The Door Behind Big Stacy Pool Leads to the Reason It Never Gets Cold

Walk past the bathhouses at Big Stacy Pool on any January morning and you'll see something that looks like a maintenance shed, tucked behind the pool deck where most swimmers never look. Open it and there's no equipment room, no pump station in the way you'd expect. There's a door that leads to what appears to be a hole in the ground. That hole is a well, drilled deep enough to pull water that comes out of the earth somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees, and it is the entire reason Travis Heights has a public pool that never closes for cold weather while every other outdoor pool in the city shuts down for the season.

Most residents know Big Stacy is warm. Fewer know the warmth is running on borrowed time, or that the pool's name, the greenbelt that connects it to Little Stacy Park, and the very shape of the neighborhood around it all trace back to one man who was, of all things, a real estate agent.

A Name Older Than the Pool

The "Stacy" in Big Stacy and Little Stacy comes from General William Stacy, a Spanish-American War veteran and real estate agent who helped found Travis Heights in 1912. Stacy didn't just plat streets and sell lots. He donated the land along Blunn Creek that became the neighborhood's public parks, a decision that shaped how Travis Heights would feel for the next century more than any single house he ever sold.

Big Stacy Pool opened in 1937, built with New Deal money under the WPA and named "Big" specifically to distinguish it from the nearby Little Stacy wading pool, which the city had purchased from the Stacy Realty Company eight years earlier for $17,150. That's not a typo. An entire 6.73-acre park, land that now anchors one of Austin's most recognizable historic districts, cost less than a modest down payment would today.

The pool's history isn't just architectural trivia. Joan Means Khabele was one of the first Black women to swim at Big Stacy in protest of segregation, a fact documented by Austin's NPR affiliate as part of the pool's civil rights record. The pool, its bathhouses, and the surrounding greenbelt are also named contributors to the Travis Heights-Fairview Park Historic District, the designation neighborhood residents spent sixteen years pursuing before it reached the National Register of Historic Places. This is a pool with a paper trail, not just a reputation.

The Well That Makes Big Stacy, Big Stacy

Here's the part most residents skip past: Big Stacy isn't heated by a boiler or a solar system. It's geothermal, in the same category as Barton Springs but running the opposite direction on the thermometer. Where Barton Springs holds steady near 70 degrees year-round, Big Stacy's well delivers water in the 90s and 100s, which mixes with city water and settles into a pool temperature around 80 degrees, comfortable enough for a January lap swim in a T-shirt-weather city that otherwise closes its outdoor pools by October.

Paul Slutes, who manages the City of Austin's Aquatic Division, has described the well as the kind of infrastructure that quietly outlasts the people who built it, right up until it doesn't. The well's casing has become fragile enough that a routine cleaning attempt years ago was called off when experts realized the process risked collapsing it entirely. There is no plan to repair it. The only plan is to leave it alone and hope it keeps working.

That's not a small hope. Beverly Deutsch, a longtime Big Stacy swimmer, has used the pool's warm water for physical therapy since a 2021 stroke left her without the use of her right side and, for a time, her ability to speak. For her and swimmers like her, the well isn't ambiance. It's the reason the pool works as a year-round recovery tool instead of a seasonal amenity that shuts down exactly when cold weather makes warm water most useful.

A Contingency Plan Nobody Notices

The city has already built the backup. Gas heaters are plumbed into the system and tested annually, sitting in reserve in case the well fails outright. They have never been switched on for real operation, which means every swimmer at Big Stacy today is still floating in water heated the same way it was in 1937.

If that changes, the cost is not abstract. Slutes has put the number at up to $10,000 a month to heat a pool of that size by gas instead of relying on the well, a bill the city would absorb to keep Big Stacy open and warm on a schedule residents have never had to think about. The pool would stay open. It would stay warm. But it would stop being naturally heated, and the thing that makes Big Stacy different from every heated pool in every other city would quietly become a technicality.

This is the detail that separates Big Stacy from a nice neighborhood amenity: its most defining feature is currently being sustained by a piece of century-old infrastructure that everyone agrees is failing, with a contingency plan that has never had to be used. Nobody is telling residents this is urgent. Nobody thinks the well will fail next month. But it's not permanent, and most people who swim laps there three times a week have no idea the ground beneath them is the actual mechanism keeping the water warm.

The Path That Connects the Story

The Blunn Creek Greenbelt is the physical thread tying Big Stacy to its smaller sibling, a shaded, roughly one-mile route that runs from Little Stacy Park south to Big Stacy Park along the creek. It's a working trail, not a scenic overlook. Residents use it to walk dogs, jog before work, and cut between the two parks without touching a car. Along the way there are numbered interpretive markers identifying trees, a bridge with mosaic tilework that regulars have nicknamed for its resemblance to Frank Lloyd Wright's style, and one of Austin's moon towers standing over a stretch of the path.

None of this is manicured. The creek runs low some seasons and higher after rain, and the trail surface shifts between paved concrete and crushed granite depending on where you are. That's part of what makes it feel like a neighborhood path instead of a destination trail. It was never built for tourists. It was built to connect two city parks that happen to share a donor's name, and it still does exactly that.

Free, But Not Without a Bill

Big Stacy Pool is free to enter, closed only on Mondays and during rare hard freezes. This past May, it closed for its usual stretch of annual spring cleaning and maintenance, a routine that returns every year and briefly sends regulars to Deep Eddy or Barton Springs while the pool is drained and serviced. That kind of predictable closure is easy to plan around once you know it's coming. The well's long-term health is a different kind of maintenance question, one without a calendar attached to it.

The thing worth sitting with is this: a pool with no admission fee, run by the city, sitting inside a National Register historic district, is one of the more quietly significant pieces of infrastructure in Travis Heights, and its central feature depends on a hole in the ground that nobody has a plan to fix. That's not a reason to worry every time you walk in for a swim. It's a reason to notice what you have while the water is still coming from where it's always come from.

Travis Heights residents already know their neighborhood has more history under its feet than most. The well behind Big Stacy Pool is one more piece of it, doing its job in the dark, mostly unnoticed, until someone opens the door.

If you're curious about what else shapes daily life and long-term value in Travis Heights, from its historic district status to the way its parks connect, Judith Bundschuh has spent more than two decades working in Austin neighborhoods like this one. Let's Connect.