Swim laps at Big Stacy on a hot August evening and the water does something no other public pool in Austin does. It's warmer than the air around you, warmer than the concrete deck, warmer than it has any business being in a state where the ground itself usually just adds to the heat rather than relieving it. Regulars know why. Everyone else assumes it's a mechanical trick, some gas heater humming behind the bathhouse. It isn't. The water comes straight out of a well, the way it has since before Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration paid to build the pool around it in 1937.
What most people swimming there this summer do not know is that the arrangement they take for granted is quietly no longer guaranteed.
What's Actually Warming the Water
The well beneath Big Stacy Pool has been weakening for years. According to reporting from KUT, the city's aquatic division tried cleaning it with high-frequency sound about five or six years ago, the first attempt of its kind, and found the well's casing had grown too fragile to risk it. A full cleaning could have collapsed the well on itself. So the city left it alone and did something else instead: it quietly plumbed in backup gas heaters as insurance, and has been testing them every year since, without ever switching them on for real.
If that day comes, the shift will not be subtle. Aquatics staff have said the pool has run bills as high as $10,000 a month to heat comparable water by conventional means, a cost the well has been covering for free for nearly nine decades. The water currently leaves the ground at 90 to 100 degrees and settles to a more swimmable temperature once it mixes with city water in the pool itself, which is part of why Big Stacy stays open through freezing weather elsewhere in the city and closes only on Mondays and when the air itself drops below freezing.
None of this is hypothetical maintenance chatter. It is the actual mechanism keeping a neighborhood fixture running, and it is running on borrowed time from a well nobody can safely repair.
A few things worth knowing if you use the pool regularly:
- Six lanes, 33 yards, depth ranging from 3.5 feet to just over 9 feet
- Free admission, every day except Monday
- Closed for its annual spring cleaning May 9 through May 17 this year, per the city's parks department
- Located at 700 East Live Oak Street, inside Big Stacy Park
The Walk That Actually Connects Two Parks
Ask three people in Travis Heights to point you toward Little Stacy Park and Big Stacy Park and at least one will assume they're the same place. They aren't, and the confusion is understandable since Little Stacy is, despite the name, the larger of the two. What actually links them is the Blunn Creek Greenbelt, a roughly one-mile stretch of paved concrete and crushed granite that runs along East Side Drive between the two parks.
The walk is short enough to do before dinner and shaded enough to make sense in August. Along the way, a bridge locals have nicknamed for its resemblance to Frank Lloyd Wright's work crosses the creek near the turnaround by Travis Heights Elementary, and one of Austin's old moon towers still stands over a section of the path. Metal markers identify trees along the route, useful if you have ever wanted to settle the difference between an elm and a cedar elm without pulling out your phone.
Dinner Without Crossing Oltorf
The newest addition to the Oltorf side of the neighborhood is The Greek Bar, which opened at 534 East Oltorf Street in February 2025 from husband and wife team Dimitri Karabinas and Daphne Greer. Karabinas built the wine bar VINES Grove in Florida before coming to Austin, and Greer spent time managing the Peacock at Austin Proper and Juniper before deciding the city was underserved on Mediterranean food. The kitchen is run by chef Brian Beach, formerly of Kokkari, and the space itself, designed with Luke Havekes, keeps original saltillo tile and terra cotta detailing alongside a covered back patio. It's open 4 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, with weekend brunch still in the works.
That sits alongside the stretch of South Congress most Travis Heights residents already treat as an extension of their own block. Home Slice Pizza, Perla's, and June's All Day anchor the corridor a short walk west, and none of them require a car to reach from most streets in the neighborhood.
Old Enough to Be Protected
Here is the part that ties the pool's uncertain future to something bigger than plumbing. In July 2021, Travis Heights and Fairview Park were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation confirmed through the neighborhood's own historic district organization. Sarah Marshall, the city's program coordinator for historic preservation, has said the pool itself, along with its bathhouses and the seawall around it, counts as a contributing structure to that district's historical significance.
That status matters beyond the trivia value. A contributing structure inside a National Register district is not something a city department can simply retrofit on its own schedule. Any eventual repair, replacement well, or permanent switch to those backup heaters will likely move through a slower process than a typical parks maintenance job, precisely because the pool's value as a historic asset is now on paper alongside its value as a place to swim. The charm that draws people to Travis Heights, the bungalows, the winding streets, the pool that has run the same trick since the New Deal, comes with a layer of protection that also means less room to move fast if something breaks.
For now, the water is still warm, the greenbelt still connects the two parks it always has, and Oltorf has one more kitchen worth walking to. But the pool's temperature is no longer something to take for granted the way it was for the eighty-plus years before this decade, and that is worth knowing the next time you're doing laps under the moon tower's shadow.
If you're weighing Travis Heights against a neighborhood like Bouldin Creek, we've laid out how the two compare in more detail, and our Travis Heights neighborhood page covers the streets, architecture, and market patterns specific to this stretch of 78704.
Have a question about what's happening on your own street, or curious what a home nearby is actually worth in today's market? Lesley Taylor knows this neighborhood block by block. Let's Connect.
