Sixth Street was called Pecan Street until 1884, when Austin renumbered its downtown grid and the name vanished from the signs. The trees stayed in local memory; the Victorian storefronts stayed in place. Roughly 110 of those buildings, most raised between 1875 and 1930, were entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 as the Sixth Street Historic District. Limestone and brick facades, cast-iron columns, transom windows: the architecture of a frontier commercial street that was never demolished. Today an Austin St Patty's Bar Crawl tour threads the same nine-block corridor, past the Driskill Hotel, which opened at Sixth and Brazos in 1886. Austin claimed the title Live Music Capital of the World in 1991, and Sixth Street supplied much of the evidence. Esther's Follies has staged political satire behind a plate-glass window since 1977. Maggie Mae's has held its corner since 1978. Pete's Dueling Piano Bar built a room where two grand pianos answer each other across a crowd. The blocks east of Congress Avenue carry the density: dozens of licensed rooms within a short walk, stacked above and beside one another, many in buildings that once held hardware stores, saloons and Chinese laundries. The March tradition arrived later. Irish pubs reached downtown Austin in the 1990s and early 2000s, and with them the habit of turning a single saint's day into an afternoon-long procession between bars. Locals call the strip Dirty Sixth, affectionately, and the organised Sixth Street pub crawl grew out of that shorthand: one wristband, a fixed route, a guide who knows which doors open first. Green dye in the pint glasses is the costume. The real subject is the street itself, which closes to cars for events and becomes, briefly, a pedestrian room nine blocks long. Nothing about this is incidental to Austin's economy. The Sixth Street Historic District draws visitors who arrive for the music and stay for the architecture, and the 25 USD event access charged per person for Austin St Patty's Bar Crawl tours buys entry to a route rather than a building. Preservation arguments have run alongside the party for fifty years: whether to restore the upper storeys, whether to widen the sidewalks, whether neon belongs on a National Register facade. The answers keep changing. What persists is the fabric — narrow lots, nineteenth-century party walls, stairways that lead to rooms with original pressed-tin ceilings — and the fact that a crowd has gathered on these blocks, in one form or another, since the cattle trade. Among Austin landmarks, few carry their history so lightly, or so loudly.