Red River: Street on the Edge

Before Stubb's, the Mohawk, and Elysium, there was the One Knite, El Charro and Snoopers Paradise

El Charro occupied 912 Red River for almost 30 years. It was one of Monroe Lopez’s “Big 3,” Mexican restaurants, including El Matamoros and El Toro (where Clay Pit is today).

Owner James Moody, a former pharmaceutical salesman, built the amphitheater at 912 Red River, which regularly hosts nationally-known acts.

The Mohawk has been strong on the Red River music scene since opening on Sept. 15, 2006 with Ghostland Observatory, but the building at 912 Red River had quite a pre-’Hawk history.

Built in the ‘20s to house an architectural firm, it was popular Mexican restaurant El Charro from 1937-1966. After a couple years as a boarding house, 912 became the home of the Night Train restaurant, open until midnight from 1968-1971. It was somehow affiliated to NFL Hall-of-Famer Dick “Night Train” Lane, Austin’s greatest-ever athlete.

After Night Train, it was briefly Bayou Gems, a Cajun restaurant, and then it became Nick Kralj’s private club for legislators and lobbyists called Quorum Club. Former UT regent chairman Frank Erwin, who became a lobbyist for UT in 1975, racked up such expenses picking up checks at the Quorum, money had to be raised to cover the bill without using university funds.

John Joseph’s family still owns 912 Red River, home of the Mohawk.

The most notorious tenant at 912 was the Caucus Club, also private in the beginning (1977) because they had high stakes poker in the back room. Building owner John Joseph was a convicted gambler, and the Caucus was investigated after the 1979 suicide of Triumph Motors owner Roy Burton, Jr., who defaulted on bank loans totaling $140,000 to cover gambling debts. The club came back with “new owner” Donald Sconci, Joseph’s nephew.

The third iteration of the Caucus Club came in the ‘90s, during the martini/cigar bar craze, when new owner Daniel Foreman went after Cedar Street Courtyard, which was selling more booze than even the “gentlemen’s” clubs. In that era, former roots musicians started playing swing music and jump blues in retro bands like Lucky Strikes and the Recliners because that’s where the money was. Even shock-rocker Dino Lee, the “King of White Trash,” became saloon crooner Mr. Fabulous, opening the swanky Oceans 11 club on Red River.

The building at 912 was home for several short-lived clubs: Legends sports bar, Auntie’s Mame’s gay bar, Le Privilege French disco (with Hot Freaks upstairs) and the Velvet Spade, James Moody’s hangout, which he cashed in his 401K to buy.

While Rio Rojo currently has some stability with the Mohawk and Stubb’s anchoring the strip like Nordstrom and Macy’s, those blocks went through some serious changes in the 20th century. The 1915 Waller Creek Flood washed away rows of houses, with a death toll of 13, but the Red River neighborhood was even more physically affected by acts of man. Early ‘70s wrecking balls wiped away everything from 10th St. to 19th St. (MLK today) as part of the Brackenridge Urban Renewal Project. Seeing how many of the displaced businesses were African-American-owned, detractors termed the project “urban removal.” It would take years for Red River to bounce back, but it always does.

Red River Street was at the eastern edge of Austin when the street plan was laid out in 1839, and became a main north-south thoroughfare because it was the only street east of Congress Avenue that wasn’t uphill. Red River became home to automobile businesses like Raven’s Garage (later Emo’s), Crenshaw Garage (later Beerland), and McPherson’s Used Cars (Cheer Up Charlies), from the 1920s and ‘30s. Before that, 705 Red River (Elysium) was a mule barn for the Army during WWI.

The former home of the 11th Door, where Janis Joplin returned to performing in ‘66, was built by a former slave in 1871.

Manager Allen Damron. Photo Bob Simmons.

The diverse neighborhood was originally nicknamed Germantown after the colony of immigrants who settled around 10th and Red River in the mid-to-late 1800s, with German Free School the community’s cornerstone. Aloes Wulz Grocery was located at 1101 Red River, the future home of the 11th Door folk club and the Austin Symphony offices. Older than the Capitol and the University of Texas, that building dates to 1871, when former slave Jeremiah Hamilton, in the first group of Black Texas legislators, laid those stones.

For most of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, the Red River corridor was dominated by used furniture stores and junk shops with names like Williams Do-Rite Swap Shop, Fairyland Antiques, Dutch Meyer’s Trading Post, Red River Rats, Hurt’s Hunting Grounds and J.B. Branton. Doug Sahm’s Austin anthem “Groover’s Paradise” was a play on Snooper’s Paradise, a thrift store at 705 Red River. Most of the old junk stores became clubs.

801 Red River, once home to the One Knite, now Stubb’s.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a cook” – C.B. Stubblefield

Before the ARCH shelter was built at 7th and Red River in 2004, there were homeless encampments up and down Waller Creek. One of the biggest was where Stubb’s Amphitheater is now. When BBQ legend Christopher B. “Stubb” Stubblefield first came out to see where his namesake restaurant would go, he dubbed the block “Hell’s Half Acre.” There was a ton of work ahead. 

But Stubb passed away due to heart failure in 1995, the year before Stubb’s opened with the Fugees and other SXSW acts. He was not an owner, having licensed his name and likeness to the restaurant/venue and the BBQ sauce and rub company.

C.B. Stubblefield and Joe Ely, who designed the original Stubb’s label.

The first batches of Stubb’s BBQ sauce were created in the kitchen of Joe and Sharon Ely, as a way to get some income for their daughter’s godfather, whose Stubb’s BBQ joint on the N. I-35 frontage road near 38th St. was closed by the health department in 1989. Funneled into empty whiskey bottles and corked with a jalapeno, the sauce was sold to friends and barbecue afficionados, with Stubb getting all proceeds.

Joe Ely, who designed the primitive-looking Stubb’s logo, gifted a bottle to David Letterman when he appeared on the show, which led to a 1991 appearance by the 6’6” pitmaster. Asked why he became a cook, Stubb said it was because “I was born hongry.”

The Fugees christened Stubb’s outdoor stage at SXSW 1996.

In 2015, the Stubb’s sauces and spices company was sold for $100 million to McCormick and Co. The amphitheater that bears his name was bought by concert giant Live Nation in 2021.

Though Stubb’s lifestyle might’ve changed if he’d been around for the windfall, his mindset most likely wouldn’t have. “I would say it’s the people I love to cook for, the people that surround me,” Stubb told the Statesman when asked what made his cooking special. “There’s a deep separation between cooking for money and fame and cooking to make someone happy.”

Before 801 Red River was Stubb’s, it was the notorious One Knite, “the dive that wouldn’t die,” which eventually did in 1976. The same decade took down New Orleans Club, which replaced dixieland jazz with psychedelic rock in 1966. Though the 13th Floor Elevators first played at the staid Jade Room on San Jacinto in Dec. ‘65, the New Orleans became home base two months later.

The Red River walk has always had a bit of an outlaw swagger. The Cave Club booked Ministry and Skinny Puppy in 1987, when their industrial rock was still underground. In the early ‘90s, the BYOB Cavity Club installed a half-pipe for skateboarders and hosted scum-rocker G.G. Allin. Miss Laura of the Blue Flamingo turned her drag bar into a punk club, with the action spilling out onto the street. That’s where Spoon was discovered by Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records in March ‘94, when the line to get in to see Johnny Cash at Emo’s was too long.

Emo’s, which really turned Red River around in the early ‘90s, gets its own chapter.

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