Vic Mathias Shores Trailhead

 
Apparently Auditorium Shores had its named changed in 2014 by the Austin City Council to Vic Mathias Shores, although I never really noticed or adopted the change.  What I did notice was the landscape facelift the area has recently been given.  The improvements resulted from a partnership between C3 (organizer of the ACL Festival), the Austin Parks Foundation, and Austin's Parks & Recreation Department.  TBG Partners  was hired for the design.

The portion of Vic Mathias Shores I visited is the portion right on Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake since we're talking about name changes) at the First Street bridge.  The City of Austin project sign that's still up on the site declares this part the Auditorium Shores Trailhead (didn't we just change that name?).  You can access the site either driving or walking in off of Riverside Drive where the main entry sign is, or enter it from a ramp connected to the pedestrian walkway portion of the First Street bridge.  The later method gives you a good view of a good sized rain garden at the terminus of the parking lot as well as one off to the side of the lot.  The project increased the parking by 33 spaces, so assuming a 10'x20' parking space you've got 6,600 square feet of additional impervious cover.  With 1 inch of rain you'd get 4,112 gallons of water to potentially collect (using a multiplying factor of 0.623 per square foot).

Construction Sign

View of Rain Garden from Ramp

Entering the site from West Riverside Drive, it's evident that an effort has been made to keep the pedestrian pathway intersections with the vehicular routes flush.  In one area, the vehicular paving ramps up to a pedestrian crosswalk.  At the ADA parking the whole adjacent pedestrian route is flush, projected by wheel stops.  The end of the parking lot has a drop off loop that is flush with the plaza area and separation of vehicular and pedestrian spaces is provided by raised planters and bollards.  

Flush Pedestrian Crossing

Accessible Parking Spaces

Plaza Drop Off with Bollards

As a trailhead, there are the associated amenities that you would expect such as a new restroom and a drinking fountain station.  I read that the drinking fountains have chilled water which is unusual for a public drinking fountain.  The restroom has some benches out front that have a board-formed concrete base that matches the entry monument sign and then some composite wood product with skate stops as the seating surface.  The board-formed concrete has such a visible and somehow regular lookng grain, that I'm guessing they used some sort of textured form liner instead of actual wood.  Or maybe they used the composite wood material that also has an artifical wood grain.  There are custom galvanized steel tube and composite wood seats over on a composite wood deck that overlooks the lagoon at Brent Grulke Plaza.  The welds on the seats' mitered corner are inconsistent and many of them are really conspicuous.  I prefer to have welds where they are ground down flush.  I know that there's some more challenge with that and the galvanization zinc coating, but I've seen cleaner welds done with galvanized metal.  There also appears to be splattered concrete on the sides of some of the seats.

New Restroom

Board Formed Concrete with Composite Wood

Chilled Drinking Fountains

Galvanized Steel Tube & Composite Wood Seats

Brent Gulke Plaza Sign

Lagoon

The largest rain  garden is near the plaza drop off.  Its main inlet is in one corner where just inside there's a rock-filled gabion separator wall presumable to filter out trash.  A large stormdrain at this corner presumably serves as an overflow for the rain garden.  There are some interior limestone blocks with gaps, and I'm not sure if they're just aesthetic or if there's some elevation change that separates water chamber.  A secondary inlet is on the diagonal from the main inlet.  It's cut right at an expansion joint, and while that makes sense in some ways with the tilting planes of the paving, it does make me wonder what might happen if the exapnsion joint fails and water directed  towards it starts infiltrating beneath the paving.  There are also a series of pvc cleanouts along one edge of the rain garden, and I'm not sure what these are for.

Large Rain Garden

Limestone Blocks in Rain Garden

Secondary Inlet

Cleanouts

When the redesign of Auditorium Shores was underway and public feedback was being collected, I recall there being a lot of debate about offleash dog areas.  The park is a popular dog spot, especially a limestone block edge at the water where I've seen dogs swimming off of for years.  Technically this area is now not an off leash area according to the temporary map up at the site.  There is a "Creekside Forest" restoration area adjacent to these limestone blocks.  A wood fence separates this area the people and canines.

Leash Sign

Off-Leash Boundary Map

Limestone Blocks into Water

Creekside Forest

The bulk of the square footage of the Vic Mathias Shores area at the trailhead is a large open lawn.  There's a concrete band that cuts through it, and at first I thought that might be a designation of dog off-leash area, but that doesn't match what the off leash map shows.  Both long edges of this lawn have great allees of Live Oak trees that were existing before the improvements.  Shaded pedestrian pathways run through the trees, and one of them ends at a statue of Austin icon Stevie Ray Vaughan.  And while Stevie was a great music star, a landscape in Texas isn't complete without a large Texas star.  In this case it's part of the Bicentennial Fountain that was existing before the renovation.  This is yet another empty water feature, either a vicitm of the current drought water restrictions or insufficient maintenance budgets.

Open Lawn

Live Oak Allee

Stevie Ray Vaughan Statue

Bicentennial Fountain