Two Rainey Street Bars Closed Permanently Over the Weekend

Two Rainey bars closed permanently over the weekend in downtown Austin. The Container Bar at 90 Rainey Street and Bungalow at 92 Rainey Street held their last days of service on Sunday, March 27.

The Rainey addresses will become the future home of a new 55-story high-rise condo building, the Modern, as reported by Towers. And while this means that Container Bar will eventually be demolished, owner Bridget Dunlap will run a bar in the basement of the future development, as reported by Austin Business Journal. The building will also include some sort of exclusive residents-only hospitality business. It’s all scheduled to open in 2024.

Per its name, the Container Bar was made up of several shipping containers. Dunlap announced the bar in 2011, and it took three years to open due to many delays. Her other Rainey bars — Lustre Pearl (which is actually the second iteration of the original bar that had been on Rainey Street which actually physically relocated to East Austin) and the recently renovated and expanded Clive Bar — remain open.

Bungalow owner Jason Steward opened the bar in 2012. The bar wasn’t eligible for landmark status because it had changed its interior too much.

Nearby, another bungalow bar at 84 Rainey Street, House Party, will be physically relocated to make way for another high-rise residential building, as reported by Community Impact. It’ll be moved right behind two-doors-down bungalow bar Reina.

Further down the street, two other bungalow bars, Craft Pride and Javelina, closed in late 2021, October and December respectively. Craft co-owner Brandy Wolf still plans on reopening the bar in a new to-be-announced location. That corner is supposed to give way to yet-another residential development, River Street Residences.

Rainey’s last remaining residential home was sold to Austin bar owner Bob Woody in the summer of 2019. He’s turning the space into — you’ve guessed it — a bar.

And then, in non-residential-Rainey-Street-development news, bar hospitality group Pouring With Heart is opening a brewery in the former space of Indian restaurant G’Raj Mahal sometime this summer.

Bungalow/Facebook

• The Container Bar [Instagram]
• Bungalow [Instagram]
• Meet the Modern Austin Condo Tower, Headed for the Modern Rainey District [Tower]
• All Coverage of the Container Bar [EATX]
• All Coverage of Bungalow [EATX]