The East Austin park improvement initiative formerly known as Holly Point but now sporting the broader (but slightly less memorable) label of Holly Project represents the first step towards upgrading the large tract of shoreline city parkland on the north banks of Lady Bird Lake commonly referred to as Holly Shores.

This area, its size exceeding a whopping 90 acres and containing individual parks including Edward Rendon Sr. Park at Festival Beach, Fiesta Gardens, the Manuel And Robert Donley Pocket Park, and Metz Park, will also eventually contain an additional nine acres of parkland on the site of the decommissioned Holly Power Plant.

The vision for improving the long-neglected Holly Shores region into one of Austin’s premiere downtown and downtown-adjacent parks is a long time coming, with the city allocating funds for the master plan’s initial conception a solid decade ago — and with the help of the Trail Foundation nonprofit and its snazzy new Corgan Canopy Fund, the first piece of the puzzle is almost in sight, with the project possibly entering the construction planning and actual permitting stage by mid-2020.



A view of some of the Holly Project area, looking roughly southwest towards the water.

The Holly Project, now in its design review and community engagement phase, will create an ADA-accessible realignment of the Hike-and-Bike Trail along the waterfront in this area (you can see in the above image that the trail’s currently set back pretty far from the water), build additional recreation spaces, and restore the wetland habitat along the shoreline itself. At a community engagement meeting held last weekend, the Trail Foundation and Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department presented two design options for the Holly Project to the public for review, and that means you folks get to take a look at them too and decide which one tickles your fancy and so forth.

Holly Project: Concept A

In addition to a scenic overlook space at the southwestern tip of the peninsula, you’ll notice another focal point of this plan is the cluster of picnic tables on a deck installed around one of the area’s large oak trees. Pay attention to these two features, because they’re the ones that get a different spin in Concept B. If you squint at the map above, you’ll see a black arrow indicating the viewpoint of the concept sketch below, which might be the single most helpful thing included here:

Hey, not bad! We wish we could get a better view of the scenic overlook area or central shade garden, but maybe that comes later. Onward to Concept B!

Holly Project: Concept B

The two big changes in Concept B are the feature at the tip of the peninsula and the shade garden/picnic table space in the center. Instead of a scenic overlook, here we’ve got a stone pergola, a word that’s very fun to say and like a lot of fun words is derived from Latin, in this case the noun pergula, which depending on context can refer to a booth, hut, arbor, overhanging roof, or oddly enough, a brothel. Anyway, fun word.

The second major difference in this configuration is the layout of its central shade garden — instead of circling its picnic tables on a deck around a single tree, it distributes them throughout the grove and does away with the deck entirely. Remember to look for the small black arrow on the above map so you can tell the perspective of the sketch below, but it’s pretty obvious what we’re looking at here:

The foundation also included a second, more detailed concept sketch for the pergola structure seen in the sketch above — plus a human for scale:

You’ll notice that neither of these concepts do anything to threaten the existing baseball fields at the site — so please don’t get mad and email us about that. Instead, channel that energy towards filling out the Trail Foundation’s brief survey on the project’s design and let them know which of these two concepts you prefer. We’re torn on a favorite, since we love the pergola from Concept B most of all but also think the elevated deck in the shade garden from Concept A is pretty cool. Kinda makes you wonder, why not do both? That’s what the survey’s for, partner.