Walk south from Exposition on University Boulevard on a September evening and the lot at 740 South University no longer sits behind plywood. There's a leasing sign now, a waitlist, a website with floor plans. For a block that has watched this parcel sit dark, then fenced, then slowly framed over four years, that alone counts as news. But look closer at the dates on that sign and you'll notice something the marketing copy doesn't say out loud: this project is running about two years behind the timeline its own developer first put in writing.
That gap between the promised calendar and the actual one is the real story on the 700 block this fall, more than the leasing announcement itself.
What the Dires Left Behind
Bonnie Brae Tavern opened in June 1934, seven months after Prohibition ended, when Carl and Sue Dire started serving pizza and burgers out of a roadhouse at 740 South University. Three generations of the Dire family owned it after that, with a fourth already working the counter by the time it closed on June 25, 2022, after 88 years in the same building under the same family, one of the longest continuous runs of any restaurant in Denver. The Denver Gazette covered the final weeks, when the line started forming at 10:30 a.m. for an 11 o'clock open. One longtime regular, a 73-year-old former cab driver named Bruce Adams who'd been coming for 50 years, put it simply: "I was just gutted when I heard they were closing."
The Dire family had actually cleared the path to sell years before they used it. Denver's Zoning Board approved a five-year redevelopment window for the site back in 2019, well ahead of any closure announcement, which meant the family was holding an option, not reacting to a crisis, when they finally took it. Aging infrastructure, mandatory ADA upgrades, and two years of pandemic losses made the decision for them. The sale closed for $4.5 million to Churchill Bunn's Alpine Investments and Rhys Duggan's Revesco Properties, a deal that folded in the neighboring Wish Gifts building at 750 South University and the parking behind both.
The Timeline That Kept Moving
Here's where the story gets useful for anyone who actually lives here, rather than anyone reading about it from outside.
When Alpine Investments first went public with plans for the site, the estimate given directly to reporters was a completion date in the first quarter of 2025, branding the project "akin Bonnie Brae" and describing a three-story building with 43 to 48 apartments and roughly 16,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. That date came and went. By April 2025, construction tracking through BLDUP's project database had revised the estimate again, listing construction as slated to begin that month with completion anticipated in the first quarter of 2026.
That date has also passed. As of this fall, akin Bonnie Brae's own leasing site lists pre-leasing beginning in fall 2026, with move-ins projected for early 2027. Read those three numbers in sequence and the pattern is plain: Q1 2025, then Q1 2026, then early 2027. A project first pitched as a roughly year-long build has stretched into something closer to five years from the Tavern's last pizza order to an actual tenant carrying boxes through the door.
None of this makes the project unusual for Denver infill construction. It does mean that anyone who assumed the sight of a leasing sign equals a finished, occupied building by winter is working from the same optimistic math the developer started with in 2022, and that math has been wrong twice already.
What the Retail Bays Still Don't Tell You
The apartments are the part getting a leasing page. The 16,500 square feet of ground-floor retail is the part that will actually determine whether the 700 block still feels like Bonnie Brae once the scaffolding comes down, and as of this writing no tenants have been named for that space.
That's not a small omission. The retail bays are roughly what will replace the storefront frontage the Tavern itself occupied for 88 years, and whoever signs those leases sets the tone for the block for a long stretch afterward, the same way the Tavern's arrival in 1934 shaped it for the ninety years that followed. Rents in new ground-floor construction typically run well above what a fully depreciated, decades-old single-story building could charge, which is the ordinary economics of any teardown-and-rebuild, not a Bonnie Brae-specific problem. But it does mean the businesses that eventually move in are more likely to be regional or well-capitalized operators than another 88-year family run, simply because the lease math favors tenants who can absorb a higher base rent from day one.
Nobody on the 700 block has an answer to who that will be yet. Residents who want to know first should watch the Bonnie Brae Neighborhood Association's own updates rather than assuming a leasing sign for apartments means retail announcements are close behind.
The Businesses That Never Needed a Redevelopment Story
While all of that has played out at 740 South University, a few doors down at 799, Bonnie Brae Ice Cream marked its 40th anniversary on July 19, 2026, National Ice Cream Day, with face painting and balloon artists running from noon to 5 p.m. Ken and Judy Simon and Bob and Cindy Pailet opened the shop in 1986, taking over a space that a Dolly Madison bakery outlet had occupied since 1945 before closing that year, and it has stayed under the same ownership and at the same address for all 40 years since. No zoning window, no developer press release, no leasing site. The shop's continued presence has nothing to do with the parcel's redevelopment value and everything to do with whether people keep showing up for a cone, the same way they have for four decades. Bonnie Brae Liquor, a few doors over on the same block, now handles delivery of the ice cream itself, the kind of small cross-pollination that doesn't show up in any zoning filing but tells you something real about how the block actually functions day to day.
That contrast matters more than it might first appear. Two businesses on the same short stretch of sidewalk are operating on entirely different clocks, one tied to a construction and leasing calendar that keeps slipping, the other tied to nothing but foot traffic and a recipe that hasn't changed in forty years.
Not Every For-Sale Sign Is the Same Story
If you've noticed a for-sale sign on the Conoco station further up University and assumed it's the next chapter of the Tavern story, it isn't, at least not yet. That listing belongs to a separate owner making a separate decision on his own schedule, with no announced closing timeline attached to it. A for-sale sign sitting there for six months or a year doesn't mean the same forces are at work that moved the Tavern parcel. It just means the owner hasn't gotten the number he's looking for.
What This Actually Means Walking the Block This Fall
If you live inside the ellipse, the practical takeaway isn't complicated. The leasing sign at 740 South University is real, but the building behind it is still months away from anyone actually moving in, based on the developer's own current numbers, and the retail tenants who will define the ground floor haven't been chosen. Ellipse Park, laid out by landscape architect Saco DeBoer in 1936 at the center of Bonnie Brae's looping streets, has anchored the neighborhood since long before this redevelopment started, and the Bonnie Brae Neighborhood Association's own updates are the most reliable place to watch for whatever comes next. The ice cream line at 799 South University will keep moving at its own unhurried pace regardless of what the construction fencing next door does.
Four years is a long time for one corner to work through a redevelopment, longer than anyone standing in that Tavern lunch line in June 2022 would have guessed. The building is coming. It's just coming on a schedule nobody promised out loud the first time.
If you're weighing a move within Bonnie Brae, thinking through a sale, or just want a straight read on how a specific block or parcel is likely to hold value as these projects finish, Wadsworth Property Group works this part of Denver house by house. Request a free home valuation and consultation to talk through what a specific address, not a headline, actually tells you.
