Spoooooky mystery towers! Image: JLL
It’s been three long years since we examined the interesting traces of what appeared to be very early plans for a tower development at the site of former downtown pizzeria Frank & Angie’s at 508 West Avenue, and in the following years we’ve seen a few changes at the corner of West Sixth Street and West Avenue — Hut’s Hamburgers closed, the Favorite Liquor & Wine store next door closed, and Frank & Angie’s left the building which reopened with a new tenant and intense paint job as Taquero Mucho.
Looking west towards 508 West Avenue, at the parking lot and restaurant (now painted pink) now known as Taquero Mucho.
A few properties around this corner have changed hands in the last three years as well — our 2018 article explored a newly-formed corporate entity known as 506 West Avenue LP connected with local investment firm Manifold Real Estate that purchased the 506 West Avenue property currently home to restaurant Irene’s right next door to Frank & Angie’s back in 2018. In the years since then that same LP has gone on to purchase the former Frank & Angie’s property at 508 West Avenue, along with West Sixth-facing bars Concrete Cowboy and The Dogwood.
Looking at Concrete Cowboy and the Dogwood from West Sixth Street.
This same Manifold-related entity already owns the building across the street from Frank & Angies at 507 West Avenue formerly used as a leasing office for the Fifth & West condo tower next door — that tower’s developers at Riverside Resources have many connections to Manifold and its founder Tyler Grooms. It’s important to note that the one property these folks don’t appear to own around here is the West Sixth-facing tract on the west side of West Avenue — yeah, that’s “west” three times — home to what used to be Hut’s Hamburgers but recently reopened as retro-Italian eatery Sammie’s, along with the shuttered liquor store on the corner.
A view of the former Hut’s Hamburgers building in the process of its recent transformation into Italian restaurant Sammie’s.
This is all suddenly important because Manifold seems to be marketing these consecutive properties it has assembled as a prime location for a multi-tower development on both sides of West Avenue. A listing is live this month via commercial real estate giants JLL for what’s described as a 0.95-acre tract using the address 508 West Avenue — and the property page, using the extremely creative title 6th & West, features a concept rendering of a two-tower development spanning West Avenue:
We’re looking south over West Sixth Street here. That’s West Avenue running between the towers. Image: JLL
There’s a lot to ponder about this rendering, though as we know from other similar marketing pushes there’s absolutely no reason why anything built here has to look like this — it’s just a snazzy way to show what could be built here under the assembly’s potential entitlements and scale. That’s why it’s kind of weird that in the tower image above, Sammie’s (f.k.a. Hut’s) and the liquor store facing West Sixth Street are both gone — going by the orientation above, they would be in front of the building on the right. Though the removal of these buildings could theoretically still take place, we’re thinking they’ve been left out simply for better visibility of the concept tower that would otherwise have its ground floor hidden behind them. Here’s the same perspective as the rendering above, just a bit lower to the ground:
You’ll recall that listing above describes a 0.95-acre assembly at 508 West Avenue, but the actual 508 property is a lot smaller, so we have to start doing math. Adding together the acreage of the Manifold-connected properties at 508 West Avenue (Irene’s), 506 West Avenue (Taquero Mucho f.k.a. Frank & Angies), 719 West Sixth Street (Concrete Cowboy), 715 West Sixth Street (The Dogwood), and 507 West Avenue (former Fifth & West leasing office now used as office space), we come up with a total area of 0.9467 acres, the only way you can get that approximately 0.95 acre figure — no other combination of these properties that includes the Sammie’s/liquor store tract comes nearly as close, and Manifold doesn’t appear to have any connection to that one at the moment anyway.
We loved you, Hut’s, even though your owner was mean to us when we asked him about all this stuff in 2018. C’est la vie! Image: Cherry Bream / Flickr
Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of these restaurants and bars will face the wrecking ball to make way for immediate redevelopment even if these properties find a buyer, since some people like to buy property and never, ever build anything — still, the potential for West Avenue to host a lot of tower kinda speaks for itself.
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