The Plaza

The Plaza in Downtown Round Rock

After riding around on the scooter Sunday, Max and I decided to take a walk around downtown Round Rock. Round Rock dates back to 1851. What I call "downtown" is actually "New Town". Originally, Round Rock was about a half-mile away. When the railroad came in 1876, the town moved closer to the tracks. After that, the original location became known as "Old Town", and the new location was called, appropriately enough, "New Town".  Most of the buildings are single story and were built of limestone in the late 1800's. Main Avenue is only slightly over two blocks.Max and I strolled the length of the street enjoying our Sunday afternoon.

There is a lot of history along this street and most of the buildings have a plaque posted that tells when the building was built and what businesses have been located there.  Today almost half of the businesses are bars or restaurants.  There is also a tattoo parlor and a few professional offices.
The city offices and library are at one end of the town.  These were probably build sometime in the 60's, and although they are also of limestone, the craftsmanship is strikingly different from the older buildings. There is also a modernistic plaza, which, though nice enough, is completely out of sync with the architecture of the rest of downtown.

The official name of this plaza is "Sharon Prete Memorial Plaza". I tend to call it "Mussolini Plaza" because the architecture and design resembles the plazas that Beneto Mussolini designed to exemplify the Facist ideal in WWII Italy.  Before they built the plaza, this was a rather nice village green.  They paved over the grass and, in lieu of trees, erected aluminum stanchions (Mussolini was very fond of aluminum!) with suspended fabric screens to provide shade. 

Scattered about the plaza and up and down Main Avenue, the city has installed various sculptures.

The sculptures do not seem to have any relation to Round Rock or Central Texas. Most of them are a bit "unusual". For the most part these are not abstract. They are "representative", but what they represent is anyone guess!  Certainly the old time residents of Round Rock would have been bewildered to see these.  I can easily imagine the cowboys and farmers unlimbering their sidearms to practice their marksmanship on this "art".

I took photos of several of the sculptures

Bird wrapped in armor

Heron(?) dining on a fish

Tortoise standing on it's hind legs 

 The most interesting sculpture is in the median of Main Avenue. At first glance this seems to be trite depiction of three acrobats or contortionists performing.

But, when you look closely at the sculpture, you realize that every part of the sculpture contains faces - or at least parts of faces! The faces are jumbled together so that what is an eye in one face, becomes perhaps a mouth or nose in another face. As you change your angle, the sculpture seems to metamorphose before you. In some ways a very disturbing work, yet also quite interesting!

Closeup of several faces on one of the legs

Seems to be a face with other faces in it's mouth!