Reflecting on the Beauty of Waller Creek Amid Massive Campus Construction
The limestone floor of Waller Creek is estimated to be 75 million years old.
As a student at The University of Texas at Austin in the early ’80s, I must have walked across Waller Creek at 21st Street and San Jacinto Boulevard on campus hundreds of times—heading from Jester Center for evening runs around the track at Memorial Stadium; taking advantage of my Longhorn football student season pass on Saturday game days; and playing racquetball on the old outdoor courts at Clark Field.
I even worked on the banks of Waller Creek at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center (pictured above) for this very magazine for seven years, before leaving in 1992 to work for the Texas Department of Transportation’s “Don’t Mess with Texas” litter prevention campaign. Now, decades after my UT days and a career focused on protecting the environment, I must admit I don’t recall ever stopping to appreciate the beauty and significance of Waller Creek.
That all changed for me when I recently met with Jim Walker, director of UT’s Sustainability Office, who shared the 2019 “Waller Creek Framework Plan” with me. After reading the plan, all my years of urging people to “know your watershed” came back to me in glorious burnt-orange fashion, so I went back to UT to re-experience Waller Creek.
Pollution from campus can wash into Waller Creek, and ultimately into Austin’s primary drinking water source–the Colorado River, more popularly known in the Capital City as Lady Bird Lake.
A watershed is an area of land where rainwater falls and drains into bigger bodies of water—collecting pollutants along the way. We all live in a watershed, and in the case of Waller Creek, rainwater drains into Austin’s primary drinking water source—the Colorado River (aka: Lady Bird Lake)–and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. The Waller Creek Watershed is six miles long, with under two miles of it cutting through the UT campus.
As COVID-19 restrictions were loosening in May, I grabbed a mask and explored Waller Creek, starting at the Health District (home of UT’s Dell Medical School and Dell Seton Medical Center) between 15th Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. Waller Creek runs through the middle of the Health District so started I there, strolling through colorful drought-tolerant landscaping, with vivid yellow sunflowers contrasting with Indian Blankets and bright red firecracker plants. Walker told me the principles of the Waller Creek Framework Plan greatly informed the landscape and creek relationship in the Health District and the university’s approach and recommendations for storm water management.
UT’s Dell Medical School and Dell Seton Medical School in May.
Some of the drought-tolerant plants at the Health District.
From the Health District, I headed north toward UT proper, passing a mega-construction project for the Capitol Complex at 18th and Trinity where the waters of Waller Creek looked surprisingly pristine, despite all the surrounding urban activity. After walking past the historical landmark “Santa Rita No. 1,” I crossed the footbridge connecting San Jacinto to what’s now called the Caven Lacrosse and Sports Center at Clark Field.
Gone are those old outdoor racquetball courts I used to play on, replaced on the north end of Clark Field by the expansive San Jacinto Residence Hall and its Cypress Bend Convenience Store and Cafe. Though the campus was virtually shut down due to the pandemic, there were a few athletes working on the field to stay in shape, including a soccer player kicking a ball around and a ballet dancer practicing his leaps. Workers wearing masks and gloves at the Cypress Bend Café offered bottled water and a few other sundries for sale from under a makeshift tent.
It was at the Clark Field footbridge (one of more than 20 bridges that span this waterway on the UT campus) that I realized how I had taken the beauty of Waller Creek for granted all these decades. Beneath the bridge, the water is greenish but clear, with limestone boulders visible along the bottom of the creek. Thick, tangled roots stretch from stately Bald Cypress trees plunging under, over and around rocks and into the shallow stream.
There are 71 bald cypress trees along a one-mile stretch of Waller Creek on the UT campus (a tree rarely seen throughout other parts of the watershed).
That footbridge to Clark Field is near the site of the historic “Battle of Waller Creek”–the 1969 student demonstration to protect Waller Creek’s majestic Bald Cypress and Live Oak trees from construction. Times were a-changing, and 50 years have passed since this literal tree-hugging demonstration–and the first Earth Day.
Among the many responsibilities my friend and colleague Chris Plonsky—the chief of staff and associate director of Texas Athletics—is to help oversee massive construction projects, which include a much-needed renovation of the Moncrief-Neuhaus training center for athletes at the south end of Memorial Stadium and an outdoor pool for Texas Swimming and Diving (to be named after legendary Texas and Olympics Coach Eddie Reese) just south of that—all along Waller Creek.
The view of the south end of Darrell K. Royal Stadium from the site of the 1969 Battle of Waller Creek.
The Texas Athletics construction project getting the most attention (it’s even got a live webcam on TexasSports.com and Texas Ex Matthew McConaughey as “Minister of Culture”) is the Moody Center that will become an intimate, state-of-the-art home of UT basketball, concerts and other University events. There’s also a lot of buzz about the pending demolition of the Frank Erwin Center, which Plonsky says won’t happen before Moody Center is completed (no sooner than August 2022), but when it’s gone, it will leave room for the Health District to expand its facilities.
I asked Plonsky what she thinks of all these construction connections and working across the street from Waller Creek at Belmont Hall in Memorial Stadium for decades. She points out Waller Creek literally connects UT with Austin and the city’s crown jewel, Lady Bird Lake and its popular Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail.
“It’s what makes Austin Austin,” she says. “When there’s a hard rain on campus, you can watch it come down the creek bed. It’s incredible. It can shake you to your ankles. And then it pours into Lady Bird Lake.”
Plonsky’s favorite Waller Creek walk is from her office at Belmont Hall, west up 23rd Street toward the East Mall, past the Martin Luther King statue and toward the Main Building for on-campus meetings. Some evenings, she crosses the creek at 21st Street as she heads toward Gregory Gym for volleyball games.
In partnership with the City of Austin and Waterloo Greenway Conservancy (the steward nonprofit responsible for the stretch of Waller Creek between UT and Lady Bird Lake), UT recently transplanted the first of several Live Oak trees from areas affected by Texas Athletics construction projects to the 11-acre Waterloo Park on Red River Street, between 12th and 15th streets. The Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, which is orchestrating a massive $250 million green space redevelopment project in downtown Austin through 2026, is headquartered at the historic and newly renovated Hardeman House located at Symphony Square, just down Red River from the old Jaime’s Spanish Village Tex-Mex restaurant (now called Pelón’s).
Says Jim Walker: “The creek today is enjoying a more visible moment in the day-to-day life on the campus.”
“Creek Monster Habitat” from the 2019 Waterloo Greenway Conservancy Creek Show. (Photo: Texas Performing Arts)
Perhaps the most important example of Waller Creek gaining attention is a College of Fine Arts and Office of Sustainability collaboration that’s helping students learn lifelong lessons about urban ecology.
It’s called the “Waller Creek Monster Project,” and leverages the traditional skills of Texas Applied Arts students such as prop building, and sound and set design to bring attention to Waller Creek.
“This has changed students’ understanding of their own environmental footprints—from travel, to their food choices to shopping,” says Texas Performing Arts Scenic Arts Supervisor Karen Maness, who got the Creek Monster Project going in 2019 when the Waterloo Greenway Conservancy called inviting her students to create a “Creek Monster Habitat” at 11th and Red River streets.
This year, COVID-19 interrupted the Monster Creek Project’s planned 50th Anniversary Earth Day “Grand Procession” to new installations around campus in April, but Maness’ students persisted, using Instagram to share their work and encourage followers to offer personal promises to protect the environment. Included in the Creek Monster plans for 2020-21 are a “soundscape” featuring recorded pledges to protect Waller Creek, and building new features such as large-scale puppets with sustainable materials.
Wrote student Kevin Yuen in a post-Earth-Day Monster Creek Project blog: "Once people make the connection between themselves and Waller Creek and the surrounding environment, this serves as the catalyst for change, whether it be a small change in mindset or a massive call to action. … I have learned that everything, no matter how small, whether it be the smallest rain puddle, the creek, the albino squirrels, to the cars commuting every day, all play an important role in Austin’s urban ecology."
I couldn’t have written it better, Kevin. And to the half million fellow Texas Exes on our beautiful planet, we all live in a watershed. Get to know it. Mine’s “Mustang Branch-Onion Creek” south of Austin. What’s yours? These days it’s easy to find your watershed. Just Google it–and appreciate it.
If you are lucky enough to return to the Forty Acres sometime soon, think back to your days at UT and re-experience Waller Creek to see what’s changed from your perspective. Whether you find your way back to campus or not, I recommend reading the UT Sustainability Office’s online walking tour, which is packed with history and information, including the fact that there are 71 bald cypress trees along a one-mile stretch of Waller Creek on the campus (a tree rarely seen on other parts of this watershed) and that the limestone floor of the creek is estimated to be some 75 million years old.
Long gone is Jaime’s Spanish Village, with its sangria margaritas, but I’m looking forward to seeing the Waterloo Greenway project come to full fruition by 2026. I’ve already had a surgery at Dell Medical (bike crash), and unfortunately found some PPE litter on the district campus. Chris Plonsky tells me the opportunity to run under the Memorial Stadium lights at night went the way of the artificial turf after it was replaced with a grass field that requires more maintenance and protection. I’ve run countless laps around the Frank Erwin Center, hoofing it inside for “adds and drops” long before online class registration came to be. I’m anxious to see the old Drum go and experience the new Moody Center venue someday soon. More than anything though, it’s reassuring to know Waller Creek’s clear, green waters will likely continue to flow over that limestone for millions more years to come. Let’s just hope the quality of that water remains pristine.