocaine catwalk” were said to be the best. Yet money was always tight, neighbors never stopped complaining and the venue’s reputation for drug use just kept growing, according to Texas Monthly. It closed as a regular music venue in 1992.

Among the most vocal opponents is Brian Beattie, a longtime musician and music producer. In meetings and interviews, he has said that the historic importance of the Opera House is in the music performed there, not the building itself. He has a wealth of clippings and other paperwork that document the venue’s problems from an early age, before a cease-and-desist from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry forced it to change its name from the Austin Opry House. They include revoked liquor licenses and the times 1,200 tipsy patrons partied on in the parking lot or spilled out into the neighborhood to find their cars.

And the music scene is thriving nonetheless, thanks largely to the success of two annual events, the SXSW Conference & Festivals and Austin City Limits Music Festival. They funneled almost $650 million into the city’s coffers in separate two-week spans in 2019. 

In a mildly weird turn, it’s the newer establishments that are most wholeheartedly embracing the return of live music to places such as the Opera House. 

Music Lane’s developers, who are renovating 400 apartments nearby, seem to be banking on the net good more activity brings. And Standard International chairman Amar Lavalni, who oversees that chain’s Bunkhouse division, thinks the revival would be a boon — and essentially on-brand for his nearby properties.

Hotel guests and residents are coming to Austin for the music and the culture and are respectful of that,” he said. “If they can bring back more sacred institutions in the city,” that’s a positive development.

Project architect and 30-year veteran of the local music scene Richard Weiss said it was Nelson in general and the Opera House in particular that drew him to the city.

In 1986, I was a kid living in Miami Beach, Florida,” Weiss said. “When I heard Live Alive, the Stevie Ray Vaughan album recorded in the building, it narrowed my choices for where I wanted to go to college and is the reason I became a Texan. Thanks, Stevie.”