Transforming the Sprawl and Saving the Pink Gorilla at Anderson Square

An aerial view of the Anderson Square shopping center, with a typical population in its parking lot. Image: Google Maps

Anderson Square is the official name for the 16-acre ocean of asphalt located at the southwest corner of the interchange between Highway 183, West Anderson Lane, and North Lamar Boulevard in Central Austin; a sleepy yet humongous shopping center anchored by a Hobby Lobby, Planet Fitness, and one of the city’s most consistently underused parking lots. Aside from the well-attended evenings at Big Star Bingo, it’s so dead here it feels like a stretch to call Anderson Square a shopping center at all.

Unused parking in the middle of a weekday afternoon at the Anderson Square shopping center. Photo by James Rambin

This is, after all, the parking lot so famously empty that the local scooter and motorcycle dealers at Electric Avenue can teach Class M license courses here simply by plopping down a handful of cones, as you’ll see in the astounding video below:

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for Anderson Square, with its owners including prolific local investor Jimmy Nassour now seeking a rezoning from the city’s Planning Commission for a higher-density redevelopment of the site, with a potential yield of more than 2,000 new apartments alongside millions of square feet of retail, office, and hotel uses in a more urban, mixed-use form rising up to 120 feet — the kind of project, dare we call it another Brodie Oaksification, that we love to see growing in popularity over the sprawled-out legacy shopping centers you’ll find all over Austin.

Reconsidering an Ocean of Asphalt at the Anderson Square Shopping Center

Although the rezoning case seeking a Planned Development Area designation for the Anderson Square site has been postponed to the Planning Commission’s upcoming June 25 meeting to allow for further conversations between the property owners and the adjacent Wooten neighborhood, we’ve already got our hands on a concept site plan for how a dense redevelopment of this property might look:

Click for a larger view. Image: Alice Glasco / Anderson Square Investments

Once again, the image above is just a conceptual take on how the site could be redeveloped in the coming years and is definitely subject to change, but you can quickly grasp the immediate priorities of such a project — taller towers against the highway, shorter buildings facing the nearby neighborhoods, a new grid of internal streets reclaiming an urban feel from the existing vast parking lot, new pedestrian-friendly retail and green space, and an anchor grocery store tenant at the project’s “front door” facing West Anderson Lane to sweeten the deal. The site is also directly across the highway from the North Lamar Transit Center, which (optimistically) could someday become Project Connect’s northern rail terminal. Like plans for Brodie Oaks, Twin Oaks, and other shopping centers on major corridors, the redevelopment of Anderson Square represents a slam dunk for transit-accessible density.

But there’s still one piece of local character worth preserving at Anderson Square — the pink gorilla statue standing behind the Big Star Bingo hall at the far south corner of the site, which may or may not be a relic of long-lost Austin business Pinky’s Pagers. (Nobody seems to agree on this, since the famous Pinky’s gorilla was inflatable.) Anderson Square’s owners have told the Wooten Neighborhood Association that they “…will endeavor to keep the pink gorilla onsite, if it is feasible, or donate it to the City of Austin’s Parks Department to be placed at the Wooten neighborhood park.” Phew!