A Sixth Street Sesquicentennial

Old Steamboat building, constructed by a future mayor with a murderous past, turns 150

Photo Todd V. Wolfson

As former Sixth Street rock club Steamboat is being feted at SXSW with a free concert marking 25 years since its closing, let’s also acknowledge the 150th anniversary of its former building at 403 E. 6th Street. The proper name “Steamboat 1874” refers to the year the Victorian building was constructed, along with others on that block. Toad Hall, in the former Cotton Exchange building at 401 E. 6th, would lead the conversion to live music venues in the early ‘70s. Steamboat opened in ‘78.

More than a hundred years earlier, that E. 400 block of Pecan (Sixth) Street was home to the first documented music venue in Austin. Buaas Garden, mostly open-air, with a smallish indoor bar, opened in 1860, six years before Scholz’s. Owned by John L. Buaas, the property was divided into six lots in 1874, three of which were purchased by lumberman Joseph Nalle. He built three storefronts, at a cost of $5,000 each, at 401, 403 and 405 E. Sixth. One of the earliest tenants at 403 was a furniture store called “Costley’s.”

Carl Besserer’s band. He’s the one behind the bass drum holding a child. Photo courtesy Texas Music Museum.

Buaas was the stepfather (since age two) of Carl William Besserer, who would go on to be Austin’s John Phillip Sousa. Buaas sent him to Germany as a teenager to be trained by future New York Philharmonic leader Leopold Damrosch. Back in Austin, Besserer ran a musical instrument store owned by his stepfather, and gave lessons.

In 1873, he married the daughter of August Scholz (who called his place “Garden,” not “Garten”). After Scholz died in 1891, the Besserers inherited Scholz’s, but sold it after a few years so Carl could dedicate himself to music. The Austin Saengerrunde has owned Scholz’s since 1908. It’s one of the longest-operating businesses in the state, and the oldest beer garden in the country.

Photo courtesy Austin History Center

If you needed something done, musically in Austin, Besserer was your man. From 1895 until the boat’s destruction in the 1900 flood, Besseser led the orchestra of the Ben Hur paddle wheel riverboat on its excursions on Lake Austin when it was called Lake McDonald. In 1906, he put together, on short notice, a string quartet to back French actress Sarah Bernhardt at Hancock Opera House (120 W. Sixth St.), on a performance of Camille the Statesman called “decidedly the greatest ever seen in Austin.” Playing cello was Carl T. Widen, the son of Swedish immigrants, who would co-found the Austin Symphony in 1911.

Joseph Nalle, who built the future home of Steamboat in 1874, would be elected to the Austin City Council in 1878. That first year he went up against fellow councilman Thomas J. Markley, who opposed Nalle’s support of the city building a butcher market on Sixth Street. The pair had to be separated at a contentious meeting at the Daily Democratic Statesman, and the bad blood spilled out to the street. Standing outside the Palace Saloon on Congress Avenue, Markley said something threatening to Nalle, who pulled out a knife and stabbed his rival two times in the heart. At just 119 lbs to Markley’s 162, Nalle claimed self defense at his Jan. 1880 trial for murder- and won.

Nalle sold the “Buaas Block” to photographer George Schuwirth in 1883. In 1887, this former councilman (then called alderman) who stabbed another councilman to death- “the fatal termination of his difficulties with Mr. Markley,” as the Statesman put it- was elected Mayor of Austin. After just one term, Nalle was defeated by John McDonald.