John Borek describes himself as “your typical, weird South Austin guy.” His house has flying saucers in the yard. He owns a Batmobile, custom golf carts, old soda machines, and a collection of old cars.
The UFOs were his Halloween display for five years running. By the fifth year, he felt they’d gotten stale, so he bought two large dinosaurs instead.
His neighbors were less enthusiastic, particularly about how long the dinosaurs stayed up after Halloween ended. Borek has said the neighborhood association came after him about it.
A unique pivot
He had somewhere to put them. In February 2015, after selling his auto body shop, he’d bought a car wash on South Congress Avenue that had been operating unremarkably for about nine years. He moved the dinosaurs there.
“I didn’t want to just have a typical car wash,” he told local paper, Community Impact. “I thought people would like a few dinosaurs here.”
Jurassic Car Wash now sits at 4809 South Congress, open 24 hours, with four self-service bays and an automatic tunnel. A pterodactyl watches the entrance. A T-rex spits water on your windshield before you go through. More dinosaurs are positioned inside the tunnel and around the lot, including a dilophosaurus that gets photographed constantly. For a few quarters, a couple of the animatronics behind the building will put on a short show. There’s also a self-serve pet wash that costs ten dollars and change for ten minutes, oatmeal shampoo included.
The carwash is now a community staple
Borek kept adding to it over the years, modifying pieces to work around the business, which let him keep using the mechanical skills from his body shop days. “For something to be successful you have to be passionate about it,” he said. “Dinosaurs are fun. I don’t know too much about the different species, but kids come here and know every one of them.”
After roughly eight years he sold the place to Vincent Korth and Gavin Greenblum, who are both in their thirties.
“As you get older, you don’t want to work every single day,” Borek, now 60, said. “They also offered me a lot of money for it.”
The new owners have no plans to change the theme. “It’s kind of a generational thing,” Korth said. “We’re younger guys. We’re in our 30s. John is kind of like passing the torch to us. We’re keeping little jewels in Austin that have always been there.”
