May 25th, 2007
Austin After Dark: Icons
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United States
October 17th, 2006
Morning Coffee: Spiderhouse
Sign in the parking lot of the Spiderhouse Café, Austin
On a blog dedicated to urbanism, it might seem sacrilegious to sing the praises of a coffeehouse that has its very own parking lot. But this is Texas we’re talking about, and allowances must be made.
More to the point, this is Austin we’re talking about — a low-slung, laid-back, liberal bastion in the middle of the lone star state — where the café is more central to community life than in any other North American city I have been to. The people of Seattle and Vancouver may love their coffee, but the people of Austin live at the café.
The Spiderhouse is located in an old house on the border between the university campus and the granola-crunching residential enclave of Hyde Park. It epitomizes the only civic movement to which Austin’s hippies and hipsters alike have dedicated themselves without reservation — an endearingly quixotic campaign to confront the forces of corporate homogenization and “Keep Austin Weird.”
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Interior Space, Society and Culture, United States
