Bar
Elephant Room
Basement jazz club named for ice-age mastodon bones unearthed next door in nineteen eighty-five.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Elephant Room in Austin follows a nineteen-step stairway down into a basement jazz club under the Swift Building on Congress Avenue, and the unlikely nineteen eighty-five discovery that gave the room its name. It traces the Belgian bartender and the lawyer who opened a bar here in nineteen ninety-one, and the jazz booker who talked them into giving it a soundtrack. Along the way you will hear about a house rule its owner kept about himself. Best heard standing at the foot of the stairs, under the low brick ceiling.
This audio guide was created using AI.