Post #7 in a series
Source: The Parks Department reported, in the Community Engagement Summary, "What we heard": "congestion in the women's restroom."
In 2024, when the City broke ground on the Bathhouse rehab, I and about twenty fellow protesters showed up with signs reading "$14M to DESTROY the historic women's dressing area."
The City's own 2016 feasibility study for this project suggests that we had a point.
What the 2016 Feasibility Study Recommended
The study laid out a four-phase plan for the Bathhouse. Phase 3 called for relocating the pool's Aquatics operations — offices, maintenance, and storage — into a new, consolidated facility, freeing up the "former women's basket area." Phase 4 then built on that: with Aquatics out of the way, "the women's changing room could be restored to approximately its original size and configuration," preserving the historic character of the space while addressing maintenance problems and better accommodating modern privacy needs.
The same section recommended restoring elements of the historic "basket room" configuration — tall open volumes with natural ventilation and clerestory daylighting — and suggested that a restored portion of the space could even host interpretive displays for pool visitors.
This wasn't a minor aside: at the City's own August 2018 community meeting, "congestion in the women's restroom" was one of only three things listed in the summary of what the City heard from the public.
The City's 2016 funding agreement with Barton Springs Conservancy made the same expectation part of the project's contract terms: the agreement called for "removing encroachments and opening the floor plan of the women's dressing area, creating a Visitor's Center, and upgrading the bathhouse with due respect for its architectural beauty and historic importance." [source]
What Got Built Instead
By October 2018, Limbacher's design concepts already showed staff functions intruding into the women's dressing area — not receding from it. And per the project's own occupant-load calculations (Sheet T1.02, dated April 26, 2023), the final built space is still lopsided: the Men's Shower/dressing area totals 4,101 square feet (occupant load 82), while the Women's Shower/dressing area totals 3,098 square feet (occupant load 62) — a gap of 1,003 square feet, and 20 fewer people the women's side is rated to hold.
That gap lines up with a finding from Post #4 of this series: the Aquatics facilities that the 2016 study wanted relocated out of the women's area don't appear to have moved at all — they're still carved out of the women's dressing area, in roughly the same footprint as before. If Aquatics never left, the space the 2016 study intended to free up for the women's changing room was never actually freed.
The 2019 outcome wasn't only a missed restoration — for the women's dressing area specifically, it was a step backward from what the public had already been shown in 2018. In an October 2018 survey, Limbacher's office circulated three design concepts for the women's dressing area; all three kept at least some shower stalls facing the grass courtyard, and all three kept some version of the historic winter dressing stalls. [source] The 2019 "preferred design" that followed kept neither: no showers face the courtyard at all (aside from one or two unenclosed "pole showers" with no privacy option), and the sunny winter dressing stalls were replaced by four makeup sinks and mirrors. [source]
Questions for a journalist:
- Since Aquatics operations were not relocated as the 2016 study recommended, is that why the women's changing area could not be restored to its original size?
- Why is the women's dressing/shower area more than 1,000 square feet smaller than the men's in the final, built design?
- Did the City consider any alternative that would have restored the historic size and configuration of the women's changing room, as its own 2016 study recommended?
- Why did the 2019 "preferred design" eliminate even the courtyard-facing showers and winter dressing stalls that the 2018 concepts had kept?
Sources
2016 Zilker Park Bathhouse Zone Feasibility Study (City of Austin Parks + Recreation Department / MWM DesignGroup), Recommendations section, pages 50–54; the women's-changing-room recommendation is also excerpted separately here. Sheet T1.02, "Design Data" / Occupant Loads table, 100% Construction Design Intent Document set, Limbacher & Godfrey Architects, April 26, 2023 — full sheet. Austin Parks and Recreation Department, Bathhouse Rehab Community Engagement Summary (final, Dec. 3, 2019) — full document. City of Austin and Barton Springs Conservancy, Funds Contribution Agreement for Bathhouse Renovation Project (signed Aug. 16, 2016) — full agreement.
