East Austin’s Centro Offices Will Transform Nearly Two Full Blocks

Demolition at the Centro project site in East Austin. Photo by James Rambin

Centro, a mixed-use development by local firm Riverside Resources set to bring five floors of office and retail space to the so-called “Saltillo District” of East Austin, is still working its way through the city’s permitting process — meaning the project technically exists mostly on people’s computers at this point.

A rendering of the Centro project looking northeast from the corner of East Fifth and Navasota Streets. Features including ground-floor retail space and a rooftop amenity deck are visible. Image: Gensler Austin / Notion Workshop

But looking at renderings doesn’t really give you a great idea of just how significant a change for the area the development represents, expected after its two phases of construction to span roughly 3.25 acres, or the better part of two full city blocks between East Fifth, East Sixth, Navasota, and Comal Streets.

Image: Bing Maps / James Rambin

Though construction hasn’t started yet, the properties that will eventually comprise Centro’s site are now being cleared, and with the demolition of several smaller buildings that formerly occupied portions of this area in a piecemeal fashion, we’ve finally got a real sense of the project’s scale. Inside the red outline of the project site on the aerial photo above, the only thing that’s still around is the parking lot in the top right corner — everything else is basically rubble, giving us a view of just how large Centro will eventually be. Let’s walk around and take some photos, shall we?

Photo by James Rambin

In the photo above, we’re looking at the northeast corner of East Fifth and Navasota Streets, the same corner we see in the main rendering of the Centro project. Several warehouse structures between Navasota and Onion Streets have been cleared in preparation for the new development, and remember, this is just phase one. Here’s a view of that corner from roughly the same perspective dating back to 2019:

Image: Google Maps

Below is another view of the lot from close to the same perspective near that corner of East Fifth and Navasota Streets — slightly more straight on, looking north up the lot from East Fifth Street, showing both the elevation change of the site from north to south and the scale of Centro’s first phase:

Photo by James Rambin

Moving to the opposite site of this phase one block, you can look west towards downtown from Onion Street, which basically splits the Centro project’s two phases, and see across the entire first phase tract:

Photo by James Rambin

Here’s an older view of the area from about the same perspective:

Image: Google Maps

While Centro’s first phase will occupy the full block between Navasota and Onion Streets, the second phase doesn’t quite take down an entire block — carved out of this second tract is historic East Side Tex-Mex joint Cisco’s, and the White Horse honky-tonk directly south of there. Riverside Resources doesn’t own either of these tracts and has no plans to alter the operations of either business in any way, which is good because I like them both very much and would not be happy about that.

Photo by James Rambin

In the photo above, we’re looking at part of Centro’s phase two area, on the east side of Onion Street. The parking lot we saw in the aerial map further up in this post remains, but the colorful building you see in the older street view of the same area below has been cleared for development now:

Image: Google Maps

Move the camera over to the left a little, and you see both the parking lot where Centro will eventually rise, plus the nice blue two-story building housing Cisco’s:

Photo by James Rambin

Head up to the corner of Sixth and Navasota, and you’ll get a slightly more elevated view of the first phase area — at least the northern half of it, anyway:

Photo by James Rambin

Here’s that same corner before the site clearing:

It’s not rocket science or anything, but taking a look around the Centro site provides a much realer picture than you might get from looking at a rendering or two — this is a significant project, not quite up to the scale of something like Saltillo but awfully large for a single development compared to many of the new office buildings around here.

We’ve already looked over some of the details of its design, courtesy of Gensler Austin, and many of Centro’s features — including retail space and the conversion of its stretch of Onion Street to a pedestrian “paseo” — are big improvements for the Plaza Saltillo MetroRail station’s transit-oriented development district, and will compliment the increased foot traffic from the multifamily growth just a block west at the 10-acre Saltillo complex. If all goes well, we should see groundbreaking this year.

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