Slide into Big Stacy Pool on an August morning and the water does something Austin's summer air never will: it feels deliberate, not accidental. Ninety-degree heat outside, comfortable water inside, six lanes of it, free to anyone who walks in off East Live Oak Street. Most people assume that warmth is a fixed feature of the place, like the live oaks or the hills. It isn't. It comes from a single geothermal well drilled into the ground when the pool opened in 1937, and that well is failing.
That's the detail that changes how you think about a Saturday in Travis Heights. The neighborhood's routines, the pool, the greenbelt that connects it to the next park over, the restaurant that took over a shuttered fast food building on Oltorf, all rest on specific, aging, human-built systems that most residents walk past without a second look. Here's what's actually holding up the rituals.
A Geothermal Quirk on Borrowed Time
Big Stacy Pool was built by the Works Progress Administration as part of the same New Deal push that gave Austin its network of public parks. It draws its warmth from a well that pulls water out of the ground at 90 to 100 degrees, which then mixes with city water on its way into the pool. Paul Slutes, who manages the city's Aquatic Division, has described it plainly: it's the same idea as Barton Springs, except hot instead of cold. That system has run since the pool opened, largely unnoticed because it worked.
It's working less well now. The well's casing has degraded to the point that the city's own experts have advised against trying to clean or repair it, because the attempt could collapse the well entirely. A few years ago, the city responded by installing backup gas heaters, tested annually but not yet switched on. If the well does fail, those heaters take over, and the pool keeps its winter warmth. What changes is the bill. Slutes has said the city has paid up to $10,000 a month to heat a pool that size with gas, a cost the natural well has quietly absorbed for close to ninety years.
For longtime swimmers, this isn't an abstract budget line. Beverly Deutsch, who has used the pool for years, told KUT she relies on it as part of her physical therapy after a stroke, doing laps to help maintain the movement and speech she lost. The historic preservation staff at Austin Parks and Recreation, including coordinator Sarah Marshall, point to the same well, along with the pool's original bathhouses and seawall, as part of why the surrounding district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The warmth isn't decoration. It's infrastructure with a name, an age, and a repair history, and it happens to double as a piece of the neighborhood's official historic character.
None of this means the pool is closing. It means the free, naturally heated swim that Travis Heights treats as an ordinary Tuesday is running on a system nobody can fix, only replace with something that costs real money to operate. Worth knowing before you take it for granted on your next lap.
Where Little Stacy Is Bigger Than Big Stacy
Walk out of the pool gate and you're standing at one end of the Blunn Creek Greenbelt, a shaded, granite-and-concrete path that links Big Stacy Park to Little Stacy Park to the north. The names are backward from what you'd expect. Little Stacy Park, with its wading pool, tennis courts, and volleyball court, is the larger of the two. Big Stacy, home to the pool itself, is the smaller parcel. Nobody seems to have corrected this in ninety years, and nobody seems bothered by it either.
The out-and-back covers close to a mile and a half if you walk the full length, crossing Blunn Creek on the East Side Drive bridge and passing under a second bridge locals have nicknamed for its resemblance to Frank Lloyd Wright's work, though it wasn't designed by him. One of Austin's old moon towers stands along the route, a relic from the same era as the pool. Metal markers are staked in front of select trees, unlabeled numbers paired with an interpretive key that lets you compare an elm to a cedar elm if you're the type who likes knowing the difference. It's not a wilderness trail. Neighbors are rarely out of sight of each other, and that's the point: it's a walk built into the fabric of daily errands, not a destination you drive to.
Dinner Where the Drive-Thru Used to Be
Close the loop back toward East Oltorf Street and you'll pass a building whose shape gives away its former life. The rounded arches and terracotta accents belonged to a Taco Bell before Dimitri Karabinis and Daphne Greer opened The Greek Bar there in February 2025. Rather than gut the structure, designer Luke Havekes worked the original saltillo tile and arches into a Mediterranean interior, a deliberate nod to what the building used to be alongside what it is now.
Karabinis grew up around his family's restaurants, the kind of childhood where you're five years old sitting on a table opening cans of tomatoes before you're old enough to understand why. Greer spent years managing Juniper and the Peacock Mediterranean Grill at the Austin Proper Hotel before deciding Austin needed more of the food she'd learned to cook at home. The current menu runs from scratch-made pita and grilled lamb chops to a dish the kitchen calls Big Fat Greek Fried Chicken, alongside a weekend brunch service that added feta omelets and yogurt pancakes with honey butter.
If you're stopping by after a swim or a walk, happy hour runs Tuesday through Friday from 4 to 6 p.m., with a short list of specials:
- $8 wines
- $8 Greek craft cocktails
- $6 mini pitas
- A $15 spread trio
Weekend brunch runs Saturday and Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., which lines up neatly with a late morning at the pool or an early greenbelt walk before the heat sets in.
What Actually Holds a Saturday Together
None of these three places, the pool, the greenbelt, the restaurant, would work as well as they do without someone deciding not to tear something down. The city kept a failing well running for decades rather than filling it in. The greenbelt kept its mismatched park names instead of renaming anything for tidiness. The Greek Bar kept a fast food building's bones instead of scraping the lot. Travis Heights reads as effortless from the sidewalk, but the version you experience on a Saturday is the product of specific people choosing to preserve or repurpose specific things: a well, a bridge nickname, a set of arches.
That's worth sitting with next time you're floating in water that shouldn't, by any normal utility bill logic, be free and warm. It won't stay this way by accident. It's staying this way because people who work for the city, and people who bought an old Taco Bell, decided the old thing was worth keeping around in some form.
If you're the kind of person who notices details like these, chances are you already know why this pocket of South Austin holds onto people the way it does. Annette Patterson has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of neighborhood texture, the pool bills nobody sees, the parks with backward names, the buildings that used to be something else. If Travis Heights or a neighborhood like it is somewhere you're thinking about more seriously, Let's Connect.
