Here’s Our First Look at the Centro Project’s Second Act in East Austin

An aerial view of part of Centro’s new Onion Street paseo. Image: Nudge Design

The block-sized Centro office and retail development at 1401 East Sixth Street in East Austin is one of our favorite projects in this forever-growing district — the building by local firm Riverside (née Riverside Resources) features handsome warehouse-inspired good looks with plenty of masonry from the Austin office of mega-architects Gensler, and an above-average helping of pedestrian-friendly landscape architecture from our boys at Nudge Design. The real meat of the Centro project is its conversion of Onion Street between East Sixth and East Fifth Streets into a fully pedestrianized paseo, which is one of the region’s best new outdoor spaces and elegantly connects the two streets despite a significant grade change between them.

Bringing East Austin’s Saltillo District a New Pedestrian Paradise at Centro

But although the Centro we’ve got looks great already, the Centro we’re getting has yet to break ground — the project’s second phase will soon transform most of the block directly east of the finished Centro office block with a second, even taller residential structure creatively known as Centro East, and we now have a rendering of that building courtesy of the project’s marketing team at Endeavor Real Estate Group:

Looking south at the Centro East building from East Sixth Street. The Onion Street paseo space splitting both blocks of the project is visible on the right. Image: Gensler Austin / Riverside / Endeavor

We’re not sure whether the Centro East block was always meant to be residential, since back when the project was first announced in 2019 the demand for office space around here seemed virtually infinite, but Riverside’s decision to try something different for the second phase was a lucky one either way — bringing housing to this site, particularly transit-adjacent housing thanks to the adjacent Saltillo rail station just one block south, is a great companion to walkable urban additions like the new Onion Street paseo and the project’s ample ground-level retail.

Image: Endeavor / Riverside

There’s also the fact that its location inside the Saltillo Transit-Oriented Development district allows a residential project here to rise a lot taller than usual, with plans showing nine floors on its East Fifth Street frontage and seven floors on the East Sixth Street side due to the change in elevation between the streets. Alongside a reported 260 apartments, the Centro East building will include approximately 19,000 square feet of retail space split between a number of storefronts on both East Fifth and East Sixth Street, with two of those spaces opening to the new paseo. Living here also places you next door to both Cisco’s and the White Horse, neither of which are set to be disturbed by this project, in case you were getting preemptively mad. 

Image: Patrick Wong / Nudge Design

Although a firm groundbreaking date isn’t available from this marketing, this sudden appearance of a rendering certainly isn’t a bad sign — long story short, we have a lot more faith in this project moving forward in 2024 than most of the office projects announced but still unbuilt over the last couple of years. Apartments aren’t bleeding quite like offices around here just yet, but we’ll see how the rest of 2024 treats us.