A flame-scarred thrift shop that for the past three years has been sitting boarded up on a prime piece of real estate along Tennyson Street in northwest Denver is expected to change hands in the coming days.
Some in the neighborhood are apprehensive that the unidentified buyer could turn a corner that for generations has provided a wallet-friendly place for people to shop into another stack of condos or apartments.
Green Door Furniture has been closed since November 2016 when a fire broke out in a portion of the single-story, brick building at the southwest corner of Tennyson and West 41st Avenue in the Berkeley neighborhood.
On Sept. 21, the shop’s boarded-over front door creaked open and passersby were invited in to pick over stereo equipment, piles of tools, lamps and other items that survived the fire, some of the merchandise still covered in soot.
A box filled with buttons from Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign was going for $10. On the south end of the building, boards covering the windows were peeled away to let in sunlight. The ceiling and whatever once hung from it had been eaten away by flames.
Shoppers were told that the building had been sold to developers and the inventory was being offloaded to accommodate the sale. Denver property records show the building is owned by Richard Stewart, known to people in the neighborhood as Al. Stewart also owns a house across the street at 4115 Tennyson and a low-slung commercial building next door to that, records show.
Antique shop on #Tennyson in #Denver caught on fire this morning. Can't confirm, but I think I saw shop owner out on sidewalk, thankfully. pic.twitter.com/DwTNyiEdBC
— Lauren Modery (@Hipstercrite) November 29, 2016
On Wednesday, Coldwell Banker Commercial real estate broker Dave Drahn confirmed that the Green Door building is being sold in a deal expected to close by the end of the week. Drahn declined to comment further until after the deal was done. He is also listing Stewart’s other properties on Tennyson, he said, but declined to say whether they had been sold.
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The Green Door got a new neighbor during its long dormancy. Ice cream shop High Point Creamery opened its third permanent location at 3977 Tennyson in April 2018. Erika Thomas, who owns the business with her husband, said she hasn’t seen Stewart around in a while. She has been told the property is selling but hasn’t heard who is buying it. She knows what she would like to have next door: a foot-traffic-driving retailer of some kind.
“I have no idea what their plans are,” Thomas said. “I think they can go up five stories, so I am sure they are going to do condos or apartments.”
Residential buildings have been popping up all along the largely commercial stretch of Tennyson between West 38th and West 44th Avenues in recent years, gobbling up lots previously occupied by bungalows and storefronts along what was once one of Denver’s streetcar lines.
“We are inundated now with slot homes and residential on Tennyson and it’s a tragedy,” said Steven Teitelbaum, president of the Berkeley Regis United Neighborhoods organization. “We want to keep it a commercial area.”
District 1 City Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval has been working with the neighborhood organization on ways to keep the street busy with retail, even if condos and apartments sit on top of the shops. On the Green Door block, future buildings can be up to 38 feet tall if they are exclusively condos or apartments but can go as high as 45 feet if they have a storefront component, she said.
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Sandoval’s family for four decades ran La Casita, a New Mexican style restaurant at the corner of Tennyson and 44th before her dad got sick and the family had to sell the property in 2012. She called out the building on that corner today, a five-story apartment development, for being particularly out of place on Tennyson.
“We’d prefer some ground-floor activation and not another example of what happened there,” she said.
