"We've paid up to $10,000 a month to heat a pool."
That figure reflects what it costs to run gas heaters at a facility that isn't supposed to need them. He's talking about Big Stacy Pool, the six-lane, 33-yard pool tucked into Big Stacy Park at 700 East Live Oak Street, the one every longtime Travis Heights resident has a January story about. You've probably heard the pitch before you ever set foot in the water: it's the pool that stays warm all winter because it's fed by a well, not a boiler. The well keeping the water warm is old, fragile, and on a timeline nobody controls.
What actually keeps the water warm
Big Stacy draws its heat from a geothermal well drilled deep into the earth when the pool was built in the 1930s with WPA funding under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Water comes out of that well at 90 to 100 degrees, then mixes with city water before it reaches swimmers, which is why the pool sits at a comfortable temperature rather than a bathtub one. It's the same basic idea as Barton Springs, run in reverse: instead of a spring keeping water cool year-round, this one keeps it warm. About 50 people show up to swim on a typical winter day specifically because of that.
The mechanism is invisible unless you go looking for it. Behind the pool there's a door that looks like it leads to a maintenance closet. It actually opens onto the wellhead itself, the piece of infrastructure that has quietly defined what "going to Stacy" means in this neighborhood for close to ninety years.
The well and its backup system
The well is failing. Slutes told KUT that when the city's aquatic division and well specialists tried to clean it using high-frequency sound several years ago, they discovered the casing had grown so fragile that cleaning risked collapsing the entire well. The advice from well experts since then has been blunt: leave it alone. Repairs aren't currently an option. A replacement well is something the city could pursue, but nothing on that front has been announced.
So the city built a Plan B. Gas heaters are now plumbed into the system as backup, tested every year, ready to switch on the moment the well gives out. They aren't the pool's primary heat source, which means Big Stacy is still running on borrowed geothermal time. When those heaters do turn on for good, the pool won't close, but that won't guarantee the water stays warm forever. It will just stop being the thing people in Travis Heights have always described it as: a pool warmed by free heat pulled straight out of the ground, rather than by its gas-heater backup.
That asterisk is coming. Nobody at the city has put a date on it. Infrastructure like this doesn't usually announce its ending in advance. It just eventually needs the switch flipped, and the switch is already installed.
What this looks like if you're actually going
None of this changes anything about visiting Big Stacy this year. A few practical notes worth knowing if you haven't been recently:
- Admission is still free, and the pool is open year-round, with closures on Mondays, when the outside temperature drops below freezing, and for annual spring cleaning.
- Depths range from 3.5 feet to just over 9 feet, so it works for both lap swimmers and people who just want to float.
- The annual spring-cleaning closure fell May 9 through May 17 in 2026. If you're planning a winter routine around it, that closure window is worth marking on next year's calendar too, since it tends to recur annually around the same stretch.
Sarah Marshall, the historic preservation program coordinator for Austin Parks and Recreation, has pointed out that Travis Heights and the adjacent Fairview Park are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and that the pool, its bathhouses, and its seawall all contribute to that historic designation. The well isn't a side detail to that story. It's arguably the reason the pool still functions the way it always has, which is exactly why its condition matters more than a routine maintenance note would suggest.
The rest of the routine around it
Big Stacy sits inside a small cluster of neighborhood life that doesn't show up on a map of restaurant openings or home listings. The park connects directly to the Blunn Creek Greenbelt, where shaded trails run along the creek and give the pool crowd somewhere to walk off a swim without getting in a car. Travis Heights Elementary is less than a mile away, close enough that school pickup and pool visits have overlapped for generations of families here. None of that has changed and none of it is likely to.
What has changed recently is that a new nearby option has opened. At 534 East Oltorf Street, The Greek Bar occupies a building that used to be a Taco Bell. Owners Dimitri Karabinis and Daphne Greer built the space around scratch-made pita, grilled octopus, and a patio that keeps the building's original arches. It's not a story about a neighborhood being discovered. It's a story about one more nearby option.
Why this is worth knowing now
The easy version of this story is "beloved local pool, nice history, go enjoy it." The more useful version is that one of the few genuinely free, functioning pieces of 1930s infrastructure left in Austin is running on a system nobody can repair, with a backup plan that exists specifically because the primary system is expected to fail. That's not a crisis. It's just the kind of fact that changes how you think about something you've probably taken for granted every time you've walked past that fence on East Live Oak Street.
If you live in Travis Heights, this is the sort of detail that's easy to miss because the pool still looks and feels exactly the same as it always has. The water's the same temperature. The lifeguards are still there. The only thing that's different is what you now know is happening underneath it.
This is also, in a smaller way, what it means to actually know a neighborhood instead of just living adjacent to it. The trails, the schools, the pool schedules, the restaurant that took over the old Taco Bell shell: these are the details that make a place specific rather than interchangeable, and they're the same details we track closely at Sage Space RE because they shape what it actually feels like to live somewhere, long after the closing documents are signed. If you want a closer look at what's happening in Travis Heights or any of the other South Austin and Hill Country neighborhoods we work in, you can schedule a neighborhood consultation any time.
