Drive down West Lynn Street past 12th and the storefront is still boarded, the Daniel Johnston mural still faces the side street, and the sign still says Nau's Enfield Drug even though nobody has poured a milkshake there since 2022. If you live in Clarksville or anywhere else in Old West Austin, you've probably had the same moment I did earlier this year: seeing a headline about "new redevelopment plans" for the old pharmacy corner and wondering what you missed.
Here's what you missed. Nothing.
That's not a knock on the coverage. It's the actual status of the project, and it's worth understanding precisely because so much of what's circulated this year makes it sound like the corner is about to change fast. It isn't. The plan that's getting recirculated is the same plan that was first presented to the city back in December 2024, and as of this writing in August 2026, not one of the open questions from that briefing has been closed.
What Nau's Actually Was Before Any of This
For anyone newer to the neighborhood, Nau's Enfield Drug opened as a drugstore and lunch counter in 1951, serving burgers, milkshakes and ice cream sodas from the corner of West 12th and West Lynn for more than seventy years. The Labay family took over the business in the early 1970s and ran it until the building's owners declined to renew their lease and put the property up for sale. Nau's closed in 2022, and the Labay family held an estate sale to clear out the fixtures, with longtime manager Laura Labay saying she still recognized regular customers by name after decades behind the counter. There are no current plans for the Labay family to reopen elsewhere.
The site itself didn't sit empty for long as a subject of speculation, even if it sat empty as a building. A local development firm called Zydeco Development Corporation assembled the Nau's parcel along with several adjoining properties: two single-family homes, a parking lot, and the converted house that holds Medici Coffee. The neighboring business, Anthony's Laundry & Dry Cleaning, shares the same structure as the old Nau's storefront and is part of the same footprint.
What's Actually Confirmed
In December 2024, Miguel Rivera of the local firm Miró Rivera Architects briefed the Historic Landmark Commission's Architectural Review Committee on the concept Zydeco has been developing for the site. A few specifics came out of that meeting and haven't changed since:
- A five-story building, capped at 60 feet, with commercial space fronting West Lynn and residential units facing Eason Street
- Up to 30 condo residences, with retail planned for the ground floor in the former Nau's storefront
- Two levels of underground parking, so the building keeps an active street presence instead of a surface lot
- A restrictive covenant protecting the original Nau's facade, plus a separate commitment to preserve the Daniel Johnston mural on the building's north side and keep the existing business signage
That covenant detail matters more than it might read at first glance. It means whatever gets built here is contractually bound to keep the parts of Nau's that people actually miss walking past, not just referenced in a press release.
What's Still Just a Rumor
The one detail that tends to get the most attention is the retail tenant shown in early renderings: Waterloo Records. The record store has needed a new home for years, and a Zydeco rendering did show Waterloo Records signage on the ground floor. That's it, though. It's an unconfirmed tenant in a concept drawing, not a lease. If you've seen it repeated as fact anywhere, that's the rendering doing the talking, not a signed agreement.
What Hasn't Moved At All
This is the part that actually explains the last twenty months. When Zydeco's design team first floated this concept, they told the neighborhood they weren't expecting construction to start for at least two years, because they wanted to spend that time in conversation with area residents and the city before finalizing anything. Coverage that resurfaced this spring described the same project in almost the same language, and it was explicit on this point too: no construction timeline has been officially announced, and specific square footage and tenant commitments still haven't been publicly confirmed. The project still has to clear the city's permitting and community review process before anyone breaks ground.
Put plainly, the recent wave of "news" about this corner isn't new information. It's the December 2024 briefing, recirculated. If you want a mechanism for why that happens, it isn't complicated. A project with this much emotional weight generates traffic every time someone writes about it, whether or not there's an update, and a rendering plus a well-known street corner is enough to make a story feel current even when the facts inside it are twenty months old.
Why the Slow Pace Isn't an Accident
Old West Austin isn't a neighborhood where you can quietly demolish a beloved corner and put up something generic. Homes here routinely trade well above the citywide median, and residents have made it clear through neighborhood association meetings that they're watching this specific intersection closely. A developer who wants to avoid years of appeals and public pushback has an incentive to move deliberately, get buy-in early, and lock preservation commitments into the deal before asking the city for anything. That's effectively what happened here. The facade covenant and mural preservation weren't concessions extracted after a fight. They were part of the original pitch, presented alongside the massing and unit count in the same December 2024 meeting.
If you own a home near this corner, or you're just someone who's walked past it a hundred times on the way to Medici, the practical takeaway is straightforward. You're not going to wake up to construction fencing next month. The people building this know that a rushed, contentious rollout would cost them more time in the long run than a patient one, and the record so far backs that up. Whatever gets built at 12th and West Lynn, it's going to keep moving at the pace it's moved for the last two years, which is to say slowly, with the facade and the mural attached to it by contract rather than goodwill.
What to Actually Watch For
If you want a real signal that something has changed, skip the recycled headlines and watch for two things: a filed site plan with the City of Austin's development services department, which is a matter of public record once submitted, or a confirmed lease announcement from an actual tenant rather than a name on a rendering. Until one of those happens, the honest answer to "what's happening at Nau's" is that the plan from two Decembers ago is still the plan, unbuilt and unchanged.
Clarksville has absorbed a lot of change over the decades without losing what makes it Clarksville, and this corner will likely be no different whenever it finally moves. For now, the mural's still there, the facade's still there, and the milkshake counter is just waiting for whoever eventually gets to put something back behind that glass.
If you're curious how a project like this factors into home values on your specific block, or you're weighing a move into Old West Austin and want someone who actually tracks this corridor closely, I'm happy to talk through it. You can also get your instant home valuation anytime to see where your property stands today, redevelopment rumors and all.
Olivia Osborne is a residential real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Realty, focused on Central and Northwest Austin neighborhoods including Old West Austin and Clarksville.
