If abstract economic forces can be blamed for the contraction of much of Austin’s musical infrastructure, declining support by the supposedly progressive City Council needs to get some credit as well. Compared to the Council of about four years ago, the current lineup of Smart Growth advocates seem to equate Smart with Nerdy, and music, by implication, is just plain Dumb.

Take the Austin Music Network. For years the city government maintained this special community-access medium despite money losses as a support for the local music community. Many artists who never succeeded in breaking the city’s formidable print-publicity barrier were able to place videos in rotation on the Music Channel, which was carried free on cable television throughout the city. The changing Council, however, despite public rallies in support of the Network, has sought to privatize its operations, cutting funding and inviting commercial sponsors. Unfortunately sponsorship is hard to come by and the Network remains on life support. Musicians cynically note the gigantic tax abatements offered to high tech to locate in Austin, as compared with the piddling sums the city is willing to invest in its pool of thousands of young artists.

The recent forcible closure of the venerable Liberty Lunch, really the only midsize venue adequate for smaller national touring acts, shows how the immolation of Sixth Street may result from the intolerance of supposedly liberal city planners for a thriving music venue that did not fit with the Council’s plans to sterilize the architectural environs of the planned new City Hall. On the site of the Lunch, the story goes, will arise a new software plant belonging to Computer Sciences corporation. Fine, except that a SCS employee infroms me that the corporation has no signed agreement with the city, just a verbal understanding. In other words, the supposedly progressive, Smart Growth–oriented Council connived to shut down a music venue that was too near its new headquarters on the pretext of giving the site to a high-tech employer that may or may not actually wind up building there. Call it Fear of Music masquerading as Love of Technology.

If the music district gets no help from the liberals on the Council, worse yet are the conservatives at the state level, such as Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander, recently elected in place of a Democrat on the slogan, “She’s one tough grandma.” Much was made in the local press about Rylander’s one-night closure of Antone’s, a downtown club whose legendary owner faces serious federal drug-trafficking charges. The closure was an attempt to force payment of the club’s state taxes, which are considerable and which are technically due in advance of the revenues on which they are based, though this provision has not always been enforced in such a “tough” fashion. A journalist who was on Sixth that night informed me that the press ignored some dozen other clubs also shaken down by Rylander in the same incident. Why Antone’s was singled out for press coverage is not clear. One wonders whether a high-tech firm or even one of our many new Starbucks would be summarily closed until it could cough up back taxes in the way that the music clubs are targeted. One suspects that patrons who had their evening’s entertainment interrupted by a tax raid might not come back as often.

The feeling that the city government is out to get musicians is exacerbated by the obsessive policing of the downtown music district by cops armed with dB meters, ready to shut down acts that exceed 80 dB measured from the street outside a club’s front door. Parking near a rear entrance to unload equipment is also frequently singled out for special harassment. Sometimes it seems the downtown music zone was created not just for “planning” but to ensure control, to keep the troublemakers in one place, like a red light district. (The city has several of those, but not downtown, most notoriously on South Congress Avenue.)

But harassment is a sideshow compared with the plague of “development.” If, in Austin, the main problem is micromanagerial zoning of the downtown arts district with macromanagerial zoning inciting sprawl in outlying green areas, in Houston the differing nature of anti-zoning populism between its 1970s incarnation as hostile toward traditional planning, versus today’s anti-zoning revolt that seeks to preserve a few more traditional neighborhoods amid a Futurama-like spacescape memorialized in the name of a Houston band, Sprawl. And, as in Austin, musicians perceived the connection between single-use planning and intolerance for “noise” by suburbanites with a notoriously unfriendly police force at their command.

Renee Montgomery, now an Austin performer but in 1996 named Best Female Vocalist in a Houston critics’ survey, was unaware of Austin’s 80 dB noise limit:

Wow, I didn’t know it was 80 dB in Austin, it’s a mere 65 dB in Houston, and we saw a bartender go to jail one night at one of our shows for violation. This was after the yuppies moved into the inner Loop and started buying up all the hip cheap rent being occupied by artists, musicians, students, and let’s say practitioners of alternative lifestyles who had lived together quite cheaply and happily until the invasion. They proceeded to raze quaint old homes and erect ugly condos to cram three “families” into the former space for one. Then they decided that the most charming facet of Houston needed to be eradicated, that being the complete lack of zoning which allowed for clubs and bookstores to share a block with the residential property that the bloodsuckers were salivating over. Suddenly, the oldest and best venues became eyesores and threats to property value. They tried to push their agenda through legislation, and you’ve never seen so many freaks at the polls as the day we had to vote against zoning. And we won. Small victory, as the 65 dB rule got past us through the City Council and made things rather sticky for live performance. They are still working to put the screws to the clubs and subsequently to the musicians who insist on making all that racket. And the freaks are still fighting.

Like Renee, many of those who found themselves excluded in Houston wound up in Austin, where it’s déjà vu all over again.

Little Monaco on the Prairie

If the manifest decline in artistic space in Austin reflects hierarchical approaches to social engineering that masquerade as the way of the future but hark back to a Confederate or Spanish Colonial, which is to say feudal, ideal, an apparent oasis in the Texas cultural wasteland seems more than a mirage, that is, Fort Worth. Ultimately, though, the privatized manner of Fort Worth’s success may offer no real alternative to creeping feudalism in Texan construction.

Hardly noticed by Austin boosters is the redevelopment of downtown Fort Worth over the past few years into the kind of well planned city center meant to foster creativity, entertainment, public life, and civic pride. Yet the Fort Worth success story offers lessons both on what Texas could achieve in urban design intended to raise quality of life, and on the limits of a privatized approach.

Several years ago, downtown Fort Worth equaled rundown Fort Worth. Residents expressed their fear of going downtown at night. Then private investment by the oil-rich Bass family began fixing up the city’s downtown, one block at a time. The results show that Austin’s Smart Growth paradigm, by comparison, is dumb in a few subjects.

All classes of people are included. Fort Worth’s redeveloped downtown appeals to tony gallery goers, yes, but one can also walk to the minor-league hockey arena. Even the museums reflect the town’s nonsnobbery, as one of Texas’ most noteworthy fine arts museums sits nearby a terrific collection of Western and cowboy art. The smaller scale of Fort Worth does not allow the segregation by age group that increasingly typifies Austin’s various entertainment areas, most glaringly apparent in the city’s notoriously disappointing Y2K celebration, with Lyle Lovett for the family-values Bushie crowd near the Capitol, while the college kids were herded into Sixth Street itself and treated to broadcast music and a laser show that shone lame images of corporate logos on the downtown buildings. Kids, the city seemed to be saying, we consider you second-class residents and your music a bother, but you can redeem yourself by drinking lots of Bud. Somehow Austin forgot how to party.

Benign security. In contrast to the terror squads that give Houston its feel of a city under occupation, a feeling increasingly noticed in Austin (unsurprising when one considers the string-’em-up attitude of the Governor and legislators), downtown Fort Worth is kept safe by white-jacket security guards with walkie-talkies that work for the Bass family. These private guards do the scutwork of dealing with the occasional drunk or shoplifter, meaning uniformed police are not on hand to militarize minor acts of disorder. If a serious crime does occur, a downtown police station is close enough for rapid response and the private guards are there to call the cops when needed. Compare Austin where uniformed, armed music police, in numbers recalling East Berlin, ready to turn the most mundane encounter between merchant and customer into a potential armed encounter, a “police incident.” It is the benign appearance and attitude of the Fort Worth white jackets that makes the system function. Even so, it is troubling that a city’s security should be beholden to a single family; again we see an essentially feudal structure that recalls the early South transmuted into a possible future.

Public and artistic spaces built in. Fort Worth’s downtown is so walkable that even Texans, perhaps the least pedestrian humans on the planet, can be seen strolling between cafés and movie theaters, from museums to the hockey arena, just as in Boston or a European town. Rather than a musical ghetto where only the young are welcome, music clubs and bars unashamedly share the civic center with more family-oriented amusements. There are enough movie theaters within walking distance of each other to allow for a serious and growing regional film festival to take root. By planning spaces for elite art, popular art, and performance in proximity to other downtown functions such as shopping and dining, together with a pedestrian-friendly approach, Fort Worth’s redevelopers encouraged a miniature Renaissance at a time when the rest of Texas seems to be sinking into the ennui of too much money, too little taste, partly because of insensitive suburban design that leaves no room for civil society, not even alleys where one may “bowl alone.” The downtown also shades into the rest of Fort Worth, residential and industrial; there is no obvious boundary that shouts Leaving Cute Area, and even the industrial quarters are generally well kept, with fresh paint and not much litter. No doubt the city’s economy, based on manufacturing which tends to spread wealth more broadly than, say, oil extraction, has to do with its physical integration that contrasts with the usual Texas scheme of isolated suburban pods joined by a single stem to a giant freeway. Of course, the rest of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex is little more than a collection of such suburban pods, so it may be that Fort Worth residents have self-selected for preferring civic-oriented urban design. Still, many visitors are liking Fort Worth well enough to wonder if its approach can be applied to other cities in danger of losing their character to sprawl. That’s a good question.

The recent devastation of downtown buildings by a tornado has been viewed by some as the the retributive Finger of God but the message coming from on high is far from clear. The twister blew out the windows of downtown skyscrapers but also ripped up a sprawl area in suburban Arlington. Biblical literalists continue to scan the signs for further millennial signs.

For all its civic values and built-in class admixture, Fort Worth’s vision is even less democratic than Austin’s. Fort Worth realizes the ideal of the splendid city ruled by an enlightened princely family, quite opposite of, say, the prosperous commonwealth of near equals ruled by common consent envisioned by New England patriots and embodied in the Northwest Ordinance as the model for Midwestern development that is often thought of as the paradigm for America as a whole (ignoring the vast territories in Dixie and formerly belonging to Spain that were developed on the model of the medieval barony). Far from a modern approach, Fort Worth under the Basses resembles a European city-state in which the prince allies with the hoi polloi against rival aristocracies. Fort Worth is a sort of bourgeois Monaco on the dusty prairie. Hoping for Bassist-style development to rescue Texas’ unlivable metropoli (including the rest of the freeway-and-mall wasteland that comprises Dallas and the rest of the area contiguous Fort Worth, not to mention Houston and increasingly San Antonio) is like expecting Monaco to serve as a model for development for all of Europe. We need a broad-based, democratic approach if Texas cities are to retain any charm, character, and creativity. Hoping for merchant princes to rescue our civic spaces has a delightful fairy-tale quality, but the approach has the drawback of depending entirely on the wisdom and virtue of the prince.

High-Tech Future?

On 25 March 2000 the Austin American-Statesman carried a front-page story about Intel Corporation’s choice of a new downtown site, at Fifth and Nueces, for a chip-development office. Mayor Kirk Watson, the story states, had urged Intel to locate downtown rather than in more environmentally sensitive areas. The site is near the Liberty Lunch and Electric Lounge sites. The sterile world of high-tech is suitable for proximity to the new City Hall, but not the unruly world of rock ’n’ roll.

With Intel and (supposedly) Computer Sciences Corporation colonizing downtown for the high-tech industry, it remains to be seen whether such uses will swamp the entertainment district, or whether geeks will buy the occasional ticket and keep venues alive that otherwise might go under. I suspect neither will be the case. As evidenced by the recent negative auditor’s report on Austin-based drkoop.com, the software industry may be built on dreams of being a “high-tech capital” rather than any foundation capable of making money. Further, it is not often remarked that the infusion of millions of dollars — raised nationally — into the Austin economy by Gov. Bush’s campaign for President is artificially inflating this year’s performance. Whether the Governor wins or loses, those campaign funds will dry up after November. (The kinds of people spending the money have much to do with the new chic of conservatism in town and the disfavor of forms of art not endorsed by the Christian Right allies of Bush.) Barring a miracle, look for 2001 to see high-tech contract as the music hysteria began to around 1998.

So long as Austin insists on living according to a myth in which it must play the role of “capital,” it is doomed to suffer hubristic booms followed by nihilistic busts. This kind of laissez-faire economics purports to represent the free market necessary for post-industrial capitalism, but its practical application in Texas looks like old-fashioned manipulation of resources for the gain of a powerful few in the best tradition of plantation hierarchy and hacienda exploitation. As more and more Texans pull our nation’s political levers, men like Tom DeLay and Bill Archer, and perhaps President George W. Bush, Americans would do well to realize that what Texas portrays as the cutting edge of capitalism may be the retrograde drag of feudal thinking.