For more than three decades, the conventions downtown hosted brought in a weekday crowd that hardly anyone noticed. Those visitors arrived early in the week, filled hotel rooms from Monday on, and kept bar stools and patio tables busy on nights when locals stayed home. The Austin Convention Center closed in April 2025 for its rebuild, and that crowd left with it.
That lull is set to last until early 2029. Until then, people who live and work downtown are the main weeknight customers for the blocks around the site. Read that way, this year's downtown news fits together. The places that have struggled, the places that opened anyway, and the support programs that came and went all point to the same shift.
The gap is on Sunday through Wednesday
Heather Potts co-owns Foxy's Proper Pub and Cedar Door, which sit side by side at 201 Brazos St. She told Austin Current in February that weekend crowds have held up. Her trouble starts when the workweek begins and the sidewalks empty out.
"A lot of those conventions come in earlier in the week. The conventions are really a huge part of our business model – 100%. We are definitely very dependent on conventions and tourism." Heather Potts, speaking to Austin Current, February 2026
In the same article, Visit Austin President Tom Noonan put numbers on it. About one in three hotel rooms booked in Austin is group-related, meaning tied to conventions or business conferences. Downtown hotel occupancy had fallen an average of 15% since construction began in April 2025. Those are February 2026 figures and the latest the reporting offers. They describe how much weekday traffic disappeared, not what this month looks like.
Where the shortfall shows up is just as specific. Weekends still fill on their own, so the open seats come early in the week. For someone a few blocks away, that means Tuesday is the night when a downtown regular makes the biggest difference.
What the site looks like this month
As of early October 2026, the project is at the stage you notice on a walk. The project team reports that structural demolition is done. So is the diaphragm wall, the first permanent structural element and the support for the expanded six-block footprint. Excavation was 93% complete as of August and is scheduled to finish this fall, after about 940,000 cubic yards of soil have been removed. Three construction cranes are up. Vertical steel installation began in September, the first part of the new building visible from street level.
The project's alert for the week of Sept. 27 shows what that means at street level:
- Overnight concrete pours. On Sept. 28 and Oct. 2, pump setup was scheduled to start around midnight, with placement from about 1 a.m. for roughly six hours. Regular pours start with pump setup around 5 a.m. and pumping around 6 a.m. Concrete trucks enter via northbound Trinity Street.
- Extended weekday hours. For the next several weeks, excavation, jackhammering included, and hauling run from 7 a.m. to about 9 p.m. on weekdays, with no jackhammering after 8 p.m. The city's extended construction window allows weekday work from 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
- Saturdays on, Sundays off. Rock excavation and hauling continue on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to about 7 p.m. No excavation or hauling is planned for Sundays.
- The Cesar Chavez walkway. Crews plan to remove the covered pedestrian walkway along Cesar Chavez Street, which should take no more than two days. After that, foot traffic moves to the south side of the street.
- Red River at Cesar Chavez. The city and DPR Construction are still working on the road and sidewalks at that intersection. Northbound Red River stays open, with temporary southbound lane closures and shifting pedestrian routes.
Over the longer run, the Downtown Austin Alliance's construction guide, last updated July 13, warns of full or partial lane closures on Trinity, Red River, East Third, and East Second. That's the edge of the site, and it's also where the businesses most exposed to the closure are.
The businesses that have said so publicly
Cedar Door and Foxy's sit at the Brazos end of that edge. Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill at 303 Red River St. sits at the other end. KVUE reported construction fencing and equipment directly in front of the restaurant. Assistant general manager Kevin Fry told the station he hoped the "four years go by fairly quickly."
A few blocks west, at 407 Lavaca St., Turf N' Surf Po' Boy closed on July 2 after 16 years downtown. Community Impact reported that owner Ralph Gilmore listed high food costs and slow sales among his reasons. He also mentioned lighter foot traffic from the convention center's temporary closure and from more people working from home. Gilmore announced a new restaurant in Aransas Pass, Hook House Kitchen, and said in July that he expected it to open in September.
So far, those are the specific cases. The local coverage reviewed for this piece didn't name any other downtown business that cut hours or closed because of the construction.
What opened anyway
The 407 Lavaca space didn't stay empty long. Nobody's Business opened there on Sept. 12. It's a walk-up kitchen inside Lavaca Street Bar, run jointly by Comedor chef Philip Speer and Via 313 co-founder Brandon Hunt.
Three other openings this year joined it:
- Austin Sports Club, 205 E. Third St., opened Sept. 10. It serves dinner nightly and brunch on weekends. The 4,700-square-foot room is a partnership between Austin-based Lobos Hospitality, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and Boardroom Hospitality's Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman. Peter Maxwell Bowden of PETERMAX Co. designed it with architects from RIOS and worked 18 televisions into a room meant not to feel like a standard sports bar. The menu includes grilled branzino, chilled lobster rolls, and caviar with tater tots.
- Honest Mary's opened its Seaholm location on July 14 at 222 West Ave., Ste. 120.
- Sugarwolf opened May 5 at 401 W. Fourth St., Ste. 120, serving breakfast, lunch, and drinks. It comes from Guy + Larry Restaurants and local operator Staton Jobe. Conor Smith leads the bakery program.
Austin Sports Club took longer than planned. An April preview expected it to open in spring 2026, and it opened in September. Even so, its partners committed to East Third while the convention center was a hole in the ground and steel hadn't started going up. A nightly dinner service on that block has to work on Tuesdays without conference badges walking past.
The support that ended and the support still running
The Downtown Austin Alliance and the Austin Convention Center ran a Patron Parking Pilot that gave two hours of free validated parking to customers of businesses affected by the construction, including Cedar Door, Foxy's, and Moonshine. It ran from Feb. 23 to Aug. 30 and is now over. Anyone who validated a ticket at one of those places this summer will pay for parking now.
The Alliance's Construction Impact Relief Grant is still open. It offers reimbursable aid, technical help, marketing, signage, and temporary installations to local storefront businesses on construction corridors or haul routes inside the Downtown Public Improvement District. The Alliance says the first year awarded $80,000 to eight local businesses. The same report describes a December 2025 Uber pilot that paid half the fare for trips into or out of downtown and supported almost 5,000 rides by nearly 2,000 users.
Put side by side, the programs show the strategy. Each one targeted the cost of getting a local customer through the door, because visitors weren't going to fill the gap before 2029.
The calendar from here
The sources give the timeline in pieces. Here it is in order:
- April 2025: The convention center closes and construction begins.
- October 2025: Schematic design is completed.
- Spring 2026: Design development is completed. Construction documents are now nearly finished.
- September 2026: Vertical steel installation begins.
- Fall 2026: Excavation wraps up. Foundation pours continue through the end of the year.
- Late 2028: Visit Austin's expected completion. The city's convention center page also lists completion in 2028.
- Early 2029: Opening, timed by Visit Austin for the spring 2029 festival season. The project team said in August that it remained on track.
The 2028 and 2029 dates mark two different steps. The building is finished first, and events return after that. Bookings for the new building are already in place. In February, Noonan said 23 convention hosts had signed contracts, 11 more were pending, and 74 had expressed interest. He added that about 40% of that business would not have fit in the old building. The new center will have 620,000 square feet of rentable space, almost double the old one.
That leaves about two more years of weeknights, give or take a season, with steel rising and trucks coming up Trinity, before conference crowds come back to Brazos, Red River, and East Third at a larger scale than before. Until then, the open tables on Sunday through Wednesday at Cedar Door, Foxy's, Moonshine, and the new places on Lavaca and Third are there for people who live within walking distance.
If you live downtown and want to know how these construction years are affecting the value of your building and your block, Leslie Gossett is following the rebuild street by street and is glad to talk it through. Let's connect.
