The Locals

Urban Cowboys
Four Austin residents who help give the city its spice  by John Morthland

Evan Smith
Media Man
This New Yorker arrived in 1992 as a Texas Monthly editor, ascending to editor in chief in 2000 and growing omnipresent around town: on the boards of the Austin Film Society, the Blanton Museum of Art, and PBS affiliate KLRU (where he hosts an interview program), emceeing or speaking at countless events. Smith continued the magazine’s award-winning ways while altering its focus to attract more of Texas’s mushrooming nonnative population, before resigning recently to head up the new online political venture Texas Tribune. “The magazine got me to Texas,” he explains, “but Austin kept me here; it’s an extraordinary place, especially for a city its size.”

Eddie Wilson
Restaurateur
Wilson is an Austin history buff (“This is a great place for the practice of oral history,” he says, laughing) who makes his own as often as possible. After midwifing the seventies “cosmic cowboy” scene symbolized by Willie Nelson, Wilson closed his storied Armadillo World Headquarters venue on New Year’s Eve 1980. He relaunched a local institution as Threadgill’s Home Cookin’ the next year, and he proceeded to do for chicken-fried steak and veggies what he had done for redneck-hippie détente. He later opened another Threadgill’s bordering on the original ’Dillo site; both serve as repositories for Austin music memorabilia.

Ruben Ramos
Singer
Austin’s top Tejano-music star for four decades, Ramos is nicknamed El Gato Negro (the Black Cat) after his 1980s hit about an outlaw hipster, but the phrase also describes this onetime runway model’s slinky stage presence. He peppers his tight revue-style show with English-language R & B oldies and is one of the rare Tejano stars to work with big-name Anglos like the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Music is universal; we opened for Guns N’ Roses once in Denmark and people liked us both,” Ramos recalls. If any single singer is the Voice of Austin, he’s it.

Liz Lambert
Hotelier/Developer
Lambert was a recovering lawyer nearly a decade ago when she converted a sleazy 1939 motor court on then-seedy South Congress Avenue into the boutique Hotel San José, catering to musicians and arty types and anchoring now-fashionable SoCo. In late 2008, she opened the rock-star-decadent fourteen-room Hotel Saint Cecilia in a renovated 1880s Victorian around the corner. With two Austin coffee and sandwich stands and more inn-crowd projects around Texas, Lambert has become queen of the cutting-edge hospitality business. “These places reflect a love of the outdoors and a love of the music scene,” she says. “People traveling to Austin get that as well as the people in Austin do.”