Stephen Julia is about to open an Ace Hardware in a City Park West building he owns — three years later than he thought.
“We’re through it, and I’m excited,” Julia said of a lengthy zoning and permitting process. “Seeing the store come together and having product in it is awesome.”
The shop will start slinging tools, grills and other outdoor equipment on April 14 at 2101 Humboldt St.
Ace will take up just over 8,000 square-feet of a roughly 10,000 square-foot section in the building, Julia said. That extra space means a meatier selection of grills and outdoor gear, he added.
Julia hopes to fill out the remaining space with a restaurant or cafe, which has a patio that can sit up to 50 people.
“We’re rolling right into spring, which is awesome timing,” he said. “We might sell a little snow melt (at first), but then we’re going into grass seed and fertilizer and grilling.”
He said the buildout cost $1.5 million and took much longer than anticipated. He started the rezoning process in 2020. In April 2021, he told BusinessDen he hoped to open within a year.
“Six months zoning, six months plan review and one year of construction,” Julia said of his original timeline. “Even with a six month buffer, I was off by two, two-and-a-half years.”
He viewed certain regulations, like parking space requirements, as cumbersome and counterintuitive. Without investors and an annual property tax bill in the $50,000s, Julia said the delays almost stopped construction altogether.
“You don’t get an abatement because the city is making you wait… For four-and-a-half years I had this property sitting vacant,” he said.
He noted that inspectors and people in the planning office were pleasant to work with, calling it more of a macro problem.
“I think there’s quite a disconnect between the zoning regulations and what Denver says they want to do,” he said. “They say they want a bikable, walkable city, but they want me to put in 25 parking spaces. We’re creating a small local neighborhood hub. You don’t need 25 spaces for an Ace Hardware.”
To satisfy the requirement, he is leasing spaces from a church next door.
“It’s Denver. The reason it took so long is because the city of Denver,” he said. “They don’t have enough help, and, frankly, they came close to killing this project.”
He envisions the corner, which is right near St. Joseph’s Hospital, becoming a retail center similar to what Spinelli’s Market has at Dexter St and 23rd in North Park Hill.
He said the hardware store is just phase one.
The next step will be knocking down the 10,000 square-foot warehouse that’s home to Jerry’s Nut House, a nut and snack distributor that Julia’s grandfather founded in 1948. He said the space, which is connected to the Ace, only has one dock and it’s difficult to get semi-trucks there.
“We want a bigger space with easier access that we can grow into,” he said.
Julia sold his majority stake in the business last year but said he still owns five percent.
“It’s really just so I can be involved and be on the board so to speak and help with these kinds of things,” he said. He also owns restaurants at The Denver Central Market in RiNo and the Edgewater Public Market, which, along with Ace, take up a good chunk of his time.
Once the warehouse is knocked down, Julia hopes to build a mixed use, three-story building.
On the ground floor, he sees 5,500 to 6,500 square-feet of retail broken out into four or five units. With the two levels above, he wants to put in eight to ten apartments.
But he’s already running into trouble with Denver.
It’s only regulated for two-and-a-half levels, and Julia said the city has already denied rezoning.
“Denver needs more of these little pockets of retail, yet we’re so restricted in creating that,” Julia said. “It makes it really difficult to open a small business here.”
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