The Hornet Closed. MAKfam Is Expanding. They Sat on the Same Corner.

Stand at 1st Avenue and Broadway long enough and you'll see both halves of this year's story without moving your feet. On one corner, a building that housed a neighborhood restaurant for 29 years now has a "for lease" sign in the window. Just off that same intersection, a Michelin-recognized kitchen that started as a food hall stall is getting ready to open a second, larger location clear across town. Same intersection, same twelve months, two opposite outcomes.

That's the detail that gets lost when people talk about South Broadway changing. It isn't changing evenly. It's changing by address.

What Happened at 76 Broadway

The Hornet served its last brunch on August 9, 2025, closing after 29 years at 76 Broadway. The restaurant still had two years left on its lease when the building sold that May for $3.3 million to an entity called 76 N Broadway LLC, according to property records. A "for lease" sign went up not long after. The owners never gave a single tidy reason for closing, only that things at 1st and Broadway had gotten "more complicated" over the years.

This month marks a year since that closure, which makes it a useful marker for measuring what's actually turned over on this strip and what hasn't.

What's Happening Across the Intersection

Kenneth Wan and Doris Yuen opened MAKfam in 2023 at 39 West 1st Avenue, close enough to the Hornet's corner that the two addresses share an intersection. What started as counter-service Chinese food in a fifty-seat room earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation, and this year Wan was named a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Mountain.

Instead of scaling up in place, MAKfam is opening a second location inside the Edit, an apartment building at 3463 Walnut Street in RiNo, in a corner unit that will finally give the concept a full bar, table service and reservations, none of which the original counter offers. No official date has been confirmed, though the team has been targeting a fourth-quarter 2026 debut. The Baker original stays open exactly as it is.

The New Table on the Design District Block

A few blocks south, Mother Other opened at 675 South Broadway, Suite 300, on June 27, 2026, timed to debut on Pride weekend. Chef Alexi Mandolini and beverage director Taylor Herbert are the team behind the food truck The Easy Vegan, which won Season 16 of Food Network's "The Great Food Truck Race" in 2023 after six years of pop-ups and farmers market stalls. Mother Other is their first brick-and-mortar, a 55-seat dining room with patio seating for about 16 more, built out largely by the owners themselves rather than through a contractor.

The restaurant runs Thursday through Sunday, 4 to 10 p.m., in the stretch of Baker known as the Denver Design District. Two months into its run, it's a second reason Broadway pulls a dinner crowd on a weeknight rather than just a weekend.

The Anchors That Didn't Move

Set against a closure and two expansions, a handful of Broadway fixtures haven't budged at all this year, and they're the businesses that make the strip still feel like itself:

• Hi-Dive, at 7 South Broadway, has booked touring and local acts since 2003 in a 285-capacity room that has stayed musician-owned the whole time.
• Wax Trax Records Broadway Bazaar, at 200 South Broadway, opened in 2023 in partnership with vintage shop Lady Lazarus, stocking vinyl and vintage clothing under one roof.
• Antique Row, running the 1200 and 1700 blocks, holds more than 30 dealers, some in the same storefronts for over three decades, including Eron Johnson Antiques with a stock of more than 3,500 pieces.

The Historic Baker District traces its beginnings to 1872 and holds the highest concentration of Queen Anne Victorian homes in Denver's historic center, according to Historic Denver, the nonprofit that leads walking tours through the neighborhood.

None of these businesses are new, and none are going anywhere. The pattern is worth noticing: the addresses that have held steady the longest tend to be the ones insulated from a single building trading hands, which is exactly the kind of event that ended the Hornet's run.

The Corridor's Answer to All of This

Broadway didn't just watch this turnover happen. In a special election on November 4, 2025, voters along the corridor approved forming the South Broadway General Improvement District, a new taxing district running from 6th Avenue to Interstate 25. The vote to form the district passed comfortably, 181 to 80, but the companion question actually authorizing the funding tax was much closer, 137 to 129. The district is now in its first year, funding added security, cleaning and marketing along the strip.

It's a formal acknowledgment of the same thing the Hornet and MAKfam's corner illustrates on their own: this stretch of Broadway is actively managing turnover, not just absorbing it.

The Row's One Weekend a Year

Antique Row throws its Summer Block Party every August, turning the dealer strip into live music, food trucks and sidewalk sales, with the best hunting for western memorabilia and mid-century modern pieces at prices you won't see the rest of the year. It's the one weekend when Broadway's usual antique-browsing pace gives way to something closer to a street fair.

Getting Between the Old and the New

A protected two-way bike lane now runs along Baker's stretch of Broadway and connects to the Cherry Creek Trail, so a ride from Antique Row to MAKfam to Mother Other doesn't require parking at any of them. The South Platte River Trail on Baker's western edge adds a second car-free route, north to downtown and LoHi or south along the river corridor. There's no light rail stop inside Baker itself, but the 6th Avenue station on the W Line sits at the neighborhood's northern boundary, with RTD buses running along both Broadway and Colfax.

The Read on This Year

Ask whether South Broadway is losing its character or reinventing itself, and the honest answer is neither, depending entirely on which corner you're standing on. At 1st and Broadway, a 29-year restaurant closed the same year its Michelin-recognized neighbor just off the intersection outgrew its own building. A few blocks south, a food truck's owners built their first restaurant by hand. And the strip's oldest fixtures, the ones that have anchored it for twenty or thirty years, didn't move at all.

What changed this year traces back to specific transactions and specific leases, not a wholesale shift in what Broadway is. That's the version of this story worth knowing if you live here, because it's the difference between watching a neighborhood disappear and watching it add on to itself, one corner at a time.

If you're curious what a home near this stretch of South Broadway is actually worth in today's market, Christine Nottoli brings the kind of block-by-block read that goes beyond a listing sheet. Schedule a personalized market consultation to talk through what's happening on your corner, not just the citywide averages.