For more than three years, the promise of a new hangout spot has loomed over a booming stretch of San Antonio. But the ousted laundromat, reportedly a late-night hotspot with ties to an iconic Austin honky-tonk, remains a full-blown construction site nearly a year after renovations were set to wrap up.
In 2019, Bexar Josephine LLC bought the 1960s-era, midcentury modern building at the corner of Josephine and North Alamo streets. The purchase makes sense, given the massive real estate boom in what’s now known as River North, where Credit Human’s headquarters, a swanky Broadway East development, and several major projects are located.
A few years later, in 2023, Nathan Hill, the name behind some iconic Austin hotspots (The White Horse honky–tonk bar, Frazier’s Long & Low and High Noon), said he was expanding his nightlife empire to San Antonio for the first time. Since then, the promise of Jackie’s Desert Rose has gone unfulfilled.
“San Antonio has always held a special place in my heart and has always felt like home,” Hill told MySA back in 2023 when the announcement was fresh, noting he fell in love with the old Worthington Laundromat building during a trip to the Pearl District.
At the time, Hill didn’t provide a project timeline, expecting the work to take up most, if not all, of 2023. A filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, submitted shortly after, set a completion date of mid-August 2025.
It’s been nearly a year since that self-imposed deadline, and the property is still a construction zone. Piles of rubble line the corners, sidewalks are blocked, floor-to-ceiling windows remain boarded up and the buzz of power tools can be heard from a scant worker or two inside on some days.
The City of San Antonio has issued several fines and liens for cleaning up the lot, which officials deemed dangerous to the healthy or safety of the public. It’s not uncommon for slow-moving projects to rack up fines, but it’s less common for city officials to file a lien on the property to ensure repayment for clearing up abandoned duties by a property owner.
While walking around the property, where sidewalks are blocked and construction fences have begun to lean, it’s easy to see how this could be deemed hazardous.
Since the announcement three years ago, the property has posted signs advertising Jackie’s Desert Oasis – a move approved by San Antonio’s Historic Design and Review Commission in 2024. It seems that one day the vacant laundromat will be transformed into a watering hole and may feature a food truck called “Fancy’s Burgers,” as shown in a mockup submitted to the city.
The question remains whether Austin’s nightlife entrepreneur will ever make his first foray into San Antonio, but he seems to have bought the property during a business boom in 2019. He opened four new places in Austin between the San Antonio announcement and now, including Busty’s Bar & Jukebox and Daydreamer in East Austin, which boasts “cocktails, champagne and caviar bumps.”