The South Gaylord Corner Reopens This Summer as Two Restaurants, Not One

For fifteen months, the busiest corner on Old South Gaylord Street sat dark. If you walked the block on a Saturday morning between February 2025 and this April, you passed a papered-over window at 1096 and adjusted your route around it. The Grille had been there for twenty-eight years, and then it wasn't.

What replaced it is not a restoration. It is a different corner, run by different people, on different economics, and it opened at the end of April with a second restaurant scheduled to follow it into the adjoining storefront eight weeks later. If you live here, the block you knew in 2024 is not the block you are walking this July.

What Actually Happened at 1096

The short version is public record. The property had been seized by the city for unpaid sales taxes in December 2024 and shut down for good in February 2025. Aaron Grant and Kris Johnson bought the building at 1096 S. Gaylord St. for $6 million in October 2025.

Grant is not a stranger to the block. Grant, who lives in Wash Park and owns Park Coworking on the same block, and Johnson, a Hilltop resident who works in oil and gas and has an office on South Gaylord, bought the formerly embattled real estate for $6 million in October. The corner was purchased by two people who already worked on it.

Then they hired an operator. Hickey comes to Wash Park after a seven-year stint as managing partner at the Capital Grille in Larimer Square. He was with the national chain for 24 years across various locations and said he plans to institute the processes, systems and culture he learned there. That is a different resume than the independent-restaurateur profile that has defined the block for a generation, and it is the pivot that matters most.

Two Restaurants Where There Used to Be One

The old footprint is now split. Hickey said the subsequent interior build-out cost between $1 million and $1.5 million, which included new floors, ceilings, walls, furniture and equipment. The main dining room reopened as Wash Park Social at the end of April, with a horseshoe bar at the entry and more booths than the tables it replaced.

Two months behind it, in the space you knew as Agave Taco Bar: Two months after Social opens, Hickey also will revitalize the former Agave Taco Bar space adjacent to it. That 700 square feet will be a similar styled street taco- and margarita-focused spot called Provecho's.

The menu positioning is honest about who it's for. The menu is set to lean about 75% toward familiar, crowd-pleasing staples and 25% toward more adventurous plates such as grilled octopus, while the beverage lineup plans to spotlight local names like Rebel Bread and Laws Whiskey House. Read that ratio carefully. This is a room designed for weekly regulars, not for occasion diners driving in from Highlands Ranch.

"It's not sexy, but it allows you to be consistent, which is huge for restaurants," Hickey told BusinessDen, describing the Capital Grille systems he is porting over to a neighborhood corner.

For a block whose previous anchor closed after tax seizure, a boring word like consistent is the pitch.

A July Saturday, In Order

If you want to see what the block feels like now, walk it in this order.

1. 9:00 a.m., Devil's Food Bakery, 1004 S. Gaylord. Coffee and a pastry on the south end. The corner has been the morning waypoint for years and did not change through the closure.
2. 10:30 a.m., the park itself. Cross Downing on foot. If it is a Thursday morning instead of Saturday, the Big Garden at Washington Park, 730 S Downing St, hosts volunteers for weeding and planting with Skyler on Thursdays from 7:00 a.m. to noon, run by FANS. Otherwise the lake loop is a mile plus change.
3. 12:30 p.m., Max Gill & Grill, 1052 S. Gaylord. The $2 oyster happy hour that has anchored the middle of the block for more than a decade is still there. It did not need reinventing.
4. 3:00 p.m., Sweet Action, 1061 S. Gaylord. Summer hours run Monday through Thursday 1pm to 10pm, Friday 1pm to 11pm, Saturday 12pm to 11pm, and Sunday 12pm to 10pm.
5. 6:30 p.m., Wash Park Social, 1096 S. Gaylord. The reopened corner. If Provecho's is open by the week you read this, the tacos are next door in the smaller room.

Notice what the list is doing. Four of the five stops are businesses that survived the corner going dark. The fifth is the corner itself, back in a new form. That is the actual shape of what changed.

The Summer Calendar Around the Block

The programming season fills in the rest of the walk.

• Jazz on the Green kicked off June 5, with FANS of Wash Park presenting the Larry Vernec Quartet from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. The series runs through the summer on the park side of Franklin.
• The WPENA Fourth of July celebration is the reliable one. Since 2003, WPENA has organized the annual July 4th Celebration at the historic Boathouse Pavilion in Washington Park. This popular picnic and parade is attended by both East and West Washington Park residents. The event is held annually on July 4th from 11 am – 1 pm, with a children's parade featuring all assortments of bikes, trikes, and strollers at noon.
• Firefly Handmade Markets returns to the block later in the season, alongside the Memorial Weekend Kickoff to Summer and Halloween Trick or Treat Street, which Historic South Gaylord hosts annually.
• Guided bird walks through the park continue through the year. FANS and the Denver Audubon Society offer free guided bird walks in Washington Park throughout the year. Bring your binoculars, camera and your curiosity. Regular species include Mergansers, Canvasbacks, Buffleheads, Pintails, Canada Geese, Redheads, Snowy Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Black-crowned Night Herons, Red-winged Blackbirds, Double-crested Cormorants, Hummingbirds, American White Pelicans, Nuthatches, Sapsuckers, Spotted Towhees, Downy Woodpeckers, Red tailed Hawks, Bald Eagles, and Tree Swallows.

None of these are new. What is new is that after last summer, when the corner was papered over and Perdida absorbed the overflow, the July calendar again has a full anchor at the north end of the strip.

Why This Corner Turned Over So Quickly

Here is the part that is worth understanding, because it explains why the reopening happened in eight months rather than three years.

South Gaylord is not a protected block. Unlike Larimer Square, Denver's only locally designated historic district, protected since 1971, South Gaylord has no historic designation. The neighborhood decided against it, which means there's no regulatory barrier to a property owner bulldozing a century-old building and putting up an office. That absence cuts both ways. It is the reason coworking has crept onto the block. It is also the reason a $6 million private sale in October produced a fully permitted, fully rebuilt restaurant by late April.

The build itself moved faster than most Denver hospitality projects. Everything with the build-out has gone fairly smoothly, in part because the project got into Denver's express permitting program. "It hasn't been as painful as you might expect," he said. A designated historic district would not have made that timeline impossible. It would have made it longer, more expensive, and more likely to end in a lawsuit.

The trade-off is real. What Wash Park loses in guaranteed architectural continuity, it gains in commercial adaptability. When an anchor tenant fails, the block can absorb the failure and reset within a calendar year. That is unusual for a Denver commercial corridor of this age and price point, and it is the quiet mechanism behind what you are seeing this summer.

The Corner Is Back. The Block Is Different.

If you have lived here since before the closure, the honest read is this. The morning half of the block, from Devil's Food up through Sweet Action and Max Gill, is the same one you knew. The evening half at the corner is now run by a chain-restaurant operator's systems, split across two smaller concepts, in a room built from the studs in the last twelve months. Some of what made the old Grille the Grille is not coming back. Some of what will make the new corner work is not on the menu yet.

Walk it in July. Then walk it again in September, after Provecho's has been open for a summer and the block has had a full season to settle around the change. The corner you form an opinion about in July is not the corner you will be forming an opinion about at Trick or Treat Street.

If you are thinking about what a corner turning over means for the homes a few blocks in either direction, or you are simply curious how South Gaylord's evolution is showing up in the way buyers and sellers are pricing East Wash Park this year, Christine Nicholson is a longtime Denver broker who watches this block carefully. Let's Connect.