The Real World: Austin

Downtown (or Downtown-Convention Center) is a Capital MetroRail commuter rail station in Austin, Texas. It is located in Downtown Austin at the corner of Fourth and Neches Street behind the Austin Convention Center. It is the current southern terminus of the Red Line. It was also the smallest, but busiest Capital MetroRail station, before it was rebuilt and expanded.

Austin Central Fire Station 1, is a fire station at 401 East Fifth Street in Downtown Austin, Texas, United States. It is a part of the Austin Fire Department.The Austin Fire Museum is located in the historic station. The museum's exhibits include firefighting equipment, uniforms, and memorabilia from Texas' first African American firefighters. The building became a part of the National Register of Historic Places on May 5, 2000.

The William Sydney Porter House or O. Henry House is a historic structure in Downtown Austin, Texas. William Sydney Porter, better known as the author O. Henry, lived there between 1893 and 1895. The Porter house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 18, 1973. The house is known today as the O. Henry Museum. The collection is curated by Melissa Parr, Site Coordinator.

The Frost Bank Tower is a skyscraper in Austin, Texas, United States. Standing 515 feet (157 m) tall with 33 floors, it is the fifth tallest building in Austin, behind The Independent, The Austonian, Fairmont Austin, and the 360 Condominiums. It was developed by Cousins Properties from November 2001 to December 2003 as a class A office building with 525,000 sq ft (48,774 m2) of leasable space. It was the first high-rise building to be constructed in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. The building was officially dedicated in January 2004.The Frost Bank Tower was designed by Duda/Paine Architects, LLP and HKS, Inc. It carries the highest logo in the city at 420 ft (128 m). This advertises the San Antonio-based Frost Bank, whose Austin headquarters and insurance division are in the building. Tenants in the building besides Frost Bank include the Austin offices of Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and PIMCO. The silvery blue color glass facade was first used on the Reuters Building in New York City. Cousins sold the building in 2006 to EQ Office for $188 million before the building was sold to Thomas Properties Group the same year. In 2013, ownership of the building transferred to Parkway Properties. The building is currently owned by Endeavor Real Estate Group.

The Neal Kocurek Memorial Austin Convention Center is a multi-purpose convention center located in Austin, Texas. The building is the home of the Texas Rollergirls, and was also home to the Austin Toros basketball team, until their move to the Cedar Park Center in nearby Cedar Park in 2010. The facility is also the primary "home base" for the internationally renowned South by Southwest technology, music and film conference/festival, held annually in March.

San Jacinto Center is a three-building real estate development in Downtown Austin, Texas. The complex, which overlooks Lady Bird Lake, contains a 21-story office tower, a 10-story Four Seasons Hotel, and the 32-story Four Seasons Residences, a condo skyscraper. The postmodern office tower and hotel are clad in Texas creme limestone and Llano rose granite. In addition to the towers, the complex is home to numerous restaurants and street-level retail stores. The office tower is home to the headquarters of The Zebra and The Chive.

Mexic-Arte Museum is a fine arts museum in Austin, Texas. The Mission of the organization is to enrich and educate the community through the presentation and promotion of traditional and contemporary Mexican, Latino, and Latino art and culture. Founded in 1983 and incorporated in 1984, Mexic-Arte Museum is The Official Mexican American Fine Art Museum of Texas. In 1988, the museum relocated to a new location on Congress Avenue in Austin.In 2016, the Screen It! program was one of twelve awardees of the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Awards.

Sixth Street is a historic street and entertainment district in Austin, Texas, located within the city's urban core in downtown Austin. Sixth Street was formerly named Pecan Street under Austin's older naming convention, which had east–west streets named after trees and north–south streets named after Texas rivers (the latter convention remains in place).The nine-block area of East Sixth Street roughly between Lavaca Street to the west and Interstate 35 to the east is recognized as the Sixth Street Historic District and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on December 30, 1975. Developed as one of Austin's trade and commercial districts in the late 1800s, the predominant building style are two- or three-story masonry Victorian commercial architecture. Most structures in the area had already been built by the 1880s, though a few notable exceptions include the Driskill Hotel (1886), the Scarbrough Building (1910), and the Littlefield Building. The area around nearby 4th Street and 6th Street has been a major entertainment district since the 1970s. Many bars, clubs, music venues, and shopping destinations are located on East 6th Street between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35, and many offer live music at one time or another during the week. Traffic is generally blocked on East 6th Street and most crossroads from I-35 to Brazos Street on weekend evenings, and football home games (depending on pedestrian traffic), as well as holidays and special events, to allow the crowds to walk unfettered to the many venues that line the street. East Sixth Street (known locally as Dirty Sixth) plays host to a wide variety of events each year, ranging from music and film festivals (such as South by Southwest) to biker rallies (such as The Republic of Texas Biker Rally) and the Pecan Street Festival.The area of Sixth Street west of Lavaca is known as the West 6th Street District. Recently, a movement has been growing to develop this area as an entertainment district of its own, geared toward the live-music crowd.

The Hilton Austin Hotel is the third largest hotel in Austin, with 801 rooms. The Hilton Austin is also the sixth tallest hotel and twenty-second tallest building in Austin, Texas at 377 ft (115 m) tall with 31 stories. Designed by Ellerbe Becket Inc and Susman Tisdale Gayle Architects (now STG Design, Inc), the building broke ground on July 10, 2001, and topped out officially on January 17, 2003, a span of 1 year, 6 months, and 7 days. The second largest ballroom in Austin also is located at the Hilton Austin. In 2018, a $7.5 million overhead walkway was constructed to connect the sixth floor of the hotel with the fourth floor of the Austin Convention Center.The tower began an exterior renovation in early 2018. The tower's sand-colored facade was painted white, with black paint added between windows.

IKKiCON is an annual three-day anime convention held during January at the Austin Marriott Downtown in Austin, Texas.

The Bank of America Center is the 23rd tallest building in Austin, Texas. It was built in 1975 and has 261,609 square feet (24,304 m2) of office space on 26 floors. It is 336 feet (102 m) tall and is located on the east side of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin between 5th and 6th Streets. The tower was the second building in Austin to surpass the Texas State Capitol in height, after the Chase Bank Tower. The Bank of America Center was the tallest building in Austin for 9 years from 1975 to 1984, surpassing the Chase Bank Tower but falling short of the One American Center. The building's facade was built with leftover material from Pennzoil Place in Houston.

The Austin–Round Rock-Georgetown Metropolitan Statistical Area (or Greater Austin) is a five-county metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Texas, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget. The metropolitan area is situated in Central Texas on the western edge of the American South and on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, and borders Greater San Antonio to the south. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, the Austin–Round Rock-Georgetown MSA is the 28th largest metropolitan area in the United States, with a total population of 2,283,371. The metropolitan area is centered on the City of Austin—the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 11th-largest city in the United States with a population of 961,855 people. Austin's largest suburbs are Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, San Marcos and Pflugerville.