My office building looks down on Republic Square. The park is usually deserted, except during special events. It's a sad sight.
But there's no mystery why. The blocks to the south and west are vacant. The downtown post office -- the worst building in downtown -- squats on the block to the north. The block to the east is half vacant: it was the site of the Fox & Hound Pub, torn down for apartments that might not ever built. The block to the northwest is mostly vacant (it's the lot with Miller Blueprint), the block to the southwest is a three-story parking garage, and the block to the northeast consists of a drive-through bank and an office building sitting atop several stories of parking.
The area is a wasteland, which is a shame since it lies just north of the Second Street district.
So this ought to be good news: The new federal courthouse, slated for the old Intel site west of Republic Square, might get funded with stimulus money.
I appreciate the feds getting rid of the Intel skeleton for us. The skeleton was worse than a vacant lot. But, as I've argued before, putting a federal courthouse there will do nothing to enliven Republic Square. It will create a permanent dead spot instead.
Federal courts are snooty, elitist places. They have jurisdiction over civil cases only in narrow circumstances and they have jurisdiction over criminal cases only when they involve federal crimes.
State courts, by contrast, hear most civil cases, along with divorces, child custody hearings, estate proceedings, guardianship proceedings and lots of other things. Everyone arrested by the police -- and that's a bunch of people -- gets arraigned there. When a lawyer tells you he has a case in federal court, he is telling you that he has an Important Case; when a lawyer tells you he has a case in state court, he is telling you where his case is.
The Austin federal court has just a couple of full-time district judges and magistrate judges. They try, at their busiest, a handful of cases per month. The Travis County courthouse on Guadalupe has a couple dozen judges, and I imagine there are always 6 or 8 jury trials underway there at any given time.
The federal courthouse simply won't generate much pedestrian traffic for Republic Square or Second Street.
Federal courthouses also have pedestrian-unfriendly designs. They have deep setbacks because of the Oklahoma City bombing. They are ringed by concrete barriers because of the Oklahoma City bomging. They try to dress up the barriers, but they still create a psychological barrier.
The Austin courthouse will not be any better. No, that's not strong enough -- it will be hideous according to the rendering I've seen. It will frighten old people and make little children cry. That's no way to encourage foot traffic in the area.
I doubt the GSA is monitoring this blog for advice, but I'd like to see the courthouse moved somewhere else. True, I don't want this important lot left vacant, and the proposed courthouse is better than nothing. But I think that, eventually, someone will want to build something else on that site. It would be better to move the courthouse somewhere else downtown and hold out for a better project on Republic Square.
