When you think of downtown Austin, you don’t think of empty streets or boarded up windows. You think of streets full of cars driving bumper to bumper, minimal parking and pedestrians or cyclists everywhere.

My friend Lauren and I met up at the Torchy’s on South Congress at eight in the morning on March 24. It was the day Mayor Adler announced the city’s shelter-in-place order. We wanted to capture the sunrise and see if the rumors were true about how desolate the city had become. We were in for a shock. We had never, in our lives, seen downtown Austin empty. The level of silence we experienced was disorienting. It did not feel like we were in Austin. In the hours we spent walking up and down Congress and 6th Street, we were in a ghost town.