Walk 39th Avenue between Franklin and Williams and you'll see the same thing you saw twelve months ago: a chain-link perimeter dressed up in murals, a scatter of parked cars, and behind it, six and a half acres of brick warehouses that mostly sit empty. A coffee stand still operates somewhere inside. A handful of industrial offices and a few condo units are still the only things using the space. That's it. That's the Denver Rock Drill site today, the same as it was the week Denver City Council voted to approve it.
The vote happened on September 15, 2025. Council approved a rezoning, a development agreement, and a package of up to $39.1 million in tax-increment financing for what's being called a $585 million redevelopment. If you only read the headline that week, you'd think Cole was about to get a construction crane on every corner. A year later, the fence hasn't moved, and there's no public groundbreaking date. What has changed is everything a block or two away, and that's the part nobody's writing about.
What the vote actually bought
Start with what got approved, because it's easy to overstate. The rezoning lets the site go from industrial to mixed-use, clearing the path for a project that could eventually bring up to 800 residential units, 60,000 square feet of office space, 150,000 square feet of retail, and hundreds of hotel rooms to a stretch of Cole that currently has none of that. Renderings from the design team have shown building heights ranging from around 16 stories in some early plans to as tall as 22 in others, depending on which version of the concept you're looking at. Nothing there is finalized.
The $39.1 million in tax-increment financing, funneled through the Denver Urban Renewal Authority, isn't a blank check for new construction. Roughly 80 percent of that reimbursement is earmarked specifically for rehabbing the historic structures already on site, the sawtooth-roofed industrial buildings that have stood since the Denver Rock Drill Manufacturing Company built its first plant there in 1910. The Weiss family has owned the property since 1992. Their development partner, OliverBuchananGroup, is working with a design bench that includes Tryba Architects, Sasaki, Gensler, S.A. Miro, and Semple Brown Design, with PCL Construction lined up to build it. That's a lot of firepower for a site that, right now, is mostly murals and a parking lot.
The community benefits agreement attached to the deal is where the real commitments live. Denver Urban Renewal Authority set a small-business enterprise goal of 23 percent of the construction contract value, paired with a First Source hiring commitment that prioritizes local residents for permanent jobs on the finished project. The agreement also locks in a pursuit of a neighborhood grocer, since Cole has been described as a food desert for years, along with publicly accessible community space and support for local artists.
John Deffenbaugh, CEO of Historic Denver, testified in favor of the deal, framing the adaptive reuse approach in terms that matter for anyone who cares about what gets torn down versus kept:
"Retaining and adaptively reusing an existing building is infinitely more sustainable from environmental and community perspectives than a new build."
That's the argument that got this project through council. It's also the reason the timeline is what it is. Sasaki's own project page describes the work as still moving through entitlement, with rezoning, design advancement, and further approvals still ahead before anyone breaks ground. There's no contradiction here. Preservation-heavy redevelopment on a century-old industrial site takes longer than a clean teardown, and nobody involved has claimed otherwise.
The transformation that already happened
Here's the part worth sitting with. While Rock Drill works through its design and approval steps, the two blocks immediately around it quietly finished becoming something else entirely.
The 39th Avenue Greenway is done. What used to be a stretch of cracked pavement between Franklin and Steele is now a 12-acre linear park, and it runs right along the edge of the Rock Drill property. The Cole Neighborhood Association's own materials describe Rock Drill's future plans as extending that greenway further, which only makes sense if the base version is already built and functioning, which it is. You can walk it today. Families do.
A few blocks over, York Street Yards has spent the same stretch of time filling up. It's a 550,000-square-foot flex campus on a 26-acre lot at 3863 Steele Street, built out of a 1940s industrial building, and unlike Rock Drill it isn't waiting on anyone's vote. Current tenants include:
- Cohesion Brewing Company
- Skiptown
- Beat The Bomb
- Elemental Bakery & Cafe
- Stick & Feather
- RAD Power Bikes
- Craft Collective
- River Bear American Meats
- Adults & Crafts
That's a brewery, an escape-room-style entertainment concept, a bakery, a bike shop, and a meat purveyor operating inside restored brick with exposed wood beams and a shared plaza, all leasing space right now. None of it needed tax-increment financing or a City Council hearing. It just needed tenants willing to sign leases in a building that was already standing.
A short walk south, Gold Point has been Cole's go-to happy hour spot since it opened in 2018, built on the idea that a seasonally rotating menu and a serious whiskey list don't require much pretension to work. It's not part of anyone's redevelopment plan. It's just been there, doing the job a neighborhood bar is supposed to do, for eight years.
Why the gap matters
The instinct when a project like Rock Drill gets approved is to treat the neighborhood as frozen until the cranes show up, as if nothing counts until the big thing finishes. That's backwards. The actual foot traffic, the actual reason someone might walk two extra blocks on a Friday night, is already sorted a few addresses over from the fence everyone keeps watching.
None of this means Rock Drill won't matter eventually. Up to 800 units and 150,000 square feet of retail would change the daily rhythm of this stretch of Cole in a real way, and the preservation of those sawtooth-roofed buildings is the kind of adaptive reuse that tends to age well rather than look dated in a decade. But eventually isn't now, and the entitlement process Sasaki describes doesn't come with a fixed end date. What's true today is that the greenway is finished, York Street Yards is leased up with a genuinely interesting tenant mix, and Gold Point is still pouring drinks the way it has since 2018.
If you live near 39th and Franklin, the mural-covered fence is worth watching for what it eventually becomes. It's just not where the neighborhood's actual change has been happening this past year.
You can track the entitlement process yourself through Denverite's coverage of the council vote or through the Cole Neighborhood Association's development page, which posts meeting notices as they're scheduled.
Projects like Rock Drill tend to show up in a neighborhood's character years before they show up in a listing description. Joey Hoisescu keeps an eye on entitlement filings and TIF packages around Denver for exactly that reason. If you're curious how a project like this one is likely to ripple through a specific block in Cole, that's worth a direct conversation before the fence ever comes down.
