Clarksville Assumed the Nau's Corner Would Get Scraped. The Filed Plans Say Otherwise

The plywood is still up at 12th and West Lynn. The Nau's Enfield Drug sign has faded a shade lighter every summer since the doors closed, and the Daniel Johnston mural on the side of the building has become something people photograph more than they used to shop there. For three and a half years, this corner has done nothing but sit, which is exactly long enough for a neighborhood to build its own theory about what happens next. The theory most Clarksville residents settled on: someone buys it, someone scrapes it, and whatever goes up in its place looks nothing like what was there before.

That theory had a very specific model to draw from, and it wasn't hypothetical. It was seven blocks away, at Sixth and Lamar.

The Model Everyone Had in Mind

Waterloo Records spent 43 years at Sixth and North Lamar before Endeavor Real Estate Group bought the building in 2019. Waterloo relocated in August 2025 to a bigger space at 1105 North Lamar Boulevard, and the old building sat empty for exactly as long as it took the paperwork to catch up. In December 2025, Endeavor and civil engineering firm Garza EMC filed a demolition permit for the original site, with plans for a nine-story building carrying 93 units and 18,000 square feet of retail. The building that held Waterloo's stage for four decades is coming down to make room for something that shares nothing with it but the address.

If you'd watched that play out a few blocks from Nau's, you had reason to expect the same thing here. A pharmacy nobody could save, a building nobody was obligated to preserve, and a five-story shape where the soda fountain used to be.

That's not what got filed.

What Got Filed Instead

Zydeco Development Corp, the Austin firm behind the sprawling MetCenter business park in southeast Austin, submitted plans this year for a project called The Westlyn at 1111 West Lynn Street. According to filings reported by the Austin Business Journal, it's a $70 million adaptive reuse development at 165,096 square feet, with roughly 27 residences and a mix of ground-floor retail. Construction is scheduled to begin in January 2027 and finish in January 2029, according to permit filings reported by The Real Deal.

The word doing the most work in that description is adaptive reuse. Zydeco isn't clearing the lot. The project architect is Miró Rivera, working alongside design firm dwg, and the concept that's been under Historical Landmark Commission review builds new construction on top of and around the existing Nau's storefront rather than through it, according to reporting from KVUE.

The Facade Stays, the Mural Stays

Here's the part that separates this project from the Waterloo model. The plans include a restrictive covenant protecting the Nau's facade, meaning the building's public face along West Lynn is legally tied to preservation rather than left to a developer's future discretion. The Daniel Johnston mural on the side of the structure is also planned to be kept in place, not relocated or recreated elsewhere as a nod to the original.

Next door, the converted house that holds Medici Coffee, known to most regulars as Caffé Medici's original Clarksville location, isn't part of the demolition footprint either. The design wraps the new residential structure around that building rather than absorbing it, which means the coffee shop that's been serving this stretch of West Lynn since long before Nau's closed keeps its own roofline while a five-story building rises around it.

What survives and what changes, side by side:

• Staying: the Nau's facade under covenant, the Daniel Johnston mural, the Medici Coffee house next door
• Changing: the storefront's use, the height of the block, underground parking replacing surface lots, roughly 27 new residences where there was previously none

That's not the same shape of loss the neighborhood watched happen at Sixth and Lamar. It's closer to what the Historical Landmark Commission was aiming for when project architect Miguel Rivera told the commission at a December 2024 meeting that the building's signage would be kept alongside the mural.

One longtime West Austin resident, remembering Nau's in a community essay collected by West Austin News, put words to what the building meant before any of this: "Nau's always felt like CHEERS to me."

The Retail Tenant Rumor That Didn't Happen

If you were paying close attention to early renderings of this project, you may remember seeing Waterloo Records' name attached to the Nau's storefront. An earlier concept from Zydeco and Miró Rivera floated Waterloo as a hypothetical retail tenant in the preserved space, a tidy story where one beloved Austin institution moved into the shell of another.

It didn't happen. Waterloo Records relocated in 2025, but to 1105 North Lamar Boulevard, a former Whole Foods office space five blocks from its old Sixth Street location, not to Clarksville. The move gave Waterloo 50 percent more room, a bar, a podcast studio, and new co-owners in Caren Kelleher and Trey Watson alongside longtime owner John Kunz, who stayed on as a minority partner. Record Store Day 2026 was Waterloo's first at the new address, and the shop has been drawing bigger crowds there since, according to coverage from KXAN.

That means whatever retail tenant eventually fills the Nau's storefront in The Westlyn hasn't been publicly named. The Waterloo connection was a rendering, not a lease.

What This Means If You Still Drive by Here

As of this writing, nothing about the corner's physical condition has changed. The site sat vacant after Nau's closed in the spring of 2023, following a September 2022 announcement that the family running the pharmacy since 1971 wasn't able to renew its lease. An estate sale that March cleared out two full soda fountains, an ionic neon sign, and decades of prescription records before the doors shut for good, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman.

With construction not slated to begin until January 2027, the corner is set to look almost exactly as it does now for a few more months yet. Once work starts, the completion date on file is January 2029, meaning residents driving past West 12th and West Lynn should expect roughly two years of active construction once it finally moves. The plywood isn't coming down soon, but what's underneath it, according to everything filed so far, isn't disappearing either.

For a neighborhood that watched Waterloo's old building get bought, vacated, and slated for demolition inside a few years, that distinction is worth sitting with. Not every closed Austin landmark gets the same ending.

If you're weighing a move in Clarksville, Old Enfield, or anywhere else in Central Austin and want a read on how a corner like this one affects what's around it, Roots Residential Group is a good place to start that conversation. Reach out for a complimentary home valuation or market consult, and get an answer from someone who actually walks these blocks.