Rainey Street tiki bar owner caught in preservation battle

The party don’t stop ’til the Austin Historic Landmark Commission says so. 

The preservation group has delayed a Rainey Street developer’s plans to replace his aging bungalow bar, in a neighborhood where residential highrises proliferate, the Austin Business Journal reported. As Rainey has transformed from a blue-collar residential neighborhood to a party district to one of the densest neighborhoods in the country, its property owners and residents have been caught in a bind. 

How much should they preserve what was, and how much should they make room for what is to come?

Placeholder Tiki Bar at 96 Rainey Street is now at the center of that debate. Earlier this week, the preservation board delayed a vote on the owner’s demolition plan. It is the second such postponement this summer. 

“The scale of that building is not so large that conceivably, you could integrate a similar type of program in a restored building, with possibly an addition,” Ben Heimsath, the commission’s chairman, told the Business Journal. “That would meet our criteria, and that would be something that we would encourage. I don’t think I could offer any encouragement for what we are seeing. We are going to lose a building that obviously should be thought of as a contributing building to that even fleeting district that we have.”

The commission also said it was open to relocating the building. But not everyone agrees that the building holds historic merit. 

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When the Rainey Street Historic District was created, the building had several additions to it that cut its historic value. Those additions were later removed.

Jeff Krolicki, the founder of Maker Architects, handled the plans for the replacement. 

“I would hardly say that the details are historically accurate,” Krolicki said at a commission meeting in August. “There is no interest in pushing historic zoning.”

Plans for a two-story building at 96 Rainey have been in the works since at least 2019. 

— Joe Lovinger