Ask anyone in Littleton what's changing in town this year and you'll get the same answer within the first two sentences: Costco. The demolition of the old Qwest Tower on West Mineral Avenue was hard to miss, a 130-foot concrete drying tower built in 1970 for Gates Rubber Co. coming down in pieces in the summer of 2025. It's the kind of visual that sticks. But the thing about a headline project is that it can dominate conversation for years before it changes a single daily routine, and that's exactly what's happening here. As of this fall, nothing at that 63-acre site is open to the public. The businesses that have actually reshaped how people spend a Tuesday evening or a Saturday morning in Littleton this year are almost all a mile and a half away, on Main Street.
That gap between the project everyone talks about and the one that's already changed the town is worth understanding, because it explains what your next year or two of downtown life will actually look like.
The Corridor Everyone Mentions First
Mineral Place sits on the former Lumen Technologies office campus at 700 W. Mineral Ave, near the intersection with South Broadway. Republic Investment Group, operating locally as RIG Mineral LLC, paid $50 million for the site and has been building out a mixed-use district anchored by a 159,000-square-foot Costco with a fuel station and tire center. The city's economic development manager, Brian Garner, called it the biggest project Littleton has seen in probably decades. That's not an exaggeration once you see the numbers city officials have floated: more than 800 jobs and $2.8 million in net sales tax revenue in the first year, climbing past $9 million by year ten, according to figures reported by the Denver Gazette. The retail portion also carries an incentive agreement letting the developer recoup up to $29.5 million over ten years through a share of that new sales tax revenue.
Here's the part that hasn't caught up to the conversation yet: Costco's opening, originally floated for 2026, is now targeted for 2027, according to reporting from 9News and the Associated Press this September. And the project just got bigger before it got closer. On September 17, Scheels announced it will build a flagship store at Mineral Place, more than 300,000 square feet, with plans for over 80 specialty shops inside, 500-plus jobs, and features the retailer describes as entertainment-grade: a 60-foot hubless Ferris wheel, bowling lanes, an arcade, a 16,000-gallon saltwater aquarium. Scheels is targeting a 2029 opening.
So the corridor that gets mentioned first in almost every conversation about what's new in Littleton won't hand a single resident an actual reason to drive over there for at least another year, and the full build-out stretches three years past that. The 370-unit apartment community going up alongside it, known as The Sullivan and developed by Embrey Partners, is under construction now, but even that won't be fully leased before the retail side opens.
What Main Street Actually Delivered This Year
While that corridor has been demolition, permits, and press releases, downtown has been quietly doing the opposite: filling in, one storefront at a time.
Dirt Coffee, the hometown coffee shop known for its mission of empowering neurodivergent individuals in the workforce, moved into a larger downtown location in late 2025. The new space at 2506 W. Alamo Ave includes an expanded café and what's described as Colorado's first drop-in Workforce Connection Center for neurodivergent job seekers, meaning the business grew into something bigger than a coffee stop.
A few blocks over, Ruby Jane Boutique opened on Main Street, bringing the Colorado-based mountain-chic retailer's curated styles to a storefront locals no longer have to drive to Denver or a mountain town to reach. Snarf's Sandwiches, the Colorado-born chain, expanded into town with a location on West Bowles Avenue near the Platte River. And downtown's banking options grew too: Academy Bank opened a branch in fall 2025, with Central Bank at 2516 W. Main St. and a Huntington National Bank branch at 100 E. Mineral Ave both listed as coming soon.
None of this is the kind of splashy, single-project transformation Mineral Place promises. It's smaller, block by block, and it's already done.
The Calendar Between Now and the Holidays
The other thing that's already locked in, independent of any construction timeline, is downtown's own event calendar, run largely through the Littleton Downtown Development Authority and the Littleton Merchants Association.
| Event | Timing | What it involves |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown Littleton Wine Walks | Final Friday, May through September | Check-in outside Denver Beer Co at 2409 W. Main; $30 advance, $35 day-of, ten tasting tabs across participating businesses |
| Pumpkin Festival at Chatfield Farms | October 9-11, 2026, 9am-4pm | Ten-acre pumpkin patch and corn maze at Denver Botanic Gardens' second campus, timed tickets required, no cash for pumpkin sales |
| Candlelight Walk and Tree Lighting | Night after Thanksgiving | Candlelit procession down historic Main Street with live reindeer, hot cider, and holiday music |
| Pink Friday and Local Is Good | Day after Thanksgiving into that Saturday | Merchant-driven shopping event ahead of the traditional Black Friday rush |
This year's wine walk season wrapped on its last Friday, September 25, closing out a run that's become a fixture of downtown's warmer months. The next fixed date on the calendar is the Chatfield Farms Pumpkin Festival, a single weekend that Denver Botanic Gardens runs on its 750-acre farm property off Deer Creek Canyon Road, distinct from its main York Street garden downtown Denver. It sells out its timed tickets most years, so the people who go tend to buy early rather than show up and hope.
Earlier in the summer, Littleton also served as a host city for Colorado's statewide 150th anniversary drone show on July 24, one of several events tied to the state's sesquicentennial that landed here rather than somewhere else on the Front Range. It's a small detail, but it says something about how downtown positions itself: not as a suburb waiting for its anchor tenant, but as a place that already gets picked for things.
Why the Timing Matters
None of this means Mineral Place doesn't matter. A Costco and a Scheels of that scale will change traffic patterns along Mineral Avenue and Santa Fe Drive once they're actually drawing regional shoppers, not just neighborhood foot traffic, and that's a reasonable thing to expect once doors open in 2027 and 2029. But for right now, and for at least the next twelve months, the corridor is a construction site with a very good story attached to it, not a place anyone is actually going.
Meanwhile the walkable version of downtown, the one with Dirt Coffee's expanded café, Ruby Jane's storefront, the wine walk crowd spilling out of Denver Beer Co on a Friday night, and a Main Street that shuts down for a candlelit procession the night after Thanksgiving, is the version that's already finished. It's been finished all year. The gap between the project everyone mentions first and the one that's already shaping daily life is the most useful thing to understand about Littleton right now, because it tells you which side of town to expect your actual routine to run through for a while yet.
If you're weighing what Littleton's next few years of growth might mean for a move here, our Littleton neighborhood guide goes deeper on the foothill pockets and price points, and the team at Helm Weaver Helm is glad to talk through what a corridor like Mineral Place tends to mean for the streets around it.
