Missed Opportunities - Exhibits and Education Center Did Not Get a New Building Off-site of the Bathhouse

Post #8 in a series

The Bathhouse sits inside the Barton Creek floodplain. That fact alone shaped what the City's own 2016 feasibility study said should happen to the Exhibits and Education Center — and it didn't happen that way.

What the 2016 Feasibility Study Recommended

The study pointed out that Austin City Code (§25-7-96) limits new construction inside a floodplain to a narrow list of small structures — a restroom or bath facility, a concessions stand, a tool shed, or a pump house, each under 1,000 square feet. A real Visitor's Center, in other words, legally couldn't be built at the Bathhouse itself. It had to go somewhere above the flood hazard zone.

So the study recommended exactly that: a new, stand-alone Visitor's and Education Center of 6,000 to 8,000 square feet, located near the children's playscape parking lot, within 500 feet of the Bathhouse Rotunda. The recommendation combined the Visitor Center, the Sheffield Education Center, and the SPLASH! exhibit into this one new building — both to share infrastructure costs and to properly integrate education into the visitor experience of the park. The study's own 2016 budget estimate for that new building was $3.5–$5.5 million, on top of roughly $12 million estimated for the rest of the project (which didn't include a firm number yet for Rotunda and dressing-room rehabilitation).

What BSC Was Raising Money For

Barton Springs Conservancy's own 2016–2017 promotional fundraising video, “For the Love of the Springs,” showed this same concept: a stand-alone Visitor Education Center, entirely separate from the Bathhouse, with its own classroom/office/meeting-room wing and a “Splash and Theater Wing,” plus exhibits on energy, water conservation, weather, geology, and bird-viewing. The City's agreement with BSC for BSC's original $3,000,000 contribution to the project was reached in 2016 — the same year as this video.

What Got Built Instead

By October 2018, Limbacher's design concepts had already folded the education and exhibit functions into the Bathhouse's Rotunda rather than placing them in a new, off-site building — the same pivot away from the 2016 study's Sheffield Education Center relocation that Post #4 of this series asked the City about. The finished project — covered earlier in this series — shows extensive exhibit, audio-visual, and IT infrastructure built directly into the Rotunda, the adjoining exhibit hall, and the Sheffield Education Center, all inside the historic, floodplain-sited Bathhouse itself.

Questions for a journalist:

• When was the plan for a separate, off-site Visitor and Education Center dropped, and by whom?
• Given the floodplain construction limits the 2016 study cited, how was education and exhibit space ultimately permitted inside the Bathhouse rather than in the new off-site building the study said was needed?
• Did donors who gave toward BSC's 2016 agreement know their money might end up funding education and exhibit space inside the Bathhouse, rather than the stand-alone Visitor Center shown in BSC's own fundraising materials?

Sources

2016 Zilker Park Bathhouse Zone Feasibility Study (City of Austin Parks + Recreation Department / MWM DesignGroup), pages 40–41 and 54. Barton Springs Conservancy promotional video, “For the Love of the Springs” (vimeo.com/216682712).

Missed Opportunities - Women's Dressing Area Not Restored to Historic Design

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.