MAP
SEARCH
Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Address
1308 E. 4th St, Austin, TX 78702
GPS
30.2621322, -97.7294049
Telephone
Monday
–
Tuesday
–
Wednesday
–
Thursday
–
Friday
–
Saturday
–
Sunday
–
No standing hours — door times are event-specific. Outdoor shows end by 10pm Fri/Sat, 8pm Sun–Thu; no re-entry.
SEE MORE IN:
Rapper Tyler, the Creator got arrested here in 2014. The building itself dates to 1871 — a century and a half of East Austin history packed into one backyard stage.
The Scoot Inn began as a grocery and mercantile store built by Sam and Nancy Wilson at 4th and Navasota Streets in 1871, serving travelers passing through Masontown, a historically African-American community in East Austin along the route of the Houston and Texas Central Railway. Its current facade reportedly dates to 1889, and it holds one of the longest-running liquor licenses in the city’s history. During Prohibition the building earned a reputation for bootlegging before Aubrey “Scoot” Ivy and a partner known as Red formally converted it into a saloon in 1940, renaming it Red’s Scoot Inn after Ivy himself.
Fire, Rebuild, and a New Stage
Ivy and Red both died in 1980, and the bar changed hands more than once over the following decades; a fire damaged the building sometime in the 1980s or ’90s before it was rebuilt in 1997. New ownership took over in December 2006 and, for the first time, began actively booking touring bands rather than running the Scoot Inn strictly as a neighborhood dive. A 2016 renovation added a speakeasy-style indoor room called Ivy’s Room, honoring the saloon’s Prohibition-era namesake.
East Austin’s Backyard Stage
Today the Scoot Inn’s signature feature is its large outdoor backyard patio and stage — beer-garden seating for standing and dancing crowds paired with a smaller dive-bar indoor room — with a full-venue rental capacity cited at up to 800 guests. It’s a regular South by Southwest showcase venue that has hosted acts from Austin indie band Wild Child to shock-rock veterans GWAR, and it made national entertainment news in 2014 when Tyler, the Creator was arrested there. Its East Austin roadhouse lineage, tied to a historically Black, working-class railroad neighborhood, gives the Historic Scoot Inn a distinct place in the city’s music history — a very different story from Red River clubs like Emo’s, but no less central to how Austin became the Live Music Capital of the World.
