If you've walked past 740 South University this year and watched the framing climb above the plywood, you might assume this is the moment Bonnie Brae lost its tavern. It isn't. That happened three years earlier, quietly, with no crane in sight, and it took the neighborhood most of those three years to figure out what actually mattered about what came next.
The tavern is gone. The block isn't done arguing about what replaces it.
What Actually Closed, and When
Carl and Sue Dire opened Bonnie Brae Tavern in June 1934, seven months after the repeal of Prohibition, and their family ran it in the same building for the next 88 years. It closed for good on June 25, 2022. Ricky Dire, the third-generation owner, told the Denver Post at the time that it was "a very bittersweet thing." The Dire family sold the property, along with the building at 750 South University that still houses Wish Gifts and the surrounding parking, for a reported $4.5 million.
Here's the part most people miss: the building sat dark for almost three years before anything visible happened to it. Demolition didn't start until around June 2025, when BusinessDen photographed the remnants coming down. So the loss residents are reacting to now, framing going up where pizza used to come out of the oven, is actually the tail end of a process that started closing in 2022. The tavern didn't die when the bulldozers showed up. It died when the Dire family decided to sell, and everything since has just been the paperwork catching up.
The Building Nobody's Actually Fighting
What's rising at University and Ohio is called akin Bonnie Brae, a joint project from Alpine Investments and Revesco Properties. It's a three-story building with 46 residential units, one to three bedrooms, ranging from 689 to 1,532 square feet, sitting atop roughly 16,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. Construction started in April 2025.
Nobody in Bonnie Brae is fighting whether this building goes up. Denver's zoning already permits three-story mixed-use construction along a commercial corridor like South University, and that fight, if there ever was one, ended when the sale closed. What's worth tracking instead is how much the delivery date has moved. Early reporting in 2024 pointed to a Q1 2025 completion. Once construction actually started, that shifted to Q1 2026. As of this year, Alpine's own project page lists Q1 2027. That's not unusual for infill construction, but it's a useful thing to know if you've been telling yourself the framing will be gone by spring. It probably won't be.
The Fight Neighbors Actually Picked
In June 2026, residents organized around a different question, and it's the one worth paying attention to. Cherry Creek News reported that neighbors rallied to save the character of the South University retail strip, worried that whatever rents the new landlord sets for that 16,500 square feet won't be affordable to the kind of family-run businesses that have occupied the block for decades. City planning and zoning review covers scale, height, parking, and traffic. It does not cover what a landlord charges for a retail lease or which tenants get offered one, and city officials confirmed as much.
That timing matters. Groundbreaking happened in April 2025. The rally happened more than a year later, in June 2026. By the time neighbors organized, the building's footprint, height, and unit count were already settled facts. What's still genuinely undecided isn't the construction. It's who signs the retail leases once the space is ready to fill, and whether the businesses that made this block feel like Bonnie Brae can afford to be among them.
Who's Still There While That Gets Decided
The rest of the 700 block hasn't gone anywhere. Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, at 799 South University, is still the reason there's a line on a summer evening, with a rotating scratch-made flavor list that regulars have opinions about. The Saucy Noodle has been serving pasta since 1964 in a room that hasn't chased any particular trend. Campus Lounge started as a University of Denver sports bar and has since been reworked into something closer to a neighborhood bar, with a beer garden that stays open through the seasons.
Wish Gifts, at 750 South University, has been an independent gift shop since 2012 and sits in the same building that was part of the 2022 sale, which is worth knowing even though nothing currently points to its lease being at risk. Bonnie Brae Liquor, a few doors down at 785 South University, still runs its own tastings. At 724 South University, Bonnie Brae Conoco has been a four-bay service station run by the Wilson family since 1942, doing oil changes and brake jobs the same way it has for decades. And at 730 South University, Ni Tuyo has settled in as the block's Mexican kitchen, opened by chef Silvia Andaya's family, the team behind Adelitas Cocina Y Cantina and La Doña Mezcaleria, with a molcajete menu that's become its own draw.
None of these businesses are inside the construction footprint. They're the reason the debate over what fills 740 South University's ground floor matters as much as it does.
Where the Block Actually Gathers
Here's the piece that gets lost in all the talk about the tavern: the block's real social center was never the restaurant lease. It's Ellipse Park, three blocks east, laid out in 1936 by landscape architect S.R. DeBoer as the centerpiece of the neighborhood plan that developer George Olinger commissioned back in 1923. It's under an acre. That's the point of it. It's not meant to be a destination, it's meant to be the place you end up.
The neighborhood association still holds its late-summer picnic there, and the same park hosts the quarterly zoning-committee session where residents review whatever new construction is on the docket, which this year means the akin Bonnie Brae conversation gets aired in the same green space where kids are finishing ice cream cones from the shop two blocks away. The park has been doing that job since before the tavern's grandchildren were running the kitchen. It'll keep doing it regardless of who signs the retail leases at 740.
If You're on the Belcaro Side
For residents on the east side of Bonnie Brae and Belcaro, University Boulevard isn't always the closest option. Cross Downing Street and you're at Historic Old South Gaylord Street, Denver's second-oldest shopping district, which for a lot of east-side households ends up being the shorter walk. The one practical thing worth knowing if you haven't shopped that block before: parking there runs on a resident permit system, not the open street parking you're used to on University, so it's worth checking before you assume you can just pull up.
The Part Worth Watching
The tavern's closing already happened. The demolition already happened. What hasn't happened yet is the leasing decision that determines whether the ground floor of akin Bonnie Brae ends up occupied by something that fits the block's existing rhythm or something that doesn't. That decision sits with a developer and a leasing office, not with a construction crew, and it won't show up in a permit filing. It'll show up the day a sign goes up in that empty storefront, sometime between now and whenever Q1 2027 actually arrives.
If you want to know when that happens, or when anything else shifts on a block you already know well, Kelli Barton Real Estate sends out neighborhood updates worth having in your inbox. Sign up and you'll hear about it before the sign goes up.
