Phill Foster and Company

Gates Rubber plant site sold:

The 41-acre site formerly occupied by the Gates Rubber Plant at Interstate 25 and Broadway Street in Denver has sold to Frontier Renewal, a national brownfield redeveloper.

The purchase closed last week for an undisclosed amount, according to an announcement from Denver-based Frontier Monday.

Frontier will finish the cleanup work on the site and will "re-entitle the property for its highest and best use, as well as prepare the site for vertical development," the announcement said.

The former Gates rubber factory has blighted the South Denver landscape for more than a decade. Now that demolition is underway, can the redevelopment reality match the award-winning mixed-use plan that fell apart five years ago?

It’s finally coming down.

After a dozen vacant years, a tragic urban-spelunking accident and a last-ditch attempt at historic preservation, demolition is underway at the old Gates Rubber factory on South Broadway.

Established in 1911, Gates Corporation shut down the once-thriving rubber plant in 2001 and moved its headquarters to LoDo. The manufacturing jobs -- which once numbered 5,500 in Denver -- migrated to facilities in the southeastern U.S. as well as Asia and Europe.

The property has a lot of potential to be redeveloped as residential space.

At its mid-century peak, the Denver factory was one of the biggest manufacturers of automotive and industrial belts and hoses on Earth. The company still makes plenty of belts and hoses, but not in Denver.

The south half of the facility had a date with the wrecking ball in 2007 and the 419-unit Windsor at Broadway Station apartment complex took its place in 2009. But the hulking, graffiti-spackled eyesore north of Mississippi Avenue just sat there with broken windows for the last 13 years, a reminder of a different era for the local manufacturing industry. But it's finally fading from the city's scenery, and will once and for all be history by the end of the year.

In 2007, Metro State student John Polzin died when he fell down an elevator shaft during an illegal "urban exploration," raising questions about security and whether the abandoned complex was a public hazard. Jared Jacang Maher wrote an excellent story about Polzin and the Gates site for Westword later that year.

The north side of the old rubber factory owed its survival to 2013 in large part to the recession, which quashed the 50-acre, $1 billion redevelopment, the largest in Denver since Stapleton, about five years ago. Developer Cherokee Denver ultimately couldn’t finance the project, and the award-winning plan for a mixed-use development, complete with more than 3,000 housing units and 1.75 million square feet of retail, restaurant and office space, never left the drawing board.

Gates took the title to the property back in 2009. Then University of Colorado student Eugene Elliott complicated the demolition with an attempt at historic preservation in 2012.

Hurdles cleared, Gates started demolishing the complex in Nov. 2013. In the process, the company is decontaminating the site of trichloroethelyne and asbestos, among other nasty things.

Established in 1911, Gates Corporation shut down the once-thriving rubber plant in 2001 and moved its headquarters to LoDo.

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