Demolition Planned for East Austin’s Most Mysterious Abandoned Strip Mall

An ominous view of the strip mall site from a YouTube video dating back to 2017. Image: Mixerr Reviews ATXN / YouTube

The history of the shopping center at the northeast corner of Ed Bluestein Boulevard and FM 969 — also known as 183 and East MLK Jr. Boulevard — ends before it begins. Known at various points of its non-development as East Pointe, Palm Square, and Journey Plaza, the effort to build a strip mall in this location began in the mid-1980s and never advanced beyond the completion of some brick walls and a roof. The story of the project and its highly visible failure is unwritten in the city’s historical record — “The building seems to have started one day some years ago and then just stopped before it was ever completed,” the Austin Chronicle opined in 2003.

The property, located at 6000 FM 969, has remained in this partially constructed but fully abandoned state for nearly 40 years, with the addition of a 7-Eleven gas station and attached Burger King at the front of the site in the early 2010s only barely hanging a fig leaf on the decaying half-structure in the rear. It’s rare that a building in such a visible location stays abandoned this long in Austin, and the site has attracted attention as an urban exploration destination for decades — but this month, the property’s owners at local firm CLD Realty have finally filed permits to knock it down.

An interior view of the shopping center site from another YouTube video. I have no idea what she’s talking about in the narration, but the visuals are great. Image: Alison McDowell / YouTube

CLD originally purchased the 4.7-acre property in 2020 from previous owners Morning Star Projects, who tried and failed to revive the shopping center in the 2000s. A site plan filed by the new owners back in 2022 indicates plans to redevelop the property around the existing gas station at the corner with a new shopping center known as Journey Plaza, containing several standalone buildings including a grocery store, restaurants, office space, and other retail. That site plan is currently listed by the city as inactive, but regardless of the new plan’s timeline, CLD is looking to demolish the existing abandoned structure due to safety concerns about the building’s population of homeless Austinites. (Look, if you need a place to live, a building abandoned since the 1980s seems like a pretty safe bet, but we’re sure nearby homeowners and the city’s code department feel differently.)

A view of the site plan for a retail and office project known as Journey Plaza that would replace the abandoned shopping center at this site, filed by new owners CLD Realty back in 2022. Image: WGI / CLD Realty

Anyway, we aren’t expecting locals to bemoan the demolition at this property as yet another example of the city’s cherished history being swept away in the manner of something like the failed condo project that temporarily became the Castle Hill graffiti gallery, but there’s still something worth eulogizing here. The reason this site ever attracted attention is because it was rare in Austin — the boom and bust cycle of the Texas economy decades ago is a distant memory to us now, with Austin’s pace of growth barely dipping compared with the rest of the country during the 2008 crisis and staying at full throttle all the way through the pandemic. Projects are still moving forward, but these days there’s an air of uncertainty around future developments for the first time in many people’s professional memory. We’re not saying any half-finished projects around town are destined to become like this strip mall, but once they start knocking the thing down, feel free to knock on wood anyway.