A Residential Project Dips a Toe Into Sixth Street’s Bar District at The Grant

A view of the existing office block at Grant Plaza. Image: HPI Real Estate

The apartment project planned for the Grant Plaza offices at 611 East Sixth Street would be the first major residential development built inside downtown Austin’s infamous Sixth Street entertainment district in a generation — and even before a certain sense of uncertainty struck our local real estate market, the proposal first surfaced in 2022 by New York-based investment firm Empire Square Group and national developers Ryan Companies seemed fairly audacious.

Grant Plaza Redevelopment Bringing Downtown Residences to Sixth Street

Sixth Street’s extremely public struggles with boozed-up gang violence persist against the background of considerable property acquisitions along the street by local firm Stream Realty Partners, part of a publicly-announced plan to clean up the district with more mixed-use development encouraging a variety of attractions outside of its current lineup of indistinguishable shot bars. The region’s now floating around in a sort of limbo, with Stream taking baby steps towards its vision with a few upgrades to historic buildings on Sixth now working through the city’s permitting process, but at the moment the street looks pretty much the same as before.

A view of the Grant apartment project, showing its ground-level retail space facing East Sixth Street. Image: HLR Architects

It’s oddly reassuring, then, that Empire and Ryan Companies’ plans for redeveloping a full downtown block at Grant Plaza continue to chug along, with representatives for the 258-unit apartment and retail project appearing before the Architectural Review Committee of the city’s Historic Landmark Commission earlier this month. (Although the existing office building at the site is not historic, only dating back to 1981, it’s still inside the Sixth Street National Register Historic District!) The proposed apartments, known as The Grant and designed by Plano-based firm HLR Architects, will also include two ground-level retail spaces facing East Sixth Street, together containing roughly 8,600 square feet — that’s a big win for positive street life in the district, with at least one of the spaces likely to be occupied by a restaurant tenant.

Another perspective of the building’s frontage at the corner of East Sixth and Red River Streets. Image: HLR Architects

A view of the building from the corner of East Sixth and Sabine Streets. Image: HLR Architects

Other amenities of the building include an internal courtyard with a pool, a resident coworking space, and two levels of underground parking. Local landscape architecture studio dwg. is behind the project’s streetscape improvements, which appear to enhance sidewalks through the area while maintaining the historic streetlights along Sixth Street in front of the building, which will survive the demolition of the Grant Block with a few slight relocations.

A landscape plan for the Grant project, showing its ground-level features and streetscape. Image: dwg.

The only question still up in the air — besides when the project will actually move forward with a demolition and groundbreaking, of course — is what will become of Jim-Jim’s Water Ice, the Philly-style Italian ice shop that has occupied the Grant building’s small retail space at 615 East Sixth Street since 1994. We’re all for revitalizing this street, but maybe the folks at Stream can find them something?