What do you do about an oft-flooding creek that happens to cut a serpentine line through the middle of downtown" If you?re the City of Austin, you build a tunnel. If you?re a private-public partnership between the City of Austin and a nonprofit conservancy dedicated to revitalizing that creek, you launch the most ambitious parks project the city has ever seen. Historically, Waller Creek has been a nuisance for the city, flooding frequently and making a huge swath of downtown Austin largely untenable for developers and small businesses alike. "The creek was actually a sort of ? dumping ground," says Melba Whatley, president of Waller Creek Conservancy?s board of directors. "Think of it that way: All the utilities that didn?t have anywhere to end, ended in the creek. Dead bodies were in the creek, brothels were along the creek. It was just, let?s throw them over there in that creek." Then-Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson called the "shanties" surrounding Waller Creek "hotbeds of crime" in 1938, and a fight over bulldozing parts of the creek to make way for stadium expansions at the University of Texas prompted the Waller Creek Riot in 1969. (UT expanded the stadium anyway.) It?s been more than a sore subject for Austinites; it?s been a hazard to human life, too. Dozens of people drowned in Waller Creek and elsewhere throughout the city during two historic floods in 1915 and 1981. The latter was called the Memorial Day Flood; the creek ...