East Avenue (Austin, Texas)

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Today it's a freeway, of course, but beneath the asphalt lies Austin history. When Edwin Waller platted the capital of the Republic of Texas in 1839, he was very much mindful of the precedent set by Napoleon in Paris. Austin is one of only two cities in the US that were originally designed to be the capital of a nation, and any self-respecting capital had better have a grand boulevard on which the citizens could stroll, to see and be seen, remote from the actual main commercial street. I've heard that much of East Avenue remained a weed-choked pasture until the 1930s, when the CCC finally completed the landscaping projects that Waller envisioned. Austin's Latino community referred to the street as Calle Ancha. Too bad it only lasted a decade before it was sacrificed to the god of mobility.

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