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.
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.
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?
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.
