SoCo

SoCo (South Congress) is a street, a tourist attraction, a half-mile long collection of boutiques, retro hotels, art festival tent lots, food trailers, and restaurants. It’s the Main Street of Austin, and also the main street of Austin, as it crosses the river, runs north through the downtown, and terminates at the Texas Capitol steps.
It seems to attract a crowd of both locals and tourists. The only time I’ve ever seen more food trucks/trailers in one spot was in the temporary food truck fridays at the end of summer in St. Louis. Austin is way Retro. Gulfstream trailers abound. All three of the hotels in the SoCo stretch play up their 60s motel origins, and Austin is a city of hipsters.

Walking along SoCo is actually pretty fun. The boutiques are really self-aware. There was an antique store which was set up like a flea market, but giveaway was that all the ‘stalls’ were thematically arranged and carefully coordinated to have a cumulative ‘flavor’ of antique funkiness. The arabesque and bizzare was highlighted. It’s almost as though an old town’s crammed flea market was re-imagined by Anthropologie.

There were two Mexican import stores, one more generic with a wide international breadth of goods and one more curated to higher end Mexican wares. Allen’s sells the most beautiful, widest variety of $400 cowboy boots I’ve ever seen, and just down the street is a small boutique of expensive hipster wear straight out of San Franciso or LA. I actually bought a pair of black suede mid-top sneakers there that had been marked down from $120.

The hotels, as it turned out, were fully booked, even a week after SXSW, so we got a room at one of the larger hotels closer to the bridge.

SoCo is only one street and a few stores wide. Behind the stores on both sides of the street, there are some beautiful and historic neighborhoods of wooden Texas bungalows from the nineteen-teens, giant trees mixed with prickly pear cacti, and roaming cats. The houses have been lovingly restored and maintained, and many of them have been painted bright colors. I went walking around there one sunday morning, and it was beautiful and green and calm.