Vanishing South Austin

I read today, in the Austin American Statesman, of the passing of South Lamar Plaza shopping center, which is giving way to a new development of apartments and retail space.  My earliest memories are rooted in that place on South Lamar.  It is difficult to describe the nostalgic memory and the feeling of loss as the physical buildings vanish.  Yet the memories hang on like a shimmering and impossible to touch mirage.

Growing up in South and Southwest Austin, back in the sixties and seventies, there were only a handful of grocery stores and shopping centers in South Austin.  Among them, Twin Oaks Shopping Center, Oltorf and South Congress, Southwood Mall, and others I am sure that escape my memory.  This was before Barton Creek Mall, Northcross and Highland Mall, and Westgate.  These centers were where South Austin shopped in the 60's and 70's. 

I spent countless miserable hours waiting in the Beall’s Department Store at South Lamar Plaza as my homemaker Mom walked her fingers through the towers of patterns for making dresses.  This was a neighborhood store and the people who worked there remembered us.  Probably ALL of my clothes came from Beall’s.  Next door to Beall’s was Handy Andy Groceries.  Aside from the old HEB that sat in the current home of Cavender’s Boot City, (if I remember correctly), Handy Andy was the only place to buy groceries in South Austin.  This was before Kash-n-Carry at S. Lamar and Barton Springs and Rylander’s on Bee Cave Road.  Eventually Handy Andy became Piggly Wiggly Grocery.

And then there was Lamar Plaza Drug Store.  Owned by the Karne’s and had the wonderful B.C. Allen working with them behind the Pharmacy counter.  Back then the Pharmacists were “Druggists”.   That drug store provided us at least two generations of cough syrup, antibiotics, and band-aids.

Long gone is the skate rink, (where countless friends had birthday parties,) that became the Armadillo World Headquarters which eventually became an office building.  The bowling alley is now the Bike Shop.  My hair was buzz-cut at Barton Springs Barber Shop, where the small bottles of coke cost a dime out of the vintage coke machine, and there was always a Super Bubble gum waiting for the end of my hair cut.  Dad went once a week before work whether he needed a cut or not.

Things change yet memories remain.  The old South Austin is slowly disappearing and being replaced with trendy shops, apartments, high-rise condominiums.  For me the loss is bittersweet yet change is a normal part of progress.  

My roots in South Austin run deep and long and like those of an old Oak they survive and are part of my childhood and formed who I became.  Though the buildings are disappearing, the memories of the shops and people, while difficult to touch, are a sweet and solid foundation of my life.