If you have wondered why the Sledd Nursery sign is still hanging over an empty lot on West Lynn Street, or why the old soda fountain at West 12th never got razed after it closed years ago, the answer is not that nothing is happening on this corner of Clarksville. It is that almost everything happening here comes with a preservation clause attached.
Two of the neighborhood's oldest storefronts went dark this year. Neither is becoming a parking lot or a glass box with no memory of what stood there before. Both are being rebuilt by developers who paid, in one form or another, to keep a piece of the original business alive inside the new one. That is not how redevelopment usually works in a fast-growing city, and it tells you something specific about how change actually gets negotiated on this stretch of West Lynn.
The Nursery Isn't Becoming Condos
Sledd Nursery ran at 1211 West Lynn Street for almost fifty years, opened by James and Melissa Sledd in 1977. Melissa Sledd died in December 2025, and the business wound down through the first part of 2026 before a final sale in mid-May. McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality, the group behind Clark's Oyster Bar, Swedish Hill, Pecan Square Café and Rosie's Wine Bar, bought the property and is opening its first-ever Greek restaurant there.
The detail worth sitting with: MML licensed the Sledd name from the family. The restaurant will incorporate it, along with a large collection of live plants inside the space as a design nod to what the building used to be. A company representative told Community Impact in June that the concept is roughly 12 to 18 months out, and the Austin American-Statesman's own project tracker lists a 2027-2028 completion window for the site. Either way, this is not a fast turnaround. A restaurant group with a long list of Austin concepts to its name is taking more than a year to open a Greek spot in a nursery, largely because it is building around a legacy rather than over it.
The Drugstore's Mural Comes With Legal Strings
A few doors down, at the corner of West Lynn and West 12th, Nau's Enfield Drug closed in 2021 after seventy years as a soda fountain and pharmacy. The building had housed two businesses side by side since 1951, when the Colanetta family opened Anthony's Laundry and Cleaners in one half and leased the other half to Hilton and Eleanor Nau, who ran the drugstore and soda fountain until selling to pharmacist Lambert Labay in 1971. Zydeco Development Corp bought the property in 2023 and is now building The Westlyn, a five-story mixed-use project with 27 residences and ground-floor retail.
Two things are staying no matter what gets built. The first is a Daniel Johnston mural on the building's north wall, unveiled in December 2014 as a fundraiser for Superhero Kids and Dell Children's Blood and Cancer Center. It shows a superhero figure alongside the words "Love is the question, love is the answer," and a city Historic Landmark Commission filing on the redevelopment treats it as significant enough to warrant its own protection. Zydeco's plans include a restrictive covenant specifically preserving that mural along with the Nau's facade. The second is the 1903 house next door, currently home to Medici, which is staying put while a five-story building rises around it.
Zydeco has said publicly it wants to take its time working through the project with the neighborhood before breaking ground, which lines up with what residents here have come to expect. Mary Reed, former president of the Clarksville Community Development Corporation, put it plainly to the Statesman this summer: "You start losing what makes Austin Austin." That sentiment, and the organized pushback behind it from both the CDC and the Old West Austin Neighborhood Association, is almost certainly why every major project on this corridor now arrives with something old still attached to it.
What's Actually New on the Corridor Right Now
| Site | What closed | What's replacing it | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1211 West Lynn St (Sledd Nursery) | Family-run nursery, open since 1977 | MML Hospitality's first Greek restaurant, licensing the Sledd name and using live plants as a design theme | 2027 into 2028 |
| West Lynn & West 12th (Nau's Enfield Drug) | Soda fountain and pharmacy, open 1951 to 2021 | The Westlyn: five stories, 27 residences, ground-floor retail, with the Daniel Johnston mural and 1903 Medici house preserved | Still in design and neighborhood review |
| West Sixth Street district | Small commercial parcels | Sixth & Blanco: boutique hotel, private members club, spa, ten residences, dining | Partially open now, remaining phases through 2027 |
That third row is the outlier. Sixth & Blanco, also an MML Hospitality project, is not built around saving anything specific. It is new from the ground up, with a hotel, a private members club, a spa and ten luxury residences planned around elevated dining. But part of it is already functioning. Clark's Oyster Bar has an operating location inside the Sixth & Blanco district at 1200 West 6th Street right now, with valet parking running seven days a week even as the rest of the development continues around it. So the corridor has two very different kinds of large private investment happening at once: one that treats memory as something worth paying to keep, and one that is simply new.
The Cheapest, Fastest Project on This List Isn't Private
While the nursery and the drugstore sites sit years from opening, the actual public investment on this side of the neighborhood is landing in weeks, not years. The Overlook, a renovation of a long-empty section of West Austin Park, carries a budget of $650,000, roughly what a single Clarksville condo unit might cost, and is being designed by the firm TBG for a completion by the end of October 2026.
West Austin Park already anchors daily life here with its playground, dog park and a seasonal pool that runs June through August, plus direct access to the Shoal Creek Trail at 9th Street for anyone walking or biking toward downtown. The Overlook fills in a piece of that park that has sat unused, and it is the one item on this list a Clarksville resident will actually get to use before the year ends, not the one requiring the most patience.
What's Already Open Nearby
For everything still years away, a couple of things on this corridor are already open and worth the walk. Aris, a Mediterranean steakhouse from Houston-based Sof Hospitality, opened at 1111 West 6th Street back in January 2025 and is still drawing crowds, currently running a $75 prix-fixe summer menu through the end of September. And after roughly two years of an unlit sign hanging over an empty storefront, Shug's Bagels finally opened its doors in Clarksville this year, bringing a New York deli-style bagel menu, including chopped cheese sandwiches and a full section devoted to chicken cutlets, from the Dallas-based chain's first Austin location.
Neither is remotely the scale of what's coming at the old Sledd and Nau's sites, and that's exactly the point. The corridor's actual, walkable, order-a-sandwich-tonight changes are small. Its headline-grabbing changes are still working through design review and neighborhood meetings.
What the Preservation Clauses Actually Protect
None of this means Clarksville is frozen or that its legacy businesses are simply being erased and replaced. What's happening is closer to a negotiation, and the currency being traded is memory itself: a licensed name, a protected mural, a house left standing inside a much larger footprint. In a neighborhood founded in 1871 by Charles Clark as one of the state's first freedmen's communities, and one where the Clarksville Community Development Corporation still maintains the Haskell House as a living record of that history, that kind of leverage did not appear by accident. It is what an organized, historically minded neighborhood association can extract from developers who need buy-in to build here at all.
If you live near West Lynn Street, the practical takeaway is simple: don't expect either the Sledd site or the Nau's site to open soon, and don't assume the wait means erasure. What you'll actually notice this fall is smaller: a new stretch of park, and a bagel shop that finally has its doors open after two years of an unlit sign. The bigger story on this corridor is still being written into covenants and design reviews, one preserved name and one protected wall at a time.
We think about Austin's neighborhoods this way at Lead Commercial too, as places worth understanding block by block before anyone talks about buying, selling or building anything. If you own property on this corridor, or you're trying to make sense of what a project like this actually means for your building or your business, let's talk about your property.
