How freewheeling Austin drew in Covid-weary Californians

One of Austin’s monikers is the City of the Violet Crown. It comes from the beguiling atmospheric shenanigans known as the Belt of Venus that casts a bar of pinkish, purplish haze above the horizon at sunrise and sunset when the city’s Mexican free-tailed bats — about 750,000 of them — are either returning to or leaving from hanging out under South Congress bridge over the Colorado River flowing through the city.

‘Austin, like Texas generally, has a big, eccentric personality,’ says William Apt, an attorney who attended the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-seventies before coming back to Austin from New York in the early 1980s. Austin was just a sleepy college town when Apt first arrived. The major employers were the university and the state government. Most of the hip action centred around the ‘Drag’ adjacent the university. ‘There wasn’t anything else except a few outposts like the Split Rail bar on South Lamar, the Soap Creek Saloon on Bee Cave Road, and, of course, the Armadillo World Headquarters at the corner of South 1st Street and Barton Springs Road,’ Apt says.