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Austin Shopping

Photo Credit: Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau

The best way to examine the depths of any city’s character is to go shopping. You can tell a lot about an area by the goods they have to offer. And when it comes to items intellectual, musical, or ingestible, Austin is a match for cities twice its size.

Austin is seeing a revitalization of its urban retail scene. Downtown, specialty shops and art galleries are filtering back to the renovated 19th-century buildings along Sixth Street and Congress Avenue. Below Town Lake, South Congress Avenue, from Riverside south to Annie Street, is especially trendy, with art galleries and boutiques joining its rows of secondhand clothing stores. Other rich shopping niches include the West End on Sixth Street west of Lamar and, nearby, north of 12th Street and West Lynn. In the vicinity of Central Market, between West 35th and 40th streets and Lamar and Mo-Pac, such small shopping centers as 26 Doors and Jefferson Square are similarly charming. Many stores on the Drag — the stretch of Guadalupe Street between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and 26th Street, across from the University of Texas campus — are student oriented, but a wide range of clothing, gifts, toys, and, of course, books can also be found here.

Still, much of Austin's shopping has moved out to the malls. The newest growth area is in the northwest, where three upscale shopping centers, The Arboretum, The Arboretum Market, and The Gateway complex (consisting of the Gateway Courtyard, the Gateway Market, and Gateway Square), have earned the area the nickname “South Dallas.” Bargain hunters go a little farther out of the way to the huge collections of factory outlet stores in San Marcos and New Braunfels.

Arboretum
Highland Mall
Barton Creek Square
Lakeline Mall
Austin Antique Mall
El Taller Gallery
Gallery at Shoal Creek
Tesoros Trading Co
Central Market
Clarksville Pottery & Galleries
Waterloo Records and Video
Grape Vine Market
Capitol Saddlery
Whole Foods