Remember La Bare on Riverside? Yeah, you do.
If you’re new to Austin, La Bare was a “ladies club” located at 110 E Riverside Drive that advertised male dancer entertainment. From the get-go, the business was troubled due to an incompatible use with the surrounding neighborhood (even then, when it wasn’t as densely populated with residential developments like The Crescent and others) and eventually re-opened on I-35, where it commenced to unwind.
That first part of that story sounds familiar, as a strip club was recently proposed and faces opposition at 422 Congress.
Just as fascinating as its salacious past are the future possibilities for the site, which is now being listed by commercial brokers Avison Young.
The fact that it’s been vacant for yeeeeaaaaaarssss seems nuts given it’s HIGHLY desirable location (again, a familiar theme in recent news). Why? We can only speculate, but it likely had to do with figuring out how the adjacent TxDot property will develop.
With a large landowner controlling several adjacent lots in one of the most desirable areas of Austin, we expect that once the planets align we’re going to see a master plan for all of these sites.
Down the street, CWS is mid-construction on a 260-unit luxury apartment complex.
It was also a short lived comedy club. Definitely one of Austin’s cursed locations. But a lot has changed since it was last opened. The Chronicle did an article about La Bare’s problems with being too close to the school for the deaf. It was a PG 13 operation at its most provocative. You’d probably see more scandalous stuff for free on Dirty Sixth.
What’s even more interesting is that the owner/landlord of LaBare is the same person is now tring to open the strip club on 422 congress avenue. Which also same owner that opened another strip club up north called Rockstar’s that closed in 6 months since it was illegally opened less than 1,000 feet away from a school.
Before it was LaBare it was a gay sports bar (forgot the name). Before that it was the last location of the Steamboat. I believe it cycled through being a few other things in a relatively short time-span. Despite the location, that seems a bit like a cursed spot, never able to hold on to a business for more than a year or so. (Maybe it’s that you have to deal with the terrible Riverside traffic to get in and out?)
If that spot is going to succeed, it will probably need some kind of master plan to get the things around it fixed up (especially the Northeast corner of Riverside and Congress, which is run down enough that it doesn’t exactly invite people to want to walk further East on Riverside to see what’s there.