Since 1839, the Texas capital has been known for a lot of things. Music. Politics. Wildlife. Fine dining. Football. Barbecue. Weird little guys. Tacos. It wears lots of hats and goes by lots of names.
Some of those nicknames are warranted; others, frankly, are stupid or confusing — but you've probably heard them.
If you haven't, here's a rundown of the city's nicknames. If you have, well, here's some history you probably didn't know. We're starting with, perhaps, the best-known one.
Live Music Capital of the World
This one's a doozy, friend.
For years it's been shrouded in lore, with scores of Austinites taking credit for the moniker. But if we're going to get into when the city itself began self-identifying as the "Live Music Capital of the World," well, that's actually pretty cut-and-dry.
Aug. 29, 1991.
That's when the Austin City Council OK'd a resolution to adopt the nickname.
But the nickname had been around for a little longer than that, thanks to the reputation Austin built in the '70s with venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters. Austin City Limits helped bring that to a national audience in the '80s. By the time the '90s rolled around, South by Southwest, or SXSW, bolstered the city's reputation as a place where musicians went to get discovered, hard as it was.
While that bureaucratic move cemented the nickname, it wasn't its origin. Turns out, it was the city's chamber of commerce. Seeking an angle with which to market Austin, the city's chamber took out an ad in Billboard Magazine in 1985, calling itself the "Live Music Capital of the World."
If you wanna hear more lore about all this, check out Mose Buchele's story from a few years back. But, yeah, it was a tourism thing. Not that it's untrue, it just feels industry-plant-adjacent. There's a lot of music in this town, but other cities — and totally well-meaning contrarians on the internet — beg to differ with Austin's claim.
Bat City
This story from Mental Floss would tell you, yes, "some" people use this nickname "lovingly."
That story is wrong, pal.
Telling folks in Schenectady, N.Y., that you're in town for the conference from "Bat City" is just going to invite questions. They will probably think you're weird.
I challenge you to tell a fellow Austinite that Barton Springs Pool is your "favorite part of living in Bat City, baby." They, too, will be off-put and think you're weird. Not fun-weird; weird-weird. They will definitely reassess y'all's friendship. It's just not a thing, I'm sorry. I'm putting way too fine a point on this, I know. But it's for your own good.
Anyway, the nickname's on the list because Austin has the largest urban bat colony in the world.
That colony didn't truly take hold till the redesign of the Ann Richards Bridge in the early '80s, but Central Texas has long been home to the Mexican free-tailed bat. And there's a surprising amount of history here, given the nickname's overall uselessness.
Turns out, the city didn't always have a fun, marketable relationship with the Mexican free-tailed bat. It was more of a working, marketable relationship.
Austin's first forays into marketing bats came not from attracting throngs of tourists to watch them flap about in summer's twilight but, rather, from what bats leave behind and is often euphemistically synonymous with temporary insanity: guano. Yep. Feces. We're talking about bat feces.
Austin used to be a hub for guano production, with some caves around Central Texas containing as much as 2,000 metric tons, according to a 1927 Texas Almanac.
It's a great fertilizer. On top of that, it contains saltpeter (known as potassium nitrate), an ingredient that makes it exceedingly combustible and fundamentally necessary to make gunpowder.
During the Civil War, the Northern blockade meant states fighting for slavery couldn't get gunpowder from northern suppliers.
In the then-far northwest reaches of Travis County, Thomas Anderson inked a deal in 1863 with the Texas Military Board to convert his gristmill — now in the heart of the Anderson Mill neighborhood — into a gunpowder factory. The Travis Powder Company, according to the Texas State Historical Association, manufactured gunpowder for the Confederate States of America until the end of the Civil War.
Anderson's granddaughter told the Austin American-Statesman in 1966 that the mill served as a key supplier for Southern forces, making it a target for Union troops looking to starve out the Confederate war effort.
"Anderson Mill survived the attempt of three Union Army agents to destroy it — but Yankee conspirators, less fortunate, were laid to rest at Confederate hands somewhere in the Anderson Mill area," the account read.
Then, there's the cyanide, among other poisons.
Before that redesign of the Congress Avenue bridge, migrating bats would flock to other eaves and arch-laden pieces of infrastructure throughout Austin as the industrial age — and development — ramped up. They were especially fond of the Texas Capitol and the UT Tower
Tonally, their presence was met with outright enmity, with one 1962 Statesman article calling them"as deadly as a diamond-backed rattler."
Throughout the '70s, they flocked to Darrell K Royal Memorial Stadium on UT's campus.
In 1980, exterminator Bob Dillard told the Austin American-Statesman he'd killed thousands of bats over decades in and around the 40 Acres.
"I've been doing this for the past 30 years," Dillard said. "There's a lot more of them now than there used to be."
First, he used DDT, then the federal government banned its use in 1972. Ahead of the Longhorns' home opener against the Arkansas Razorbacks in 1980, Dillard used cyanide gas after receiving a special dispensation from the city to murder bats with the chemical agent. UT Austin staff also used carbon dioxide to freeze the winged mammals. Then they would "pick them up and burn them in the incinerator," the Statesman's Janet Wilson wrote.
The anti-bat sentiment persisted through much of the 20th Century and still gripped Austin as it faced the 21st, with the same sentiment, often coupling the little guys with the spread of rabies.
Then came the bridge. The Texas Department of Transportation decided, as it often does, to widen Congress Avenue in the early '80s. In doing so, TxDOT created a perfect habitat for the bats. They began nestling in droves in the 2-foot-deep gaps that run along the road under the bridge.
First, they were met with fear, with a Statesman headline saying "bat colonies sink teeth into city."
In the decades that followed, thanks to chiropterologist (bat scientist) and conservationist Merlin Tuttle, the city embraced its colony, realizing they don't eat human flesh but they, in fact, devour mosquitoes that plague Austin.
Now the nickname is associated with a music festival that snarls traffic for car-bound Austinites. Nope, not ACL. Not SXSW. It's this smaller one that's sponsored by Thomas J. Henry. Also, a haunted house.
Waterloo
This one stretches back to Austin's earliest days post-colonization when it was a glorified campground.
Back in 1835, a white man named Jacob M. Harrell "discovered" the city, setting up a tent on the north bank of the Colorado River, where the Congress Bridge is now. He called it Waterloo — which is the fabled site of Napoleon Bonaparte's final and decisive failure, as well as the title of the first Eurovision Song Contest winner — for some reason.
Of course, the Austin area had been known to indigenous tribes for thousands of years prior — 37,000 years by some estimates, with what's now Barton Springs serving as a sacred site to Coahuiltecans for generations.
In 1838, Ed Burleson, of Burleson Road fame, surveyed the land. A year later, then-President Mirabeau B. Lamar deemed it a suitable locale for the Republic of Texas' capital. Shortly after, Texas lawmakers voted to do just that, and approved a measure on Jan. 22, 1840, to make Austin the republic's capital.
Austin being Austin, its residents still had an unflinching fondness for days gone — before everyone else got there — and took to wistfully referring to it as Waterloo, its former moniker.
Now, the name is associated with a record store, a sparkling water brand and a bar, which isn't an upgrade from Napoleon or ABBA, but it's not exactly a downgrade either, I guess.
City of the Violet Crown
Conventional wisdom would tell you that O. Henry, the Austin storyteller and one-time grifter, first used the "violet crown" imagery to describe his beloved hometown in 1894 in a short story about a funny French detective.
That conventional wisdom would be wrong.
Some less conventional wisdom — and even Austin's own history center — would tell you it was used in 1894 to describe the city's eerie atmospheric, mauve accompanied by the sun's descent into the boundless Texas Hill Country every night in an 1891 newspaper editorial.
That conventional wisdom, too, would be wrong.
So let's get to the bottom of this, starting with the O. Henry bit.
If you're unfamiliar, O. Henry's considered a progenitor of the modern American short story. Born William Sidney Porter, his ability to twist a dramatic knife had a massive impact on literature starting in the early 20th Century, then legacy television and then largely middling films. Porter lived in Austin, and, fun fact, he did crimes. Not very well, but he did crimes in Austin, and those crimes briefly financed his career.
Anyway, he used the "violet crown" metaphor back in 1894:
That snippet in O. Henry's "Tictocq" short story was published in his short-lived literary zine, The Rolling Stone in 1894. But the uniquely confounding phrase had already been in print before then.
On July 3, 1891, the Austin Statesman crowed that "the star of Austin is in the ascendant," referring to the capital city as "The City of the Violet Crown" in an editorial.
But, even before that, the city had been previously known for its plum corona, or at least a few Victorian-era weirdos had adopted the nickname to refer to Austin.
In late 1888, the Austin Daily Statesman published another chest-beating blurb sending up the city's salutatories, saying "no town in Texas possesses natural advantages superior to Austin," adding that its "purple tints are kissed by the rising and the setting sun."
Decades later, all that crowing about Austin's greatness would come home to roost for the Austin Statesman.
In the mid-60s, the paper published a series of editorials asking with an equal measure of temerity, "Why do they keep coming to Austin, the City of the Violet Crown, and the Capitol City?"
Putting aside the exact moment of conception for its modern usage, it should be noted Athens was the first city to be referred to as one adorned with a violet crown. So, given that, Austin's co-opting seems a bit gauche, which is a word I imagine was used a lot in the Victorian era.
For a much, much more detailed history of the nickname, read this exhaustively exacting breakdown.
Now, the nickname is associated with a movie theater, a walking trail and a bar.
The Friendly City
The nickname stems from an early- to mid-20th Century campaign to market Austin as a business- and family-friendly city, but it's getting as much mileage as "Bat City" these days unless you're still smoking Chesterfields and buying war bonds. On top of that, Austin's not the only city claiming friendliness, and, when you think about it, this nickname is a literal industry plant.
