Sixth Street

The street's modern life began in a slump. After World War II, pawn shops, bars and discount stores gave it a skid-row feel, until a 1970s revival built on live music and entertainment. Esther's Follies opened in 1977, the Pecan Street Festival began in 1978 to help pay for restoring the old buildings, and Greater Tuna premiered at the TransAct in 1981. The Ritz theater, opened in 1929 at 320 East Sixth, became an Alamo Drafthouse in 2007. Earlier shops were run by Black, Lebanese, Syrian, Jewish, German, Chinese and Mexican American owners.

What the plaque says

Sixth Street Originally named Pecan Street on Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for Austin, Sixth Street served as a farm to market road entering the city from the east. Bringing together a diverse ethnic population, it became a center for Austin's 19th century development. A major thoroughfare since its beginning, the street served as a stagecoach route, with the Bullock Hotel at the corner of Pecan and Congress Avenue as a stage stop. The street's flat terrain and its distance from the occasionally flooding Colorado River contributed to its appeal as a site for commercial development. Shops, saloons, stables, wagon- and lumber-yards lined the street, with the owners often residing above their businesses. Development continued through the 1889s along Pecan Street, which was renamed Sixth Street in 1884. Sixth Street contains Austin's largest concentration of Victorian commercial architecture. the 20th century brought many changes to Sixth Street, and some early structures fell into disrepair. Restoration efforts begun in the 1960s revitalized the area and brought recognition of its role in Austin's past. Sixth Street was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.5 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.9 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.9 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.

More markers nearby

• Site of John Bremond & Company — steps away
• Site of the Official Residence of Mirabeau B. Lamar — steps away
• Organization of First Protestant Worship in Austin — steps away
• Original Site of First Methodist Church of Austin — steps away