Walk West Sixth from Baylor to West Lynn this month and you will pass two blocks that get talked about in the same breath as "the future of Clarksville." One of them has cranes, fencing, and crews working interior floors right now. The other still looks almost exactly like it did the day it closed. That gap is not an accident of scheduling. It is the clearest evidence available for how change actually moves through a neighborhood that everyone agrees is historic but that developers, architects, and longtime residents define very differently when they use that word.
The Corner That's Moving
The block bounded roughly by Baylor and Blanco on the north side of West Sixth is where Sixth & Blanco is going up, a 2.5-acre redevelopment designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, their first completed project in Texas. The team behind it is Austin's own McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality, working with Riverside Resources. Ground broke in October 2024, and permit records tracked by BLDUP show interior finishing permits were issued in 2025, more than a year of buildout ago at this point. Delivery is scheduled for the second quarter of 2027.
What's arriving is not modest. The building will hold ten residences averaging 4,600 square feet, priced from $11 million to $18 million, above a 57-key boutique hotel called The Blanco, a private members' club, a bathhouse, and roughly 50,000 square feet of new retail and restaurant space. The architecture team described the design's logic this way:
"A horizontally stacked structure which steps back and decreases in density as it grows taller."
That stepping is meant to leave room for daylight, gardens, and courtyards at street level even as the building rises. It is also, functionally, how the project reconciles new density with an old streetscape: keep the ground floor legible as Clarksville, put the scale higher up where you don't notice it from the sidewalk.
Four structures near the corner, including storefronts at 1126 and 1128 West Sixth and two buildings on Blanco, were preserved after Austin's Historic Landmark Commission signed off on the plan, a detail the developers point to as proof the project respects the block's fabric. What's gone, or going, is the retail that used to occupy the rest of it. Businesses like Swedish Hill and Z Tejas, longtime fixtures on that stretch, are not part of the new plan, according to reporting from Community Impact. The preservation here is architectural. The commercial tenancy is a clean break.
The Corner That Isn't, Yet
A few blocks away at West 12th and West Lynn sits the other half of this comparison: the shuttered Nau's Enfield Drug. Nau's opened in 1951 as a drugstore and lunch counter, leased by a local laundry owner named Anthony Colanetta to his friend Hylton Nau, and the soda fountain kept serving burgers and milkshakes for most of seven decades before it finally closed for good in 2023, according to the Clarksville Historic District's own entry on Wikipedia.
A redevelopment plan exists. It calls for a five-story mixed-use building with commercial space fronting West Lynn and residences facing Eason Street, built to wrap around the current Medici Coffee building rather than replace it, with underground parking and, according to the project architect's presentation to Austin's Historical Landmark Commission, preservation of the mural on the building's north end along with the existing business signage, as reported by KXAN.
That is a meaningfully different definition of preservation than the one two blocks away. Sixth & Blanco preserves storefront shells and lets the businesses inside them turn over. The Nau's plan, at least on paper, tries to keep the actual touchstones, the mural people recognize, the coffee shop people already walk into, intact inside a much bigger building around them.
But intentions and plans are not construction. When the closure was first announced, neighbors' worry was less about nostalgia and more about scale: could a project of this size land at one of Clarksville's most visible corners without swallowing it, a concern documented at the time by Austin's TOWERS. No construction start date has been made public since the architect's December 2024 presentation to the Historical Landmark Commission. The lot sits closed, fenced off from foot traffic but otherwise unchanged, while its counterpart on Sixth Street is already well into finishing interiors.
Why the Gap Is the Real Story
If you live in Clarksville, this difference in pace matters more than either project's press release. It tells you what to actually expect on your daily walk for the next year versus the next several years, and it tells you something about how capital moves through a legacy neighborhood.
The institutional project, backed by hospitality operators with a national footprint and matched with a globally known architecture firm, is executing on schedule. The smaller, more neighborhood-scaled plan, the one explicitly designed to keep a mural and a coffee shop rather than just a facade, has been sitting in limbo for years. Big money moves fast because it can absorb risk and carry financing costs. A project trying to thread a needle around an existing, occupied coffee shop moves slower, because every design decision has to account for a tenant who isn't going anywhere.
None of this is unique to Clarksville. But it is unusually visible here, in a ten-block neighborhood where you can see both projects from the same short walk, one finishing interiors while the other waits on a start date. If you've wondered why the fencing at Nau's hasn't moved in what feels like a long time while Sixth & Blanco keeps adding floors, that's the answer. It's not that one project is more committed to the neighborhood's history than the other. It's that scale changes what "moving forward" even looks like.
The Neighborhood Underneath the Cranes
None of this construction has paused the actual rhythm of the neighborhood, which continues on its own separate schedule a few blocks in either direction. The Clarksville Community Development Corporation's calendar for this stretch of summer includes a full day of literary panels and author meet-and-greets at the Central Library downtown, a performance by Austin blues-rock artist Gary Clark Jr. at a historic venue nearby, and a midweek farmers market for anyone stocking up on produce without a Saturday-morning commitment.
The neighborhood's older infrastructure is doing what it always does, too. West Austin Neighborhood Park, tucked just off West 9th Street, keeps its shaded walking paths, community pool, and dog park running through the heat, and the Shoal Creek Trail entrance at 9th Street still connects Clarksville on foot to downtown and the rest of the trail system without a single detour caused by either construction site.
Worth remembering, too, that Clarksville has absorbed this kind of transformation before and had it turn into something permanent rather than disruptive. The grocery store that opened here in 1979 as Clarksville Natural Grocery eventually became the original Whole Foods Market. Neighborhoods that look settled are rarely static. They're usually just between changes that haven't finished yet.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts because you're weighing what they might mean for your own property, or simply want a clearer read on how Central Austin's older neighborhoods are actually evolving block by block, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this corridor closely. Thomas Luxury Group works across Austin's Central and Hill Country neighborhoods every day, and we're glad to talk through what any of this means for you specifically. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready.
