If you live inside the ellipse, you already know the block. Ohio to Exposition, the strip of storefronts along the 700s of South University Boulevard where the neighborhood does most of its incidental gathering. What you may not have registered, because it happened quietly and in pieces, is that the block you walk to on a Tuesday evening in August 2026 is not the block you walked to two summers ago. Two of its longest-standing anchors changed at the same time. One is gone. The other just turned forty.
This is a piece about that shift, and about the small routines that have absorbed it.
Two Addresses, One Story
Walk south from Exposition and the first thing you pass on the west side is 740 South University. For most of the last century that address belonged to Bonnie Brae Tavern, which the Dire family opened in June 1934, seven months after the repeal of Prohibition. It closed in June 2022 after eighty-eight years. The building sat dark for a stretch, and then the plywood came down.
What is rising in its place is Akin Bonnie Brae, a three-story luxury apartment building with ground-floor retail from Denver-based Alpine Investments. Construction began in April 2025 with completion targeted for the first quarter of 2026, meaning the framing and finish work has been the block's ambient soundtrack for most of the last year. If you have wondered why the traffic pattern near Ohio Avenue has felt off, that is why.
Cross the street and walk two doors down and you arrive at 799 South University. That is Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, which took over the old Dolly Madison parlor in 1986 and, on July 19 of this year, threw a fortieth-birthday party with face painting, balloon artists, and a line down the sidewalk from noon until five. National Ice Cream Day and a fortieth anniversary landed on the same Sunday, which is the kind of coincidence a block like this notices.
The story of the 700 block right now is the story of those two addresses next to each other. One anchor lost, one anchor doubling down. The center of gravity did not disappear. It shifted about a hundred feet south.
The Anchors Still Standing
The block reads differently once the Tavern is subtracted, but the roster is deeper than a single loss suggests. A quick inventory, useful mostly for reminding yourself what you have been walking past:
- Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, 799 S. University. Handmade, forty years in, and still the reason the sidewalk on a July evening feels like a slow-moving parade. Expect a line.
- The Saucy Noodle. Open since 1964. Order the pasta. The room has the same handwritten-menu energy it had when your neighbors' parents were regulars.
- Campus Lounge. Originally a University of Denver sports bar, revamped under new ownership into something closer to a neighborhood bar with an updated menu, though it kept enough of its old bones to still feel like the Campus Lounge.
- Bonnie Brae Liquor, 785 S. University. The wine store that has quietly been doing tastings and small events for years.
- Ni Tuyo, 730 S. University. The Mexican kitchen that took the old 730 South space and turned it into a room that Yelp reviewers in 2026 still put at the top of the block.
- Pink's. The women's boutique in the middle of the strip that has outlasted most of the retail concepts that opened around it.
- Eugene Field Branch Library. Denver Public Library's small branch at the southeast corner of the commercial district, on University at Ohio. The story-time crowd is a decent leading indicator of how many strollers are on the block that morning.
There is also a laundromat, a Conoco, and the flower shop, all of which have carried the Bonnie Brae name at some point and which give the strip its slightly strange, almost-village texture. That texture is not an accident. It is what happens when the same six or seven family businesses occupy the same six or seven storefronts for four decades.
Ellipse Park Absorbs The Overflow
The 700 block does not have a plaza. What it has, three blocks east and set at the geometric center of the neighborhood's diagonal street grid, is Ellipse Park. Landscape architect Saco DeBoer laid it out in 1936 as the centerpiece of the plan George Olinger commissioned in 1923, and it is still doing the job DeBoer designed it to do. The park is small. Under an acre. That is the point.
The block is where you buy the ice cream. The park is where you eat it.
On a weekday evening in late August the walk from 799 South University to the park's south edge takes about six minutes, and it is the walk that half the ice-cream cones on the block are quietly headed toward. The Neighborhood Association still holds its late-summer picnic there, and the association's four-times-a-year meeting cycle uses the park for the zoning-committee session where residents review whatever new scrape-and-build is on the docket. If you have never sat in on one, this is the season to try. The docket is unusually full right now because the construction cycle that started around Akin Bonnie Brae has not fully worked its way through the surrounding blocks.
The Ten-Minute Walk East
Something the 700 block does not always get credit for is that it is not the only retail strip within an easy walk. Continue east past Ellipse Park and cross Downing and you arrive at Historic Old South Gaylord Street, between Mississippi and Tennessee. It is the second-oldest shopping district in Denver, and for residents on the east side of Bonnie Brae it is often the closer option.
Two practical notes for people who have lived here long enough to stop reading signs carefully:
Old South Gaylord's block has resident-only parking restrictions in effect on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. If you drive over on a Friday for dinner, you will be circling. Walk or bike.
And the Old South Gaylord events calendar is quieter than it used to be. The district's public calendar shows no upcoming events on the books as of this writing, which is a departure from the summer rhythm of prior years. Gaylord Street Days, the Memorial Day fixture that used to bookend the season, is worth checking directly with the merchant group rather than assuming it repeats on the old schedule.
The point is not that the strip has emptied out. The restaurants and the boutiques are still there. The point is that the programming that used to draw a crowd from Bonnie Brae westward has thinned, and Old South Gaylord in August 2026 rewards a quiet Sunday-morning walk more than a big Saturday-night outing.
What Changes This Fall
A few things worth watching as the light shortens.
Akin Bonnie Brae's ground-floor retail bays will start signing tenants. Whatever lands there will set the tone for the block for the next decade, in the same way that Bonnie Brae Tavern's arrival in 1934 set the tone for the ninety years that followed. If you have opinions, the Neighborhood Association is the venue.
The Eugene Field library's fall programming picks up in September, which reliably increases weekday foot traffic on the south end of the strip.
And Bonnie Brae Ice Cream stays open through the fall. The line gets shorter. The flavors rotate toward the pumpkin end of the spectrum. The forty-year-old family shop that anchored the block through the Tavern's closing and the Akin construction will keep doing what it does. If you have not been in since the birthday, go on a Wednesday around seven. That is when the block feels most like itself.
Bonnie Brae was designed, in 1923, to feel like a village. Saco DeBoer's winding streets and Olinger's stone pillars at the Kentucky and Tennessee entrances are still there. Ellipse Park is still at the center. The 700 block is still the front porch. What has changed this year is which chairs on that porch are occupied and by whom. That is a smaller change than it looks from the sidewalk, and a larger one than it looks from a distance.
If you are thinking about a move within Bonnie Brae, a quiet sale off-market, or simply want a candid read on how the Akin build-out and the block's evolving retail mix are shaping values in the surrounding streets, Stuart Crowell works this neighborhood house by house. Request a private market valuation or inquire about exclusive off-market opportunities.
