The almost-complete redevelopment of downtown's Rainey Street Historic District is meeting a hitch at city Historic Landmark Commission.
Property owners Pinnacle want to demolish the very literally named Placeholder Tiki Bar at 96 Rainey Street — one of the few remaining bungalows in the now skyscraper-laden neighborhood. — and redevelop the site. The commission has twice voted to postpone making a decision on the matter, most recently at its September 6 meeting.
If allowed to proceed with the demo, Pinnacle plans a two-story building for the site, which the Austin Business Journal The demolition would mark the first step in the business owners' plan to replace the house with a two-story, brick building. Site plans and elevations for the project by Austin company Maker Architects were submitted with other backup material for the meeting.
The existing wooden structure was built in 1886 as a home for Victor Kleabe, the secretary of Texas' first state barbers board and a union leader. It was a residence in the working-class Rainey Street neighborhood for several decades and was the site of one of the first bars to occupy a former home during the area's transitional bungalow-bar wave in the early to mid-aughts.
Elements that had been added to the building over the years were removed during its post-residential period, so the current structure hews closer to the original design. The bungalow was deemed a "non-contributing structure" (i.e., essentially unimportant to the maintaining the area's original aesthetic) when it was inventoried for the Rainey Street Historic District.
Maker Architects' principal Jeff Krolicki, whose firm oversaw the house's original transformation into a bar, said the details are still not historically accurate. He said that the bar's capacity requires heavy use of its patio that the bar's limited indoor capacity, combined with an amplified-music ordinance that affects its patio, limits its use as an entertainment establishment.
Some commissioners maintained that it the building is important to "what is left" of the neighborhood fabric and expressed a desire to that owners incorporate the bungalow in their plans for the proposed two-story building. The commission would also be willing to consider a relocation of the existing structure, Heimsath said.
