Too quiet

I've been cooped up since getting back to Austin, and I'm sure, like many of you, I'm starting to feel the cabin fever. At first it was great: a little reprieve from the daily hustle, not just for me but for the whole non-essential world, which had ground to a halt. But little by little you crave some human contact, a view other than the four walls of a room.

This morning, with the help of jet lag, I woke around 5 AM. The world was still dark, and I just needed to change my view. So I got up, hoping it was early enough that people wouldn't be out, grabbed my camera and went for a walk. The air was still cold, even though at this time of year it's usually warming up.

Austin was quiet. Too quiet.

Even as the day began, there was none of the usual bustle of downtown, people coming and going. Sixth Street, busy at any hour of the day, was eerily quiet. Windows were boarded up. There was no one.

But as I rounded an alley in this ghost town, I saw a lone Royal Blue Grocery van, unloading goods for the day. Sometimes we get complacent. Woe is me, trapped in my house, my apartment, getting bored. And then you realise it isn't only the hospitals that are overrun, though we're eternally grateful for them. It's your grocery stores stacking toilet paper, your gas station attendants, and the people working behind the scenes without any of the glory.

Yes, things have changed so much. The world is a different place.

What Austin was going through

The city had been closing down for most of March. On Friday 6 March 2020, Mayor Steve Adler declared a local disaster, which cancelled South by Southwest. The festival said it was the first time in 34 years its March event wouldn't go ahead. The year before, it had drawn more than 400,000 people and brought in an estimated $356 million.

On 17 March the city shut its bars, limited restaurants to drive-through, pick-up and delivery, and banned gatherings of more than ten people. By that weekend the bars on Sixth Street were closed and boarded up; the Austin History Center keeps photographs of them taken on 22 March.

On 24 March, Austin and Travis County told people to stay home from 11:59 PM that night until at least 13 April. On 13 April the orders were extended to 8 May. So this walk came a week into the city's stay-home order.

The same day this was posted, 31 March, Governor Greg Abbott issued a statewide order, GA-14. From 2 April to 30 April, Texans were to limit gatherings and contact with people outside their household, except to give or get essential services.

Who kept working

The orders kept essential businesses open. Austin's list included grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, hardware stores, laundromats and child care. Anyone doing essential work could still leave home to do it.

Then there was the toilet paper. In mid-March, H-E-B said there was no shortage in its supply chain: "Shelves are just temporarily empty because customers are buying items faster than trucks can deliver the products." Some of its stores limited shoppers to two items of bath tissue a visit, and restocked every day.

Sixth Street

Sixth Street was called Pecan Street under Austin's older naming scheme. Nine blocks of it, roughly from Lavaca Street east to Interstate 35, have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 30 December 1975, as the Sixth Street Historic District. The streets around Sixth and Fourth have been a major entertainment district since the 1970s, and many of the bars have live music during the week.

Royal Blue Grocery

Royal Blue Grocery is a small Austin chain of downtown grocery stores. It calls itself "a modern urban grocery store" and adds: "Called a bodega by some and a corner store by others." Its third store, at 609 Congress Avenue, about 100 feet north of Sixth Street, was announced in 2010.

By May 2020, the Downtown Austin Alliance's guide to what was still open downtown listed Royal Blue from 7 AM to 11:59 PM with delivery and curbside pickup, and its Congress Avenue store as temporarily closed.

That store has since gone. Royal Blue couldn't get its lease extended, and the shop at Sixth and Congress closed on 13 June 2025, after about 15 years.