Stand at University Boulevard and Ohio Avenue on a Saturday morning and you can see two different speeds of change without moving your feet. To your left, a sign at the Conoco has quietly flipped from decades of "not for sale" to for sale. A half block south, at the old Bonnie Brae Tavern lot, a rendering board has been staring back at commuters for months while the ground underneath it stays exactly as empty as it was the year before.
That contrast is the real story of Bonnie Brae and Belcaro this year, and it cuts against the assumption most people make when they hear "neighborhood in transition." The family businesses that everyone worried would disappear overnight are the ones moving on the slowest, most deliberate timelines. The big announced projects, the ones with renderings and press releases, are the ones running behind schedule. If you live here, understanding which clock is actually ticking matters more than any single headline.
The Sign That Finally Flipped
The Bonnie Brae Conoco at 724 S. University Blvd. has been a Wilson family operation since 1942, when Ken Wilson's grandfather first leased the station. Wilson himself started working there part time at age 12 in 1978 and has run the place for about 15 years now. In February 2026, a for sale sign went up outside the station for the first time in its history, as CBS Colorado reported, after more than 80 years of continuous family ownership.
What makes this notable is the pace Wilson has set for himself. He isn't shopping the property to the fastest bidder.
"We're just looking now. We're not in a rush. It's not like we're going to sell and be done this year. We're going to get a price we want to get, and if it takes us years to do that's okay."
Denver7's reporting on the 84-year-old station noted that other gas stations once operated across the street and next door, both long gone, leaving the Conoco as the last one standing on that stretch. Wilson believes it may be the only remaining full-service, family-owned gas station left in Denver. Whatever comes next for that corner, the family is setting the timeline, not a developer's spreadsheet.
Forty Years, One Scoop at a Time
A few doors down, Bonnie Brae Ice Cream marked a very different kind of milestone. The shop at 799 S. University Blvd. opened in 1986, and on July 19, 2026, National Ice Cream Day, it threw a 40th birthday celebration with face painting, balloon artists, and prizes running from noon to 5 p.m., according to Mile High on the Cheap. No renderings, no zoning applications, just four decades of the same counter serving the same block.
Between the Conoco's unhurried sale and the ice cream shop's fortieth year, the two most personal, longest-running businesses on the strip are the two showing the least urgency to change anything.
The Lot That's Taken Longer Than Promised
Contrast that with the site one block south, where the Bonnie Brae Tavern served pizza and green chile for 88 years before closing for good in June 2022. The redevelopment plan for that corner, a 46-unit project called akin Bonnie Brae from Alpine Investments and Revesco Properties, has been public since at least 2022. Industry chatter as recently as January 2025 still pointed to an early 2026 delivery.
That date has already come and gone. As of February 2026, Naked Denver reported that a large rendering sign had gone up on the property but that construction had not yet begun. The developer's own site now lists pre-leasing beginning fall 2026, with move-ins pushed to early 2027, more than four years after the Tavern's doors closed and a full year past the timeline the project was originally floated on.
Here's the quick version of how the three storylines actually line up against what residents were told to expect:
| Site | What was announced | What's actually happened |
|---|---|---|
| Bonnie Brae Conoco | Family business, no public timeline | For sale sign up Feb. 2026, family in no hurry to close |
| Old Bonnie Brae Tavern site | Early 2026 delivery for akin Bonnie Brae | Still no construction as of Feb. 2026, pre-leasing pushed to fall 2026 |
| Belcaro King Soopers | 12-story, 700-unit tower proposed | Tower scrapped after pushback, store closed in a single day |
The One That Left Overnight
If the Conoco and the Tavern site show how slowly change moves when families and small developers are involved, the Belcaro King Soopers shows what happens when a national chain decides to move. The store at 825 S. Colorado Blvd. had operated for more than 50 years before it closed on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, with a new $37.1 million, 103,000-square-foot King Soopers opening the very next day in Virginia Village, complete with a Murray's Cheese Shop and a Starbucks, as Denverite covered the handoff.
The site itself had a longer, messier road behind it. Developer Kentro Group originally proposed three towers, the tallest reaching 12 stories, with roughly 700 units combined on the seven acre lot, a plan that drew sustained pushback from Belcaro Park homeowners over height and density. Denver7 reported that Kentro dropped the rezoning request entirely after the organized response. What's moving forward now is a scaled-back, four-story, 347-unit building from Kentro and Embrey, with the concept plan approved and the project entering the city's site development phase.
So the grocery store left in a single day. The building that will eventually replace the empty shopping center around it took more than a year of public meetings, one abandoned tower, and a full redesign to get this far.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this points to a neighborhood being remade overnight. It points to a neighborhood where three very different clocks are running at the same time, and only one of them, the corporate one, moves fast. The family businesses that give Bonnie Brae and Belcaro their identity are selling and celebrating on their own schedules. The developer-led projects are the ones lagging behind their own press releases. If you're wondering where to fill up now that the Conoco's future is uncertain, or when the old Tavern corner will actually look like anything, the honest answer is: slower than the signage suggests, and probably slower than you'd guess from driving past once.
Keep an eye on two things this fall. Pre-leasing for akin Bonnie Brae is expected to open, which should finally answer what retail, if any, lands on the ground floor. And the Belcaro Center site development plan will move through its next round of city review, which is usually when specifics about the 347 units start to firm up.
Molly Weiss has spent her career watching corners like this one change at Denver's actual pace, not the pace of a rendering board. If you're curious about what any of this means for a specific block or a specific house nearby, Let's Connect.
