Ahead of you stretches America's rowdiest historic block, the one locals call Dirty Sixth, equal parts affection and warning. When Mirabeau Lamar platted Austin in 1839, this was Pecan Street, a dusty frontier road lined with the namesake trees that still define the Texas Hill Country. By the 1880s it was a commercial corridor of dry goods stores, saloons, and frontier businesses serving the young state capital.
The street declined through much of the twentieth century, but in the 1970s and 1980s, cheap rents drew musicians, artists, and bar owners who transformed the Victorian storefronts into live music venues. Tonight — and every night — you can hear blues, country, rock, and conjunto spilling out of a dozen open doors simultaneously, an audio collision that is uniquely Austin. This corridor became the living proof of Austin's claim to be the Live Music Capital of the World, a title the city officially adopted in 1991.
When South by Southwest needs a home base, it comes here. When Stevie Ray Vaughan wanted a stage, he came here. The honky-tonks and blues clubs that made this block famous gave an entire city its identity.