The rumored play by the Denver Broncos ownership to reach across the freeway into Denver’s Burnham Yard site south of downtown for a future stadium has set off excitement — along with a few worries — in the adjacent neighborhood of Lincoln Park.

Over the years, business owners close to the 10^th and Osage Light Rail Station watched uneasily as land has traded hands on the vast site across the tracks. A century of operations as a railroad mechanic shop had given the area a “brownfield” aura, sparking fears that a substantial cleanup would be needed if it were repurposed.

The city has had a cooperative involvement with business owners there via the Denver Housing Authority (DHA), which managed public housing projects in the neighborhood and carried out a redevelopment of some of those into what proponents called “transit oriented” development in 2011.

“DHA came to us and kept us informed with what was going on,” Jud Davis, president of the historic Buckhorn Exchange restaurant at the corner of 10^th and Osage streets, told The Denver Gazette.

“That’s a little different than whatever is going on now,” Davis added.

A buying spree at Burnham Yard

A month ago, a story, published first by BusinessDen, said interests connected to the Broncos had gone on a $146 million spending spree around the Burnham site, buying up 10 surrounding properties from as far north as 13th Avenue, south to the Sixth Avenue Freeway overpass.

Included was a reported sale in April of a large parcel directly adjacent to the Light Rail station that had been owned by DHA for $7 million.

All of those properties lie close to the mile-long Burnham parcel, owned by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) after it had purchased the ground from the Union Pacific in 2021 for a reported $50 million.

According to reports, the team had also carried out year-long discussions with Denver Water, which has a large campus at 12th and Shoshone Street within a broader district of warehouses and industrial blight.

In a response to a Denver Gazette query, Denver Water replied with a statement, noting that it has operated near the site for more than 130 years and that it has been in discussions about plans for future directions.

“To ensure we maintain our critical operations as the region’s clean water provider, we’ve been in conversation with those developing possible plans for this area to better understand how any potential development would impact us,” Denver Water said in the statement.

“We’ve known that Burnham Yard was going to be redeveloped into something different for decades,” the statement continued.

Denver Water cited requirements to stay abreast of challenges related to operations, emergency response, and legal and financial responsibilities as having driven its conversations.

The water provider offered nothing with regard to how much it had known of possible stadium plans or other specifics.

The crescent shaped Burnham piece, around 58 acres, follows the Light Rail corridor north toward downtown and reaches west into former rail yards.

The state transportation agency’s purchase had been to create “a multimodal, sustainable transportation future along the Front Range,” CDOT Executive Director Shoshana Lew had said at the time.

The Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, along with the state-run High Performance Transportation Enterprise that manages the state’s Express Lane system, participated in buying the site.

The team’s existing lease on Empower Field at Mile High is said to expire at the end of the 2030 football season.

Scant communications

Communications from the Mayor’s office and CDOT — as well as from the team’s management — have been scant after stories of the recent purchases surfaced. A team spokesman implied that the team is still examining other possible sites for a future stadium in Aurora and Lone Tree.

But a check-in with officials involved in Aurora’s vast development activities surrounding Denver International Airport turned up no telltale communications of discussions with the Broncos.

“There is no record of emails between Bronco officials and the city staff,” Ryan Luby, Aurora’s deputy director of communications, told The Denver Gazette.

Luby went on to say that after stories began appearing, the city had done an email search of contacts including councilmembers, and found zero recent contacts.

Likewise, the City of Lone Tree reported no communications with the team. Lone Tree has potentially developable ground as part of its City Center site east of I-25 at RidgeGate Parkway, and a spokeswoman said the city is open to partnering on “community-focused development.”

The growing attention focuses on the Burnham site.

Stadium talk generates excitement

Do business owners see an upside to speculation about the site?

“Absolutely,” said the Buckhorn Exchange’s Davis.

The Buckhorn is recognized as Colorado’s oldest dining establishment and displays Denver’s first liquor license on the backbar. It owes the “Exchange” part of its historic name to having cashed paychecks for rail workers from the yard, who were issued wooden nickels for a free drink.

Today, it sits vulnerably between the ongoing Lincoln Park redevelopment and the empty rail site.

But Jud Davis said the building’s national landmark registration and other historical protections give some confidence it would survive any effort to sweep it away, if big transformations happen.

Davis said he followed along for years as DHA kept a for-sale sign up on the empty parcel to the south, the one sold to a Broncos-related entity this spring.

“I would assume they intend to have at least some portion of that be affordable housing,” he said.

Davis added that he is excited about the stadium prospect, noting that it would rid the restaurant of a frontage beyond the Light Rail station that has long been abandoned and would obviously involve an environmental cleanup.

“It would obviously make sense, having that stadium in proximity to Light Rail,” Davis said.

His single worry, he noted, would be construction tie-ups on the lighter-traveled streets leading in from West Colfax Avenue and from Santa Fe Boulevard that serve the site.

In spite of its humble surroundings, the restaurant has been a continuing dining attraction and a tourist draw, printing versions of its buffalo and venison-laden menu in Japanese and other languages.

Opened in 1893 by Henry H. “Shorty Scout” Zietz, it had run down over the following century until it was purchased in 1976 by the current owners, who updated the kitchen and expanded the dining areas to display Zietz’s vast collections of firearms and hunting trophies.

Walls are lined with photographs of patrons, including numbers of U.S. presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Now the restaurant is luring new media attention focused on the site, including a TV news crew that Davis said showed up last month in the middle of its dinner operation.

“We’re always good with that,” Davis said. “There is no bad publicity.”