Rainey Street Isn't Under Construction Anymore. Here's What Showed Up Instead

What do you do with a neighborhood once the cranes finally leave?

Rainey Street is about to find out. This past week, Lincoln Property Co. and Kairoi Residential confirmed that construction on Waterline, the 74-story tower at 98 Red River Street, wrapped in late August. At 1,025 feet, it's now the tallest building in Texas, 23 feet taller than the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston, which had held that record since 1981. For a district that has spent most of the last decade behind plywood fencing, that's not just another building topping out. It's the closing argument in a fight over what Rainey Street is actually for.

That same August, something smaller and sadder went quiet too. At the corner of Rainey and River, a 1945 bungalow sat empty for a different reason. Jesse Alba, who bought the house from his grandparents in 1966 and spent decades refusing to sell it while high-rises closed in around him, died on August 21 at age 81. His family hasn't said what happens to the 940-square-foot house next. He had once listed it for $10 million back in 2022, a number that only makes sense if you understand what was being built around it.

Those two stories, one about a finished skyscraper and one about an empty house, are the same story. Rainey spent years being torn apart to become something else. This fall is the first real evidence of what that something else looks like day to day.

The Corner That Finally Went Quiet

Alba's house is worth pausing on because it's not a metaphor. It's the actual last single-family home standing on Rainey Street, on a lot boxed in by bars and glass towers. Another century-old home on the same street tells a related story. Icenhauer's, a craft cocktail bar that had operated out of a nineteenth-century house since 2010, closed for good in November 2024 after its owner said construction traffic had cut revenue by up to 70 percent. That bar didn't lose to a bad location or a bad concept. It lost to years of jackhammers outside the door.

That's the part of the Rainey story that gets flattened when people talk about the neighborhood in the present tense, as though the bungalow bars and the bungalow homes were always going to give way gracefully. They didn't. Businesses closed. A man held onto his family's house until his death rather than sell into a boom he watched happen around him for twenty years. The construction era had a real cost, and it landed on real addresses.

The Tower That Finished the Job

Waterline is the building that makes the construction era feel over, and not because it's tall. It's because of how it was built to run three separate schedules under one roof.

The tower's three uses, office, hotel, and residential, were built with separate entrances, elevators, and parking, so none of them had to wait on the others to open. The office floors were sealed and ready for tenant improvements more than a year before the hotel checked in its first guest this August, and the apartments upstairs are still filling in behind both. Most supertall towers cut one ribbon. Waterline is cutting three, on three different calendars, which says something about how differently people are expected to use this stretch of Rainey now.

A Park Where the Parking Lot Used to Be

The other piece of this fall's timing is The Confluence, the second phase of the Waterloo Greenway project along Waller Creek. Where there used to be a stretch of surface lots and construction staging between Rainey and Lady Bird Lake, the greenway conservancy has been planting an estimated 200,000 plants and 1,600 trees, funded in part by a million dollars from Lincoln and Kairoi as a condition of building Waterline next door. New bridges now cross the creek, including one that connects directly to the redeveloped Austin Convention Center a few blocks north.

Ben Seigel of the longtime Rainey bar Banger's Sausage House put it plainly when asked what the finished street would feel like. "It's not going to be like the homogenous city street with bars in it that Rainey was," he said, describing a version of the neighborhood he first fell for back in 2012. He wasn't being nostalgic for its own sake. He was describing a street that's about to function differently than it has in fifteen years.

Rainey Learned to Do Mornings

Nowhere is that shift more visible than at Modern Bar, which opened at 90 Rainey Street on April 10 from Urbanspace Hospitality's Kevin Burns, the same developer behind the 56-story Modern Austin tower next door. The space runs on what its bar director Gabe Ford calls an intentionally unpretentious rhythm. "We want to lead with being good people first and serving good drinks second," he told Austin Monthly when the bar debuted. In practice that means coffee and juice service in the morning, a cocktail program built around technical, visually striking drinks by evening, and a room designed to hold both crowds without feeling like it's performing for either one.

That daypart structure shows up elsewhere on the calendar too. First Thursdays on Rainey, the district's monthly street-wide event, returned on August 6 with country swing lessons at Lucille, a three-DJ silent disco at Victory Lap Rainey, and live music spilling out of Banger's and Hotel Van Zandt. None of that reads as a bar crawl dressed up in a new name. It reads as a street trying to give people a reason to show up before dark, which is a different problem than the one Rainey used to have.

The Food Scene Caught Up First

If the towers and the park are catching up to something, the restaurants got there first. Emmer & Rye has held a Michelin Green Star and Bib Gourmand for its heirloom grains and cart-service dim sum for years now, proof that Rainey could support serious dining even during the worst of the construction years. Kinsho opened as the street's first dedicated sushi restaurant, an 18-seat bar built by a chef who previously worked at Uchiko. And this year Alteño Austin, the newest concept from Fonda Fina Hospitality's Johnny and Kasie Curiel, is opening inside Waterline itself, an expansion of their Michelin-recognized Denver flagship built around fire-driven Jalisco cooking and a beverage list heavy on raicilla and mezcal.

None of those restaurants needed the tower to finish. They opened, or kept operating, through the worst of the noise and the scaffolding, which suggests the appetite for a serious Rainey dining scene was never really in question. What changed this fall isn't demand. It's that the buildings finally caught up to it.

What Actually Changed

Go back to the two stories this piece opened with. A tower finished. A house went quiet. Neither one, on its own, tells you much. Together they mark the actual end of something: the years when Rainey Street was defined by what was being torn down and replaced. What comes next isn't a bigger version of the old bar-hopping strip, and it isn't a sanitized office district either. It's a street that finally has a daytime population large enough to support a coffee counter at Modern Bar, a park worth walking through on a Wednesday evening, and restaurants that don't need darkness to draw a crowd.

That's a different neighborhood than the one that existed five years ago, and a different one than the one being marketed in construction renderings for the last three. It's just the one that's actually there now, for anyone who lives close enough to walk it.

If you're already in the neighborhood and curious how Rainey fits into the broader picture of downtown living, our Downtown Austin guide has more on the surrounding blocks. And if a finished skyline ever has you wondering what it means for your own address nearby, Soud Twal is a straightforward call away.