Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Familiarize Yourself with Downtown

The majority of SXSW events take place in Downtown Austin. All of the official conference events during the day (panels, keynotes, the trade show, etc.) take place at the Austin Convention Center at 4th and Neches Street, on the eastern side of downtown; all evening events, music parties, and film screenings are scattered about town, but there’s lots of stuff you can do without getting inside a car.

Unfamiliar with Downtown Austin? It’s pretty easy to figure out since it’s a grid bordered by water on one side and the highway on another side.

Many of the streets downtown are one-way. The east-west streets are numerical. Cesar Chavez Street, just north of Town Lake, was formerly called First Street. Cesar Chavez is the southern border of Downtown.  Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, just south of the University of Texas campus, was formerly Nineteenth Street. MLK is the northern border of Downtown. The north-south streets are named for the rivers of Texas geographically from west to east, beginning with Rio Grande on the west and stretching east to Sabine.

Congress Ave. and East 6th Street are the main drags of downtown, with Congress running North-South and being the street that splits it the numbered streets into West and East; hopefully your accommodations are only a short walk from these streets. There’s also a bunch of bars and clubs on Red River Street. If you’re visiting for the Music Festival, definitely familiarize yourself with Red River.

Personally, I have never ventured too far into northern downtown (say, north of 9th Street) or west of Congress when walking around between panels and parties at night. There’s also a action happening on Red River, which is the street hugging the Convention Center/Austin Hilton to the right, two blocks west of I-35. So if you’re hopping to events after conferencing all day, you’ll probably be going up to Red River or north up to E. 6th Street.

Here’s the official SXSW Hotel Map [PDF]. The red splotch is the convention center, and the block labeled 8 is the Hilton. Downtown Austin has a great and very helpful web site of its own, too.

Here’s some PDF maps of the main drags, denoting businesses, restaurants, and bars:

• East 6th Street and Red River in PDF. Note that north is to the right on this map.
• Congress Avenue in PDF. Congress is three blocks to the west of the Convention Center.

Also, here’s some of the official SXSW Film and Music maps from this year:

• Music Venues + Hotels Map [Note that most venues are on 6th Street and Red River.]
• Film Venues Map [You’ll definitely need a taxi or car to get to some of the venues, or ride the Cap Metro bus.]

And if you’re a badgeholder, your program guide for Interactive, Film, or Music will have all this map information repeated, too, in professionally printed form.