Travis Heights This Fall: The Warm Pool, the Wild Preserve, and the Fence Nobody Explains

"We've paid up to $10,000 a month to heat a pool," Paul Slutes, who manages the City of Austin's Aquatic Division, told a reporter recently, describing a bill the city hasn't actually had to pay in decades. Big Stacy Pool has never needed a gas heater. It has a well.

That single fact is the kind of thing you can live three blocks from Big Stacy for years and never learn, because the pool doesn't advertise its plumbing. You just know it's warm in January when nothing else in Austin is, and you assume, the way you assume things about places you've always known, that it will stay that way. It might not. And once you understand why, the rest of the half mile around it starts to look different too: the preserve everyone confuses with the greenbelt next door, and the dog park that sits, quite literally, on top of an argument the neighborhood still hasn't settled.

The Well Behind the Door

Big Stacy Pool opened in 1937, built with Works Progress Administration money during the New Deal, and named for General William Stacy, the Spanish-American War veteran and real estate agent who developed Travis Heights in the first place. It's six lanes, 33 yards, free to enter, open every day except Monday and whenever the air drops below freezing. None of that is unusual for an Austin pool of its vintage. What is unusual sits behind an unmarked door near the pump room: a geothermal well drilled straight down at the time of construction, pulling naturally warm water up through pipes into the pool itself. Regular swimmers describe the water at a steady 80 degrees or so by the time it reaches the lap lanes. City aquatics staff have measured the source water hotter still, in the 90s and occasionally above 100, before it mixes and cools on its way into the six lanes.

The well is failing. Slutes has said the deterioration has reached a point where well experts advised the city not to attempt repairs, leaving a new well as the only real option if Austin wants to keep the natural heat long term. In the meantime, the city has installed backup gas heaters as a hedge, and tested them every year. They have never actually been switched on for regular operation. The day they are, Big Stacy stops being naturally heated and starts being a pool the city pays to run hot, at a cost Slutes has put at up to $10,000 a month.

None of this is likely to change your Tuesday. But it changes what you're actually looking at the next time you walk past that pump room on the way to the lap lanes. The warmth that's made Big Stacy one of the only free, heated, outdoor pools in Austin isn't a permanent feature of the ground under Travis Heights. It's a piece of 1930s infrastructure that's outlasted its own expected lifespan, being kept alive by a plan B the city hasn't had to use yet.

"Having a free pool where you can swim laps or you can splash around is something that we just don't experience all that often anymore," Anna Strong, a Texas Parks and Wildlife botanist and regular swimmer, has said of Big Stacy.

Two Trails, One Assumption

Ask most people in Travis Heights where they walk and they'll say the greenbelt, meaning Blunn Creek Greenbelt, the shaded path that links Little Stacy Park to Big Stacy Park along East Side Drive. It's an easy, almost entirely flat stroll under Elm and Cedar Elm cover, marked with granite mix trail surface and interpretive metal markers, crossing a bridge locals have taken to calling the "Frank Lloyd Wright bridge" for its geometry, passing under another bridge through a short tunnel, and running near one of the city's old moon towers. It's a neighborhood amenity in the truest sense: something you use without thinking much about it.

What a surprising number of residents don't realize is that a few blocks away, on the other side of St. Edward's Drive, sits a completely different piece of land with a similar name and almost nothing else in common. Blunn Creek Nature Preserve is roughly 40 undeveloped acres run by the city as an actual preserve rather than a park, which means rougher trails, no paved surface, and no dogs, a rule posted at the entrance even if not every visitor follows it. The preserve was farmland as recently as the 1940s and 50s, and the terrain still carries a stranger history than that: part of the trail surface is compressed volcanic ash, left behind by eruptions that geologists date to roughly 75 million years ago, when this stretch of Central Texas sat under a shallow sea. The out and back to what hikers call the Volcanic Overlook climbs to what was, at the time, the summit of one of those undersea volcanoes, and now offers a clear view across to St. Edward's University's own hilltop and, on a clear day, downtown Austin.

The two are managed by different logics entirely, and the preserve is looked after in part by the Blunn Creek Partnership, an informal group of neighbors who track the health of the watershed running from its outfall at Lady Bird Lake down to its headwaters near Ben White Boulevard, a stretch that includes the preserve, Stacy Park, and the Travis Heights and Sherwood Oaks neighborhoods along the way. It's worth the ten extra minutes across St. Edwards Drive if you've only ever walked the greenbelt. It doesn't feel like the same neighborhood.

The Fence Line at Norwood

If your dog goes anywhere off leash, it's almost certainly Norwood Estate Dog Park, the fully fenced spot at the corner of I-35 and Riverside with separate sections for small and large dogs, the busiest fenced option in this part of South Austin. What's easy to miss, standing at the gate waiting for your dog to finish its rounds, is what the park is built on top of.

Norwood was once a private estate, and the pool that came with it was filled in decades ago as a safety hazard. The off-leash area sits over that filled-in pool today. A short distance away, behind a chain-link fence most walkers stop noticing after the first few visits, stands what's left of the Norwood House itself: a stripped wooden frame, unrecognizable as the home it once was, though the view from the property, out over Lady Bird Lake and the downtown skyline, hasn't changed at all.

The house has been the subject of a preservation fight that's run for roughly four decades. Neighbors first got it landmarked in the 1980s to stop a condo developer from bulldozing it, a deal that fell through anyway, not before the house was temporarily moved and its brick facade collapsed in the process. The city bought the lot in the 1990s. A group calling itself the Norwood Park Foundation later formed and convinced the city to let them lead a restoration, and in 2021 the Parks and Recreation Department set aside roughly $3 million in bond and hotel tax money to make it happen. Then construction costs doubled during the pandemic, and the department moved that money elsewhere.

"The idea was for NPF and the city to combine private and public money to get this old house back to its original appearance," Wolf Sittler, whose wife Charlotte Bell has advocated for the house for years, has explained.

The most recent detailed public accounting of the fight left two options on the table: the city takes full control and turns the site into a rentable event space, similar to the Zilker Clubhouse, or the landmark designation comes off and the house comes down, replaced by an overlook with exhibits describing what once stood there. A newer group, calling itself the Revive Norwood Alliance, has since taken up the cause with the department. As of the most recent reporting available, no final decision had been made public. The next time your dog is sniffing the fence line, that's the argument sitting behind it.

What This Adds Up To

None of these three places will show up on a map as connected. But walk the loop, from Big Stacy's pump room to the preserve's volcanic overlook to Norwood's chain-link fence, and you're covering roughly half a mile that's quietly holding three separate, unresolved stories: a historic pool weighing whether to keep its natural heat, a nature preserve most residents have never actually visited despite living a few blocks away, and a house the city still hasn't decided whether to save.

That's not trivia. It's a fair description of what makes Travis Heights feel the way it does this time of year, when the crowds thin out on South Congress and the neighborhood's own green spaces start doing more of the daily work. The pool stays warm for now. The preserve stays wild on purpose. And the fence stays up, holding a decision that isn't finished yet.

If you're the kind of person who notices details like these about a neighborhood, chances are you already know Travis Heights better than most agents do. Kumara Wilcoxon works this market and this neighborhood specifically, and welcomes a conversation with anyone who wants a second set of eyes on it, whether that's this fall or down the road. Work With Kumara.