Drive down West Lynn and you still pass it. Boarded windows at the corner of 12th, faded signage nobody bothered to take down, a mural on the side wall that has now outlasted the business it was painted beside. Nau's Enfield Drug closed in 2022 after seventy-one years, and the corner has been answering nothing ever since.
That changed this year. The project has a name, The Westlyn, and it has filed numbers, a budget, and a construction schedule. Clients ask me about this corner more than any other block in Clarksville, usually some version of the same question: is something finally happening, and is it going to be awful.
Here is what is on file.
A Drugstore That Changed Hands Fifty Years Before It Closed
Hilton and Eleanor Nau opened the store in 1951. They sold it in 1972 to Lambert Labay, a pharmacist who had started working the counter as a UT student in 1963. The Labay family ran it for the next fifty years. So the soda fountain most Austinites remember, the one serving malts and burgers well into the 2000s, was a Labay operation for almost its entire run. The Nau name stayed because it had already become the shorthand for the corner, the way people say the Muny without thinking about who holds the lease.
The store had been visibly short-staffed for years. What surprised people was how long nothing happened afterward.
Why the Corner Sat Empty for Four Years
The site did not sit vacant for lack of interest. Zydeco Development Corporation, an Austin firm best known for the MetCenter business park in southeast Austin, bought the Nau's building and its neighbor, Anthony's Laundry and Dry Cleaning, and then kept buying. The assembled site eventually pulled in single-family lots, a parking lot, and the century-old house that holds Cafe Medici.
That is not a lot purchase. That is stitching together separate parcels inside a National Register historic district, and some of those parcels had to be rezoned from single-family to commercial mixed-use before anything could be designed. City Council approved that rezoning with a list of prohibited uses attached. Every added parcel meant another round of neighborhood input and another trip through city review.
The project reached the Historic Landmark Commission in December 2024. Commissioners released a partial demolition permit, then postponed construction permits, saying the design did not step back enough to let the historic first-floor facades read from the street. Miró Rivera Architects went back to the Architectural Review Committee. None of that is unusual. It is simply how long this block takes.
What The Westlyn Actually Is
The current plan is a five-story mixed-use building with commercial frontage on West Lynn and residential frontage on Eason Street, wrapping the Cafe Medici house with outdoor terraces linking the two. Twenty-seven condominium residences sit above roughly thirteen thousand square feet of ground-floor retail. Parking goes underground, two levels of it, which is the reason the sidewalk stays a sidewalk instead of turning into a curb cut.
The state construction filing puts the whole project at 165,096 square feet and $70 million, with about 103,000 of that square footage residential and close to 49,000 in structured parking. Work is scheduled to begin in January 2027 and finish in January 2029.
Those dates are a filing, not a groundbreaking. The last four years produced a name, a permit history, and a schedule, and nothing on the ground. I would hold the 2029 date loosely.
The Height Number Worth Knowing
This is the part that matters more than the square footage.
The Old West Austin Neighborhood Plan, adopted in 2000, addresses this exact stretch by name. It says no rezonings from residential to commercial are recommended on West Lynn. It also sets a height limit of forty feet and three stories for commercially zoned property on West Lynn between 10th and 13th.
The Westlyn is five stories at a maximum of sixty feet, on a site that required residential-to-commercial rezoning to happen at all.
I am not casting anybody as the villain here. The plan is twenty-five years old, it functions as guidance rather than code, and the city has rewritten compatibility rules several times since it was adopted. But if you own a home within a few blocks of this corner, the difference between the plan's guidance and the current project's height is useful context. West Lynn between 10th and 13th is one of the very few commercially zoned stretches serving these streets. It absorbs demand for shops and restaurants from the surrounding residential blocks.
What Gets Kept
The canopied Nau's storefront stays, with in-kind reconstruction where the original features are too deteriorated to repair. The historic signage stays. The brickwork on the side elevation stays. So does the Daniel Johnston mural, painted in 2014 and funded by GSD&M as a fundraiser for Dell Children's Blood and Cancer Center. It shows a boxer standing over a monster meant to represent disease. Johnston died in 2019, and the mural has become one of the most photographed pieces of public art in the neighborhood, which is presumably why its survival was never seriously up for negotiation.
The practical version: from the sidewalk, the corner will still read as Nau's. The five stories happen behind it and above it.
What This Means If You Own Nearby
Owners ask whether a project like this drags down values on the surrounding streets. On a corridor like this one, in central Austin, the pattern usually runs the other direction. Retail that functions, on a walkable block, supports prices on the streets feeding into it. A boarded storefront does not.
The harder question is timing. Two years of construction on West Lynn between 2027 and 2029 will affect showings on Eason, on West 12th, and on the streets immediately north and south of the site. If you are planning to sell inside that window, the construction is a fact your pricing has to absorb, not a detail to leave out of the listing. Buyers walking the block will find it in about ninety seconds. Better that they hear it from you first.
If you are buying on these streets now, you are buying the 2029 version of the corridor at a price set by the 2026 version of it. On this particular block, that is not a bad trade.
Wondering what the West Lynn construction timeline means for the value of your home in Clarksville or Old Enfield? That is exactly the kind of block-level detail I track. →
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
