On a cold January morning, steam lifts off the water at Big Stacy Pool while frost sits on the grass six feet away. Regulars know not to ask why. The water comes out of the ground warm, has for generations, and that's simply how Big Stacy works. What most of them don't know is that the thing making it work is quietly falling apart, and the city has spent years preparing for the day it stops.
Big Stacy sits inside Travis Heights, on East Live Oak Street, a six-lane, 33-yard pool that opened in 1937 with New Deal money from the Works Progress Administration. The city added "Big" to the name to distinguish it from Little Stacy, the shallower wading pool next door built for younger kids. Both take their name from Gen. William Stacy, a Spanish-American War veteran and the real estate developer who platted Travis Heights itself. Nearly ninety years later, the pool he's remembered for is still open nearly every day, closed only on Mondays and on the rare morning when the air drops below freezing.
The Trick Nobody Questions
The reason Big Stacy stays open through winter, when nearly every other outdoor pool in Austin shuts down, is a well. A pump system draws water from deep underground, where it emerges at somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees before mixing with city water and settling into the pleasant, swimmable range regulars associate with the place. It is the same geological logic that keeps Barton Springs a constant 70 degrees, just inverted. Cold spring, warm well, same idea underneath.
Regulars treat this as a fixed feature of the neighborhood, the same way they treat the limestone bluffs or the live oaks. It isn't. It's a piece of infrastructure with a lifespan, and Austin Parks and Recreation has known for years that the lifespan is running out.
A Well With a Failing Casing
City aquatics staff told KUT that engineers attempted to clean the well using high-frequency sound, a standard technique for wells that have accumulated mineral buildup over decades. What they found instead was a casing too fragile to touch. Cleaning it risked collapsing the entire structure, cutting off the warm water for good with no clear path to repair. Drilling a replacement well is technically possible, but nobody has committed to doing it.
So the city built a workaround. Gas heaters are now plumbed directly into the pool's system, tested every year, ready to switch on the moment the well gives out. They have never been used for a full season. If they are, the bill changes dramatically. "We've paid up to $10,000 a month to heat a pool," one Austin Parks staffer told KUT, describing what the backup system would cost to run through a Texas winter.
That's the trade the city is quietly managing. Right now, Travis Heights gets a warm pool for the price of maintenance. If the well fails, it gets the same warm pool for a five-figure monthly gas bill, funded the way most municipal pool budgets are funded, which is to say inconsistently and under competition from every other line item in the parks department.
| Natural well heating, today | Backup gas heaters, if activated | |
|---|---|---|
| Heat source | Geothermal well water pumped from underground | City gas burners plumbed into the filtration system |
| Monthly cost | Minimal, powered by the well itself | Up to $10,000 in gas, per Austin Parks staff |
| Current status | Weakening, casing too fragile to service | Installed, tested annually, never run for a full season |
| What swimmers notice | Water arrives warm from the ground, no visible change | Same target temperature, dependent on budget and fuel |
Why the City Is Moving Carefully
Part of the caution comes from the fact that this isn't just a pool. Travis Heights and neighboring Fairview Park are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places as historic districts, and Sarah Marshall, the program coordinator for historic preservation at Austin Parks and Recreation, has said the pool, its bathhouses, and the surrounding seawall are contributing structures to that designation. Losing the natural heating wouldn't just change a resident's morning swim. It would change the character of a facility the federal government has already agreed is historically significant.
That's likely why the city hasn't drilled a new well or forced a resolution. A pool this old, this documented, and this tied to its original 1930s form isn't something anyone wants to rebuild around a mechanical fix if there's any way to avoid it.
What Regulars Have Actually Seen
For now, the pool is behaving normally. Austin Parks closed Big Stacy for its usual spring maintenance window this past May, from the 9th through the 17th, the same brief closure it takes most years before reopening for the season. Roughly 50 people a day still show up through the coldest months, according to reporting on the pool's winter usage, enough that longtime swimmers like Beverly Deutsch, who has used Big Stacy's warm water for physical therapy since a 2021 stroke, still treat it as a daily fixture rather than a seasonal one.
Nothing about a visit this fall or winter will look different. The water will be warm, the pool will be open six days a week, and the backup heaters will sit untested for another season. But the mechanism underneath that consistency is older and more fragile than the calm surface suggests, and anyone who has made Big Stacy part of their routine is, whether they know it or not, swimming on borrowed geology.
The Rest of the Ritual Around It
Big Stacy doesn't sit in isolation. It anchors the northern edge of Stacy Park, which connects directly to the Blunn Creek Greenbelt, a shaded, winding trail that's become one of the most reliable dog-walking loops in South Austin. Little Stacy Park sits just south, with its own playground and tennis courts, still doing the job it was built for when the city decided the wading pool needed its own name separate from its bigger, warmer neighbor.
A short walk west puts you on South Congress Avenue, where the Saturday farmers market has become as much a fixture of the weekly rhythm as the pool itself. The corridor's restaurant lineup keeps shifting at the edges even as its anchors stay put, Home Slice Pizza and Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar among them, with Jo's Coffee still drawing a line for its "I Love You So Much" mural and Guero's Taco Bar still running live music in its Oak Garden. Earlier this year, The Greek Bar opened in Travis Heights, adding spanakopita and dolmades to a stretch of Austin that rarely goes more than a few months without a new opening worth walking to.
On the first Thursday of every month, South Congress Hotel keeps a tradition alive that predates the hotel itself, back to when businesses along the avenue stayed open late and turned the street into something closer to a block party. First Thursdays now brings live music, DJs, and pop-up activations to the hotel's spaces, one more recurring date on a calendar that Travis Heights residents build their months around without necessarily naming it a tradition.
None of these rituals require a warm pool to survive. But they share something with Big Stacy that's easy to miss when you're only paying attention to the parts that are working. A neighborhood's daily rhythm rests on infrastructure and habits that feel permanent because they've never visibly changed, right up until the year they do. Big Stacy's well has been running since long before anyone currently swimming in it was born. Nobody knows exactly how much longer it has. For this season at least, the water is still warm, the pool is still open six days a week, and the backup plan is still just a backup.
If you're the kind of Travis Heights resident who's already thinking about what a change at Big Stacy, or in the neighborhood more broadly, might mean for your own home down the line, Robin Banister has spent more than two decades watching how these small, unglamorous details shape the way people actually live in this pocket of Austin. A closer look at the neighborhood's homes and streets is available on the Travis Heights guide, and a private consultation is always open for anyone ready to talk specifics.
