Elitch Gardens owners pay $7M for site south of Meow Wolf

The owners of Elitch Gardens have purchased additional land just south of the amusement park.

Denver-based Revesco Properties and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment paid $7.35 million last week for a 2.5-acre site in the 1300 and 1400 block of North Zuni Street in the Sun Valley neighborhood, according to public records.

The property — 1380 and 1432 N. Zuni St. and 1940, 1948 and 1950 W. 14th Ave. — is industrial in nature and vacant.

“It’s a site that I don’t necessarily have a vision for,” Revesco President and CEO Rhys Duggan told BusinessDen. “But if I didn’t buy it, five years from now I would look back and wonder why we didn’t buy it.”

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, founded by billionaire Stan Kroenke, is the parent company of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche. Revesco is a real estate investor and developer.

The site is one block south of Meow Wolf, the tourist attraction that opened in 2021. Its building rising above the viaducts at 1338 1st St. — “Even long-time residents of Denver didn’t know where that was,” Duggan said — was developed by Revesco and Kroenke.

North of that is Elitch Gardens. Kroenke and Revesco purchased the business and its real estate in 2015, and plan to eventually move the park and redevelop the site into a new neighborhood named River Mile.

Separately, Kroenke also owns the Pepsi Center, where the Nuggets and Avalanche play, and wants to redevelop the sea of parking lots that surround the venue. The River Mile and Pepsi Center sites, separated by railroad tracks, are about 115 acres combined.

The property along Zuni Street was sold by the Siegel family, which operated a petroleum distribution business at the site for years before selling it to a firm called Diesel Direct in 2017, according to a news release from the sellers. Evan Makovsky, Dorit Fischer and Hayden Hirschfeld of NAI Shames Makovsky represented the sellers.