Walk the 700 block of South University this month and you will pass two businesses that put their futures up for grabs within a few years of each other. One is gone. The other is still pumping gas, still doing oil changes, and in no particular hurry to close anything.
If you have lived in Bonnie Brae for a while, you already know the shorthand version of this story: the old places are disappearing, the new places are going up, the neighborhood is turning over. That version is not wrong, exactly. It is just incomplete in a way that matters if you are trying to guess what your own walk to the ice cream shop looks like in five years. A sign in a window can mean an ending. It can also mean a negotiation that has not started yet. Telling the difference is the actual skill here, and this stretch of University Boulevard happens to be running both experiments at once.
What Closed at 740 South University
The Bonnie Brae Tavern opened in June 1934, seven months after Prohibition ended, and it stayed in the Dire family for three generations, with a fourth already working the floor when the end came. It closed on June 25, 2022, after eighty-eight years. According to reporting from Westword at the time, the decision came down to a combination the Dires could not out-cook: an aging building, the financial toll of the pandemic, and the rising cost of running a restaurant in a business climate where competition, staffing, and property taxes had all gotten harder at once. The family sold the property, a little over three-quarters of an acre including the space next door, for $4.5 million to Alpine Investments and Revesco Properties.
That sale is the important part. Once the Dires signed, the calendar for that corner belonged to somebody else. The new owners announced a project called Akin Bonnie Brae, a three-story building with somewhere between 43 and 48 residential units and roughly 16,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. Demolition followed, then construction, which began in April 2025 with an initial completion target of the first quarter of 2026. That target has now come and gone. Large infill projects routinely run past their first announced date, and as of this writing there is no public leasing announcement for who will occupy the new retail bays. That absence is itself worth sitting with. The building will eventually open. What goes into those storefronts, and at what rent, is a decision that has not been made yet, or at least not one that has been made public. The Cherry Creek News reported that commercial real estate observers see a fairly predictable mechanism at work here: landlords replacing a fully depreciated, single-story building with new construction typically need higher base rents to cover financing and construction costs, which tends to price out the kind of longtime, lower-rent tenant the Tavern itself once was.
None of that makes the Dire family's choice a mistake. It makes it a specific kind of choice: sell, take the number, and let someone else write the next chapter.
Down the Block, the Conoco Isn't Racing Anyone
A few doors south, at 724 South University Boulevard, the Wilson family has owned the Conoco station since 1942, when Ken Wilson's grandfather first leased the site. Ken is the third generation to run it. He started working there part time in 1978, at age twelve, left for a while, and has been back full time for about fifteen years. In February 2026, a for-sale sign went up outside the station for the first time.
It would be easy to read that sign the same way you'd read the plywood that went up over the Tavern's windows, as the start of the same countdown. Wilson's own words, in an interview with CBS Colorado, suggest otherwise.
"We're not in a rush. It's not like we're going to sell and be done this year."
He has said he is willing to wait years to get the price he wants. That is a fundamentally different posture than a family that has already decided the building is more trouble than it's worth. The Wilsons are not fielding offers because they are exhausted. They are testing the market from a position where walking away costs them nothing.
The two properties sit under the exact same pressure. Both occupy valuable, low-density land on a corridor where three-story mixed-use buildings are now the zoning norm. Both are family businesses old enough to have outlived the infrastructure they were built on. The Tavern's owners looked at that pressure and were done. The Conoco's owner is looking at the same pressure and shrugging. If the sign outside the gas station is still there next September, that will not mean the deal fell through. It will mean Ken Wilson is still waiting for someone to meet his number, exactly as he said he would.
The Businesses That Didn't Have to Choose
Not everyone on this stretch owns the ground under their storefront, and that turns out to matter just as much as who does. A short list of what else fills the same three blocks:
- Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, 799 South University, family-owned and scooping since 1986
- Ni Tuyo, 730 South University, a Mexican kitchen and mezcal bar built around a decade of the owners' agave dinners and weekly specials
- Bonnie Brae Conoco, 724 South University, the Wilson family's full-service station since 1942
- Akin Bonnie Brae, 740 South University, the apartment and retail building rising on the old Tavern site
Bonnie Brae Ice Cream doesn't have a redevelopment decision hanging over it, because its survival was never tied to the value of the dirt underneath it. It has run as a lease-and-serve business for four decades, and its future depends on whether people keep showing up for a cone, not on what a developer would pay for the parcel. Ni Tuyo, newer to the block, is in the same category. Their fortunes rise and fall with foot traffic and regulars, not with a sale price.
That is a third posture, distinct from both the Dires and the Wilsons: businesses that rent, keep their overhead in line with what a scoop or a plate of tacos can actually support, and let the real estate questions belong to someone else entirely. It is a quieter kind of stability, and it is easy to walk past without noticing it as a strategy at all.
Reading the Next Sign
The next time a for-sale sign or a construction fence shows up on this stretch, the useful question is not just what got a for-sale sign, but who is putting it up and why. A family that has already made peace with an ending, the way the Dires had, will move fast once a buyer appears. A family that is simply pricing patience into the deal, the way the Wilsons are, might sit under that sign for years without anything changing at all. And the businesses that never owned the ground in the first place will keep doing exactly what they have always done, which is show up, serve the next customer, and let the buildings around them sort out their own timelines.
That distinction is the kind of thing you only pick up by watching a corridor closely over time, which is another way of saying it's the kind of thing a longtime resident already half-knows and a new arrival has to learn the hard way. If you're the kind of person who likes understanding why a neighborhood changes the way it does, and not just what changed, that instinct tends to be useful well beyond a single city block.
If you ever want to talk through what's actually happening on a specific corner of Denver, or what a shift like this one tends to mean for a street over the long run, the Trish & Maggie Team is always glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.
