Austin's 23rd Street Mural Has Become a Digital Archive of the City's History

In 1974, artists painted a mural on the side of a building near the University of Texas campus in Austin. At first glance it looks like a quirky relic of old Austin, but a closer look reveals something far stranger.

The painting depicts real people alongside legendary clubs, armadillos, political movements, underground comic characters, a health-care revolution, musician Willie Nelson, the city's distinctive moon towers, and peyote, among many other details that require explanation — some of which may actually be true.

Created by artists Kerry Awn, Rick Turner and Tommy Bee, the mural has never stayed static. Over five decades it has been restored, repainted and expanded repeatedly, with new pieces of Austin history added to the original 1974 imagery. Rather than a frozen historical monument, it functions as a continually updated visual record of a city that has spent much of the last fifty years reinventing itself.

A New Digital Layer

Today the mural carries an additional layer. The 23rd Street Mural Project has turned the artwork into an interactive documentary archive. At 23rdstreetmural.com, visitors can browse a high-resolution version of the painting and click on individual figures, places and odd details to watch original short documentary films about the stories behind them.

That means a visit to the mural doesn't have to end when visitors walk away from the wall. A strange figure or a tiny painted detail can lead to a documentary about an Austin nightclub, an underground cartoonist, a community health clinic, a murder mystery, or the counterculture movement that helped shape the city Austin became.

The mural has survived more than 50 years in a city known for tearing down, rebuilding and forgetting its past. This unruly wall, it seems, keeps remembering instead.