"For a break worth about $222 per day," Dan Cohen told Denverite in June, "hundreds of people use the park every day." Cohen runs D4 Urban, the company that owns the acre of land at 363 S. Broadway where Broadway Bark sits, and he was talking about a property tax exemption that might not survive the summer. The dog park could close. Not because anyone wants to build something else there. Because a state law rewrote the fine print on who's allowed to lease land to a dog park for a dollar a year.
That's Baker's actual news cycle this August, and once you notice the pattern, it's everywhere. The three developments people are actually talking about on this stretch of South Broadway right now, a dog park fight, a new bar, and a walking tour that happened three weeks ago, have nothing to do with new construction. Each one is a second use for space that was already sitting there.
An acre with no address, running on a workaround
Broadway Bark opened in 2023 inside Broadway Park, D4 Urban's 75-acre master development at Broadway and Alameda that mixes big-box retail, freestanding restaurants, and a growing stack of apartment buildings. Cohen and his partners lease the acre to Broadway Park North Metropolitan District for a dollar a year. The district fenced it, split it into sections for big dogs and small dogs, and pays for a maintenance crew that keeps it noticeably cleaner than a typical off-leash run. Denver operates 17 city dog parks. Broadway Bark isn't one of them.
The deal worked financially because the land qualified for a property tax exemption tied to public-benefit use of a site that's still waiting on future development. That exemption was worth roughly $81,000 a year, and the district paid the company about $58,000 to cover its own lost revenue from granting it, which nets out to the $222-a-day figure Cohen cited. Then in 2025 the state legislature passed House Bill 25-1289, adding scrutiny to exemptions on metro-district land leased from a board member who also happens to own the property. That describes Cohen exactly, and the Denver Assessor's Office used the new law to pull the automatic exemption.
Getting it back now requires a City Council vote. By mid-July, according to BusinessDen, D4 Urban's request had already reached Council, and a committee held a hearing where longtime regulars showed up to make the case in person. State law gives Council 63 days from that kind of request to decide, which points toward a final vote landing sometime in September if it hasn't happened already. Jordan Bentley, who told the committee he lives a seven-minute drive from the park, put it plainly: "I know like 15 or 20 people that I would consider friends just from going there all the time." A petition supporting the exemption has topped 1,000 signatures.
If you use the park, the practical takeaway is simple: don't assume it's permanent, but don't assume it's gone either. Watch for the Council vote before you build a routine around it disappearing.
A basement, not a groundbreaking
On March 12, 2026, a bar called Vaultaire opened directly underneath La Forêt at 38 S. Broadway. Same address, same building, a floor nobody had been using. La Forêt has run the ground floor since March 2024, in the room that housed Beatrice & Woodsley for more than a decade before it, and Vaultaire is the first concept to open inside that building without displacing the one already running upstairs.
Vaultaire runs Thursday through Saturday, spinning European synth wave, post-punk, and underground disco off an analog record system beneath vaulted ceilings and ornate woodwork left over from the building's earlier life. Chef Jamie Rutherford keeps the French thread going downstairs with small plates built for sharing: mussels in a brava sauce, smoked trout and mackerel in olive oil, and a cheese course that includes Le Petit Basque and Gabriel Coulet Roquefort. It's designed as the natural second stop after dinner upstairs, and the crowds have treated it that way.
Speaking of upstairs, La Forêt is currently running a limited dinner menu called Summer in Provence through the end of August, served Tuesday through Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m. Sunday brunch keeps its usual 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. window if the dinner reservation doesn't pan out, which on weekends it often doesn't without advance notice.
None of this required Baker to add a single square foot. The neighborhood's own planning document draws a hard line on where growth is supposed to happen: the Baker Neighborhood Plan marks the Gates Rubber site and the Broadway Marketplace near Alameda station as Areas of Change, where larger redevelopment is expected, and treats the rest of the corridor, including this block, as an Area of Stability, where the existing building stock stays put. A basement bar is what expansion looks like when the building above it isn't going anywhere.
The walking tour that skipped the postcard version of Baker
On August 8, the Baker Historic Neighborhood Association ran its sixth annual walking tour, organized by Kevin Henderson, who chairs the group and is currently a few months into gutting his own 1889 Queen Anne on the same blocks the tour covers. Roughly half the buildings in Baker's 150-acre historic district are Queen Anne style, all turrets and gingerbread trim, and most guides to the neighborhood lean on that image. This year's route pointed at what doesn't fit it:
- An Art Deco fire station
- A Collegiate Gothic elementary school
- A rare Second Empire home
- A Hobo Craftsman bungalow
- A midcentury modern showroom
- An English Cottage style stone church
Henderson's own ADU sits on the same lot as the Queen Anne he's rebuilding, a small case study in the same question the dog park and the basement bar are both answering: how do you get more out of a property in a neighborhood where the lot lines were drawn more than a century ago and aren't moving. "Baker is going through gentrification," Henderson told the Denver Gazette, "but the core Bohemian charm is still here." The tour was his evidence: a neighborhood confident enough in its own identity to spend a Saturday showing off the buildings that don't match the brochure.
Same lots, more uses
Three headlines that read as unrelated share one answer running underneath all of them. Baker's growth this year isn't happening at the edges of the neighborhood. It's happening inside lots and buildings that already exist. An interim dog park, funded by a tax workaround, now needs a City Council vote to survive. A basement under a French restaurant became a second restaurant without a permit for a single new wall. A neighborhood association spent a Saturday walking people past its own accessory dwelling units and its own non-Victorian buildings to make the point that Baker was always more varied than its Queen Anne reputation suggests.
The outside attention that's followed, MAKfam chef Kenneth Wan picking up a 2026 James Beard semifinalist nod for Best Chef: Mountain, Baker jumping 34 spots to land at number 11 on 5280's Best Neighborhoods list this year, is a response to something residents already knew. The neighborhood didn't get more interesting this year. People outside it just started paying attention to what was already happening on the same handful of blocks.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely, whether you're deciding to stay put or wondering what your own lot could still do for you, that's the exact conversation The Denver Group is built to have. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening on your street.
