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Austin to ATX
In this gonzo history of the “City of the Violet Crown,” author and journalist Joe Nick Patoski chronicles the modern evolution of the quirky, bustling, funky, self-contradictory place known as Austin, Texas. Patoski describes the series of cosmic accidents that tossed together a mashup of outsiders, free spirits, thinkers, educators, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, and politicians who would foster the atmosphere, the vibe, the slightly off-kilter zeitgeist that allowed Austin to become the home of both Armadillo World Headquarters and Dell Technologies.
Patoski’s raucous, rollicking romp through Austin’s recent past and hipster present connects the dots that lead from places like Scholz Garten—Texas’ oldest continuously operating business—to places like the Armadillo, where Willie Nelson and Darrell Royal brought hippies and rednecks together around music. He shows how misfits like William Sydney Porter—the embezzler who became famous under his pen name, O. Henry—served as precursors for iconoclasts like J. Frank Dobie, Bud Shrake, and Molly Ivins. He describes the journey, beginning with the search for an old girlfriend, that eventually brought Louis Black, Nick Barbaro, and Roland Swenson to the founding of the South by Southwest music, film, and technology festival.
As one Austinite, who in typical fashion is simultaneously pursuing degrees in medicine and cinematography, says, “Austin is very different from the rest of Texas.” Many readers of Austin to ATX will have already realized that. Now they will know why.
Patoski’s raucous, rollicking romp through Austin’s recent past and hipster present connects the dots that lead from places like Scholz Garten—Texas’ oldest continuously operating business—to places like the Armadillo, where Willie Nelson and Darrell Royal brought hippies and rednecks together around music. He shows how misfits like William Sydney Porter—the embezzler who became famous under his pen name, O. Henry—served as precursors for iconoclasts like J. Frank Dobie, Bud Shrake, and Molly Ivins. He describes the journey, beginning with the search for an old girlfriend, that eventually brought Louis Black, Nick Barbaro, and Roland Swenson to the founding of the South by Southwest music, film, and technology festival.
As one Austinite, who in typical fashion is simultaneously pursuing degrees in medicine and cinematography, says, “Austin is very different from the rest of Texas.” Many readers of Austin to ATX will have already realized that. Now they will know why.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 23, 2019
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138 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 7, 2019
Quite where the boundary is between love for your hometown and simple narcissism is I don't know, but while the majority of the market for this book is probably limited to hardcore Austin navel-gazers like myself, since it does not attempt to provide a Grand Unified Theory of why Austin made the transition from small/poor/weird to big/rich/cool while other cities did not, it's certainly the best general cultural history of Austin that I've read. Patoski has really done his homework, digging deep into the archives for informed historical context and then leavening that research with revealing interviews of luminaries like Lance Armstrong, Richard Linklater, Liz Lambert, and a bunch more. Austin has always seemed to me like a large small town where everyone was only a few degrees away from everyone else, so I got a lot of pleasure out of learning more about the incredible web of connections between the people who turned Austin into a hotspot in food, music, film, tech, and so on. If you live here, even if you only showed up yesterday, you're participating in one of the fastest demographic and economic transitions in modern American history, and while I freely admit that there's almost no Austin-themed book that's too self-indulgent for my tastes, I think even a non-Austinite could enjoy this, if only for Patoski's real affection for the city. That, and the fact that you could construct quite a few great playlists out of the musicians he discusses.
Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.
These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you ant to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.
Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.
Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.
Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.
These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you ant to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.
Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.
Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.
July 17, 2019
I was looking for an overview of Austin and how it’s developed in recent decades, but this book is all trees and no forest - lots of microbiographies and paragraphs that are just lists of names, and then some complaining at the end about how the city has changed. He certainly did his research, but the book was of limited usefulness to someone not from Austin who’s looking for the big picture.
November 2, 2019
This book may earn from me two stars (the book suffers style shifting, long tedious sections full of unnecessary names and details), but it is absolutely wonderful and a required read for every Austinite. It’s made me even more passionate and curious about Austin and helped me connect with the city’s deeper meaning.
September 19, 2022
This book shouldn’t have taken three weeks to finish, but such is life.
That said, I loved it. 2022 marks my 15th year in Austin, and delving into the history of this city - the music, the food, the writers, the filmmakers - was so much fun.
I really enjoyed learning about places I knew, places I’ve overlooked, places that no longer exist… the history is immense.
Sadly, reading this post-Covid, a lot of the places that existed when this book was written and released a few short years ago are now gone, but… that’s Austin. And I think the author does a beautiful job of describing that sort of change within the city.
I recently got married and bought a home here. That said, I’ve found myself overcome with a strong sense of nostalgia.
This book helped me a lot in dealing with that change. It’s scary, but also exciting.
Austin is never going to be the city it used to be - the city I knew 5 years ago. 10… back when I first arrived in 2007 or even the city my friends and I snuck out to visit late at night when we were high school kids back in 2005/6.
But it’s home.
Texas, as a whole, is changing… and that might decide whether or not my wife and I stay here (fuck Greg Abbott, cowardly Ted Cruz, John Coryn, and I think you see where I’m going with this), but… Austin has been a wonderful part of my life. I cherish all of the memories I have, and I look forward to all the ones I will create.
That said, I loved it. 2022 marks my 15th year in Austin, and delving into the history of this city - the music, the food, the writers, the filmmakers - was so much fun.
I really enjoyed learning about places I knew, places I’ve overlooked, places that no longer exist… the history is immense.
Sadly, reading this post-Covid, a lot of the places that existed when this book was written and released a few short years ago are now gone, but… that’s Austin. And I think the author does a beautiful job of describing that sort of change within the city.
I recently got married and bought a home here. That said, I’ve found myself overcome with a strong sense of nostalgia.
This book helped me a lot in dealing with that change. It’s scary, but also exciting.
Austin is never going to be the city it used to be - the city I knew 5 years ago. 10… back when I first arrived in 2007 or even the city my friends and I snuck out to visit late at night when we were high school kids back in 2005/6.
But it’s home.
Texas, as a whole, is changing… and that might decide whether or not my wife and I stay here (fuck Greg Abbott, cowardly Ted Cruz, John Coryn, and I think you see where I’m going with this), but… Austin has been a wonderful part of my life. I cherish all of the memories I have, and I look forward to all the ones I will create.
November 23, 2020
Fun but dense--which is a wild combination. Patoski walks back the stories of Austin's most beloved institutions to give you their origins. Whole Foods, Willie, SXSW, Linklater, Franklin's, ACL, and a dozen or so other cultural landmarks are lovingly dissected and put in their proper context. There's just a massive amount of context--Aaron Franklin's story traces his mentor's story, and talks about the economic and musical scene he found when he moved to Austin ages ago. Everyone gets that deep dive treatment and it'd be the tiniest bit exhausting if Patoski didn't obviously love his subject so much. The only flaw I can find as a historian is the fact that his reporting only touches on UT. It gets mentioned again and again because this is Austin, but it doesn't get the blowout treatment it probably deserves as one of the pillars that built this town, along with music and tech. All in all, I definitely recommend this read for anyone who loves the City of the Violet Crown.
March 24, 2020
JNP is a character around Austin, having written for most of the printed outlets in town over the last 40 years. In this book, he goes back and revisits the history of Austin, starting at the very beginning with Indian times, but really focusing on all of the changes to the city since the 70's. As a long time resident of Austin, I really enjoyed all of the anecdotes about Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie Nelson, Michael Dell, Richard Garriot, Aaron Franklin, Paul Qui, the Armadillo, 6th Street, Austin City Limits, etc. Patoski covers everything from music to food to tech to history to literature to psychedelic to sports to state government to the university. It is an exhaustive book, and not particularly well edited, but lots of fun if you love Austin.
April 4, 2020
Ah, coach don't hate me for taking so long on this. I ended up forgoing the autographed copy and finishing it on Kindle.
This was an amazing book. Just like with all his others I wondered how he found the time to do all this research and why, with all that knowledge , his head isn't twice the size of everyone else's.
What a great book! IT was a wonderful trip down memory lane for some of it, other parts elicited gasps of surprise but most times I was just staring off in the distance dreaming of the life I could have had if only I had moved to Austin as soon as my dad died in 91 like I had always dreamed as a teen.
This is such a wonderful book , full of nostalgia and gems of anecdotes and stories of an Austin I never knew.
This was an amazing book. Just like with all his others I wondered how he found the time to do all this research and why, with all that knowledge , his head isn't twice the size of everyone else's.
What a great book! IT was a wonderful trip down memory lane for some of it, other parts elicited gasps of surprise but most times I was just staring off in the distance dreaming of the life I could have had if only I had moved to Austin as soon as my dad died in 91 like I had always dreamed as a teen.
This is such a wonderful book , full of nostalgia and gems of anecdotes and stories of an Austin I never knew.
May 18, 2019
Joe Nick is an excellent writer who lived in Austin for a good long while. He has done a fine job of documenting Austin's transformation from old too new. On the old he has name checked virtually everyone I've heard of and many, many whom I haven't. He quotes the likes of Steve Wertheimer, Liz Lambert and Aaron Franklin on Austin's transformation. Grant Peeple's has written a song called "It's Too Late to Live in Austin" that also documents many of Austin's changes; but, truthfully, what it really is is too late to be a slacker in Austin. It is no longer the sleepy, little college town with cheap rent and beer that it once was. It's still cool, though not as cool as it once was.
January 4, 2020
Any cohesive narrative telling a story of the history of Austin is lost in a mountain of names and mentions that I'm sure to some are exciting (Wow! One of the stores they mentioned is down the street from me, I've really connected with this book!) but have no use besides the author being able to say "Oh, and this happened too". It's a book trying to be both a story of Austin as well as an encyclopedia of the modern history of the city, and so it lacks at being either. It's the only big modern book on the modern history of Austin though, so, oh well I guess.
August 16, 2025
A superb history of Austin's transformation from bohemian mecca to cosmopolitan modern city. Well written and well researched, Mr. Patoski comprehensively maps Austin's journey from a medium-sized college town full of creative dreamers to what it has become--ever-expanding, full of traffic, and expensive. Still, as Mr. Patoski points out, the weirdness is still there. It just may be in the shadows these days. And if ATX is a victim of its own success, it came by it naturally. The roster of talent mentioned in this book is impressive, to put it mildly.
April 17, 2019
If you see my read books from last year, a hefty portion revolved around Texas and Austin history and culture. This book is hands down a masterpiece in Austin history. Author Joe Nick Patowski expertly explains all parts of Austin from the writers, music, technology, food, bbq, hippies, hipsters, and slackers that made Austin great and continue to make Austin great.
This book is a definitive text and I cannot recommend it more.
This book is a definitive text and I cannot recommend it more.
November 27, 2019
There is some really good writing, but I feel like it ignores the actual scenes in place of naming off a lot of people. I was hoping to learn more about the communities that make up each part of what makes Austin whatever it is.
Note:I’m from SATX, so Austin is automatically no where near as cool. That said, it’s a jumping off place to do find names for your own research into those scenes. Just not what I was expecting.
Note:I’m from SATX, so Austin is automatically no where near as cool. That said, it’s a jumping off place to do find names for your own research into those scenes. Just not what I was expecting.
April 2, 2019
I lived in Austin for thirty years. This book brought back so many memories! Austin creates music and technology and film and alternative spaces at a dizzying pace. Joe Nick Patiski uses clear and distinct prose to describe the people and events that define the city. Highly readable.
May 23, 2019
Joe Nick’s depiction of Austin is a loving, nostalgic trip back in time and a hard reality check of present day Austin. Well, someone had to get it right and this book holds no punches. Hook ‘me Hippies and Onward through the fog!
April 1, 2019
Good intro to the city for newcomers.
August 6, 2022
I loved reading about Austin stories that I had before and learning tales that were new to me. There were so many names dropped that illuminated dozens of pathways for further reading and research.
July 11, 2019
Very good historical information about the growth of Austin TX from a sleepy little town to a over crowded high-tech center. Jjoe Nick Patowski has been covering music stories in Austin for years, and I am glad to see that TAMU press supported his work. I moved to Austin in 1975, and know many of the people mentioned in the book. Unfortunately a great many of them are dead now, but their spirit lives on. The culture has changed from a focus on creativity and non-conformance, but there are different types of innovation still keeping Austin on the map.
March 14, 2019
A fun, fascinating and well-written book, though by the end, Mr. Patoski left me feeling once again, that I had missed the 'magic' that was Austin in the days of yore. Granted, I didn't really bring a whole lot when I arrived in the Fall of 2012 (a very deep, dark depression with accompanying anxiety). Growing up in and around Baltimore City, then hauling ass to the west coast of Salem, Oregon for 8 years didn't prepare me for the culture shock I was met with here. The uber gentrification moved the locals who had grown up here out of town. Behind is left 20 story buildings, a very poorly functioning transit system, sky-rocketing prices for everything and a hateful, vindictive legislature, that stomps on most all progressive action that the Republic of Austin tries to achieve. i.e. the rescinded bag ban, etc. Eh, that is mostly my story, but I did enjoy the read.
March 29, 2019
Incredibly comprehensive review of the past, present and future of Austin's culture. Very entertaining too.
triedtoread
May 26, 2019Sadly, I think I have fallen out of love with Austin, Texas.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews