The Old Backyard

German settlers put down roots at the meeting of Barton Creek and Little Barton Creek in the 1850s; the post office that opened in the 1870s took its name from the Mexican honeybees that hived in the creek banks and under the eaves of the settlers' buildings. For most of the next century Bee Cave was a gristmill, a cotton gin, a general store and a schoolhouse at the junction of what became State Highway 71 and Hamilton Pool Road.

The original structure at 13001 W Hwy 71 dates to 1958 — a stone-and-timber roadside building of the kind that lined the highway to the Hill Country. By the time the village incorporated in 1987 to keep Austin's annexation at bay, it counted barely two hundred residents.

Tim O'Connor — the promoter who ran Austin's Music Hall, the Glenn and, for a quarter century, much of the city's live-music calendar — wanted a venue that felt like the old Austin of the Soap Creek Saloon: mud in the parking lot, stars overhead, a stage in the trees. He and Blank bought the property in January 1993; the main building, with its restaurant downstairs and O'Connor's offices above, became the venue's front-of-house.

"There was nothing out there then, just a bunch of cows and fields," O'Connor recalled. Skeptics said nobody would drive to Bee Cave for a show. O'Connor timed the trip from downtown at fifteen minutes and answered them with the venue's slogan: The Backyard was "three songs away." Willie Nelson opened the amphitheater on May 7, 1993 — "It still gives me chills when I think about it," O'Connor said years later — and brought his Fourth of July Picnic there that first summer. The street outside became Willie Way.

The Backyard opened with a run of names that announced its ambition — Leonard Cohen, Jimmy Cliff, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Everly Brothers, Little Feat, the Allman Brothers — and grew from a 3,500-person lawn to a capacity of about 5,000 across an 8.3-acre grove. Austin's music writers came to rank it alongside the Armadillo World Headquarters and Liberty Lunch among the city's legendary lost rooms.

Willie Nelson treated it as a home stage, playing 32 shows over seventeen seasons. Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen, Widespread Panic, Coldplay, Norah Jones, Merle Haggard, ZZ Top and Elvis Costello followed. Parking was rugged and the walks were long, but, as one chronicler put it, you felt like you were out in the country.

The growth the venue had helped attract eventually surrounded it. The Shops at the Galleria — Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, Lowe's — absorbed the lawn parking by 2005, and the 1.3-million-square-foot Hill Country Galleria opened directly across Hwy 71 in October 2007, with Bee Cave's new city hall and library on its green.

"The environment that we once enjoyed out here in the hill country of Austin now is covered with urban sprawl, which we knew was coming," O'Connor told Pollstar. An employee later put it more bluntly: he decided it was time for a change when the Best Buy sign was put up right behind the stage. The Backyard closed after the 2008 season — Steve Miller Band, 311 with Snoop Dogg and the Gipsy Kings played the farewell summer — and the name moved a mile west to a new Live Oak Amphitheater on Bee Cave Parkway.

The original 1.7-acre venue parcel and its 8,100-square-foot building were purchased in 2012 with a plan to keep the structure and convert it to mixed use: bigger windows, stone pillars, a central tower, retail on the main level and engineering offices below. That remodel gave the building its glass-front garden-level offices, the terraced decks and the waterfall bridge that links the levels today, while the timber beams, limestone fireplaces and the oak canopy stayed exactly where the concertgoers left them.

The name on the leasing sign — The Old Backyard — is deliberate. Ironrock Properties is leasing the building as a collection of individually marketable suites for the kinds of operators Bee Cave is short of: an independent coffee and beer bar on the deck, a boutique fitness studio in the garden level, professional and creative offices, and executive suites upstairs. Every tenant inherits the story.