Drive past 825 S. Colorado Blvd these days and you will see a fence, a faded grocery sign nobody has bothered to take down yet, and a parking lot with more weeds in the cracks than cars. For more than fifty years, this was the King Soopers that Belcaro built its errands around. As of June 2, 2026, it is closed for good. A newer, larger store opened the very next day a mile south at 4201 E. Arkansas Ave., and the strip mall around the old one is headed for demolition.
That much you may already know if you live here. What most residents have not connected is why the thing replacing this corner is noticeably smaller than what was first on the table, and why that gap between the original plan and the current one is the real story of what happens to this stretch of Colorado Boulevard next.
The Grocery Run Got Longer Overnight
The old King Soopers closed at the end of the day on Tuesday, June 2, and the replacement store opened Wednesday morning in Virginia Village, about a mile south. The new location is a $37.1 million, 103,000-square-foot store built on the site of the former Colorado Department of Transportation headquarters. It comes with additions the Belcaro store never had: a Murray's Cheese Shop counter, a King Soopers gas station, and a drive-thru pharmacy.
For a neighborhood used to a two-minute trip for milk, a mile does not sound like much until it is the mile you now drive every single day. In the meantime, Whole Foods in Cherry Creek, Natural Grocers, and the Target on Colorado remain the closer walkable and driveable options while the old site sits fenced off.
Noodle Express Didn't Get a Second Reprieve
The grocery store was not the only casualty. Noodle Express, the Szechuan spot tucked into the same shopping center, served its last dan dan noodles, mapo tofu, and dry-fried beef in late May 2026. This was not its first brush with closure. Loyal diners rallied to keep it open when the shopping center's future first looked shaky back in 2022. This time, with the lease finally running out and the wrecking ball scheduled, there was no saving it. For a lot of longtime residents, that closure stings more than the grocery store swap, because there is no replacement address a mile away to redirect to.
Why the Empty Lot Is Smaller Than It Was Supposed to Be
Here is the part that explains the quiet on that corner right now, and it starts more than a year before the King Soopers sign came down.
In November 2024, Belcaro Park homeowners learned that developer Kentro Group had proposed something far bigger for the seven-acre site: three residential towers, the tallest reaching 12 stories, totaling roughly 700 units alongside retail and green space. The comparison neighbors kept making was to 9+Co, the dense mixed-use development two miles north. A 12-story tower on a corner surrounded by single-family blocks was not a small ask.
Belcaro Park HOA president Susan Livingston and neighbors organized fast. Their first community meeting reportedly drew more than 100 concerned homeowners. Homeowner Jori Hayes described her reaction at the time:
"I immediately thought about, you know, my kids' safety, and what that kind of density and height meant for our block."
By August 2025, Kentro Group dropped the rezoning request entirely. A follow-up piece in the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle quoted longtime resident Carol Simmons framing it as a question of scale, not opposition to growth itself, and noted that every storefront in the shopping center except King Soopers had already sat empty for months awaiting the outcome.
The demolition itself was never really in doubt. Kentro Group had already filed a landmark review application in July 2025 confirming the strip mall would come down regardless of what replaced it. What changed was the size of what comes next. By December 27, 2025, the scaled-back concept plan for EMBREY Belcaro called for a single four-story, wrap-around building on a 4.5-acre portion of the site, with 350 residential units and a share of affordable units built in to comply with Denver's Mandatory Affordable Housing rules. By May 2026, the plan cleared its concept approval and moved into site development review, with the total refined to 347 units, 35 of them reserved for households earning up to 60% of the area median income.
Run the numbers side by side: 700 units across three towers, the tallest at 12 stories, versus 347 to 350 units in a single four-story building. That is less than half the housing and a third of the height. The empty lot behind the fence right now is not evidence of a stalled project. It is what a defeated rezoning application actually looks like on the ground while the smaller version works its way through city review.
The Site Got Cut in Two
There is a second piece most residents have not clocked yet. According to the Bisnow reporting on the concept approval, Kentro Group and Embrey plan to split the roughly 6.5-acre property owned by Dillon Cos., the parent company of King Soopers, into two separate developments: apartments to the north near Colorado Boulevard and Exposition, and retail to the south.
That southern retail piece already has a name attached. A separate application filed in May 2026 proposes demolishing the shuttered liquor store on the property and building a new 18,034-square-foot retail structure in its place, roughly 25 feet tall with 57 parking spaces. It is a fraction of the original three-tower ambition, but it means the corner is not becoming purely residential. Some ground-floor commercial presence, in whatever form it eventually takes, is still part of the plan working through Denver's development review process.
A Second Landmark in Motion, Just Down the Street
Belcaro's run of changing landmarks this year has a smaller companion story a few blocks over in Bonnie Brae. The Conoco station at the corner of University Boulevard, family-owned since 1942, went up for sale in April 2026. Unlike the shopping center, there is no application on file and no scaled-back plan to point to yet. It is simply a gas station that has quietly fueled the same commute for more than eighty years now sitting with a for-sale sign, its next chapter genuinely unwritten.
Two landmarks changing hands in the same year is not a coincidence so much as a reminder that even the most familiar corners in a neighborhood this established are never permanently fixed. The difference is that Belcaro residents have already shown, once, that they get a say in how much change lands on their block.
What This Actually Means for the Next Year or So
If you live in Belcaro, the practical takeaway is this: the mile-long detour to the new King Soopers in Virginia Village is not temporary while a replacement gets built next door. The 347 to 350-unit apartment building going up in its place is residential, not retail, so the neighborhood is not getting its grocery store back on that corner. What it is getting, eventually, is a smaller apartment building than the one it fought off, plus a modest retail piece on the southern edge of the same property still working through city review.
For now, the corner stays quiet. That quiet is not neglect. It is the shape of a fight the neighborhood already won, still being built out one approval at a time.
If you are watching this stretch of Colorado Boulevard because you are weighing what it means for a home you already own here, or because news like this has you wondering how a shifting corner might affect values nearby, Downing Street Group - Engel & Völkers knows this block the way only a team rooted in it can. Request a private consultation whenever you are ready to talk through what it means for you.
