Walk the 39th Avenue Greenway east from Franklin Street on any evening this September, and you'll pass two Cole projects that get talked about as if they're the same story. They aren't. One is a mile of finished trail, swinging benches, and a mural of John Lewis that's been open to the public since November 2020. The other is a fenced 6.7-acre lot next door where a redevelopment vote passed exactly one year ago and construction still hasn't started.
If you live in Cole, you've probably heard someone call the Rock Drill site "the next big thing" for the neighborhood. That's true eventually. It just isn't true yet, and the gap between those two facts is worth understanding if you're the one walking past the fence every day.
What the Vote Actually Bought Cole
On September 15, 2025, Denver City Council approved a rezoning, a development agreement, and a tax-increment financing plan for the old Denver Rock Drill Manufacturing Company site, clearing the way for what the developer, a partnership between the Weiss family, Saunders Development, and Oliver Buchanan Group, has called a mixed-use district built around the sawtooth-roofed brick buildings that have sat empty for more than a decade. The new zoning allows up to 16 stories. The plan calls for 700 to 800 residential units, 40,000 to 60,000 square feet of office space, and 100,000 to 150,000 square feet of retail, with 10 percent of the housing reserved as income-restricted.
The Denver Urban Renewal Authority's preliminary budget sets aside roughly $39.1 million in tax-increment support, and city presentations put about 80 percent of that money toward rehabbing the historic structures rather than building new ones. That split matters if you're picturing what shows up first. The brick sawtooth buildings that have anchored the skyline of that fenced lot for a century are the priority, not a glass tower.
The community benefits agreement the Cole Neighborhood Association negotiated also commits the developer to pursuing a grocer for the site. That's not a throwaway line. Cole has been counted among Denver's food deserts, with sit-down restaurants only starting to plant flags here in recent years. A grocery store inside Rock Drill would be the first real full-service option many residents have had within walking distance.
The Steps Still Standing Between the Vote and a Shovel
Here's the part that gets skipped in the excited version of this story. Council approval is not a building permit. The city's own presentation on the vote noted that environmental review and landmark designation remain part of the forthcoming permitting process, and the developer has told the city it's still working through the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment's voluntary cleanup program for the site.
This site has done this before. A version of Rock Drill was scheduled to break ground back in 2018 and stalled while the developer waited on an anchor tenant that never signed. Oliver Buchanan Group came back with the current pitch in 2023, and it took two more years to get through entitlement.
| When | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Original redevelopment plan scheduled to break ground, stalls without a signed anchor tenant |
| 2023 | Oliver Buchanan Group returns with a new pitch, restarting the entitlement process |
| September 2025 | City Council approves rezoning, development agreement, and TIF financing |
| September 2026 | Project moving through environmental cleanup review, historic landmark designation, and building-level design |
None of that means the project is in trouble. It means the honest answer to "when will something be built there" is still measured in years, not months, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn't read the permitting timeline.
A rezoning vote and a shovel in the ground are two different events. Cole has one. Not yet the other.
What's Already Yours, Five Years Ahead of Schedule
While Rock Drill works through its second round of paperwork, the thing actually reshaping how people move through this end of Cole finished construction back in 2020, and it wasn't marketed as a neighborhood amenity at all. The 39th Avenue Greenway was built as a stormwater project, part of the city's Platte to Park Hill flood control plan, and it happens to also be the best public space Cole has gotten in a generation.
What you can actually use right now:
- A full mile of multi-use trail running between Franklin and Steele streets, with specialty lighting for nighttime use
- Denver's first shared street, where pedestrians, cyclists, and cars share the same corridor by design
- Swinging benches installed at the greenway's western edge near Franklin Street
- A mural of civil rights leader John Lewis by artist Thomas "Detour" Evans, also near the Franklin Street end
- Roughly 12 acres of new recreational open space layered on top of what used to be a chronic flooding problem for the neighborhood
The project cost close to $90.8 million, funded largely through stormwater fees, and it's designed to move floodwater safely to the outfall at Globeville Landing Park while doubling as park space the rest of the year. The Colorado chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects gave it an award for exactly that combination, infrastructure that also functions as a real neighborhood gathering space.
The point isn't that the greenway is more important than Rock Drill will eventually be. It's that residents keep waiting for the next headline when the thing that already changed their daily walk is five years old and finished.
Where to Sit With a Drink and Watch It Not Happen Yet
If you want to keep an eye on the Rock Drill fence line without staring at it directly, a few spots make that an easy habit. Gold Point, a whiskey and cocktail bar on Larimer Street that's been pouring since 2018, sits close enough to the greenway to make it a natural stop before or after a walk. A few doors down, Improper City runs 36 taps and a full bar out of a taproom built for exactly this kind of loitering.
Cross over toward RiNo and York Street Yards adds another layer: a bike shop, a furniture showroom, a fitness studio, a hair salon, and Cohesion Brewing Company all sharing one converted industrial block. None of it is technically inside Rock Drill's fence, but all of it is close enough that a resident checking on the site's progress can make an evening of it without much extra walking.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here Now
The realistic read for anyone in Cole right now: expect the grocer conversation to matter more to your daily life than the tower height debate. Expect construction noise and truck traffic on Rock Drill's timeline to be a multi-year story, not a multi-month one, given how long this exact site has taken to get from announcement to entitlement before. And expect the Cole Neighborhood Association to keep taking public comment on the project as it moves through design and landmark review, since that's how the community benefits agreement got negotiated in the first place.
None of that requires you to do anything differently this week. It just means the next time someone tells you Cole is about to look completely different, you can ask them whether they mean the vote or the building, because right now those are still two different things.
If you're weighing what a place like Cole is actually worth to live in, not just what it might become, that's the kind of read Campfire Real Estate specializes in. Dillon Roy has spent enough time in these blocks to know the difference between a headline and a finished project. If you want a second opinion on what's really changing around you, or just want to talk through the neighborhood over coffee, Let's Connect.
