The remains of Fan Fare, a 1960s discount shopping center. The structure was raised two years ago and will now be replaced by a residential-retail complex called Argenta. 
The remains of Fan Fare, a 1960s discount shopping center. The structure was raised two years ago and will now be replaced by a residential-retail complex called Argenta. 
The remains of Fan Fare, a 1960s discount shopping center. The structure was raised two years ago and will now be replaced by a residential-retail complex called Argenta.
AURORA | The plot of land near East First Avenue and Havana Street has been called many things over the years.
Fan Fare, other times Fan Fair, sometimes just Fanfare. Occasionally it’s dubbed Havana North.
And in the corridors of city hall, the site — whether when the goofy building with the bulbous roof was there or in the years it has been a vacant sea of dirt — that chunk of real estate has likely been called far, far crueler things. Sadly, many of those monikers dropped on the chunk of land that has long bedeviled city leaders are unfit for this family newspaper.
But now it has a new name: Argenta.
Developers from Dillon Place LLC. said this week they are planning a mixed-use development at the site that will include 86 for-sale, multi-level townhomes, 207 mid-rise, market rate rental apartments and almost 20,000 square feet of retail space.
The retail space is expected to face Havana, according to Andrea Amonick, manager of the city’s Development Services Division, while the for-sale townhomes will run along the property’s western edge near Geneva Street.
The plan itself is several months in the works and comes after a series of hiccups in recent years as city officials have tried to redevelop the site that briefly housed the sprawling Fan Fare indoor market.
This plan, Amonick said, meets the requirements city officials laid out for the property, which sits along busy Havana Street.
“This includes key elements such as project connectivity for all modes of travel, the provision of accessible, quality community and project amenities and public spaces, and a diverse, quality urban design format,” she said in an email.
Jim Mercado, a principal partner at Dillon Place LLC, said work on the project will start in early 2018 and he hopes to have the first units available by the end of 2018.
“We are poised to move quite quickly,” he said.
The spot is ripe for development, Mercado said, because it sits so close to the Anschutz Medical Campus to the north, Lowry to the west, Stanley Marketplace to the north and along bustling Havana.
“It can become a catalyst for a lot of things on the north Havana corridor,” he said.
The site has long been a troubled one for Aurora leaders.
Built in 1961, Fan Fare was originally a sprawling indoor discount market. Some documents say the original spelling of the building was “Fan Fair,” though city documents in recent years spell it Fan Fare or Fanfare.
After just four years in business — years marked by what was reportedly a massive grand opening and one of the first large-scale shopping centers open on Sundays in metro Denver — the business went under in 1965 and Western Electric moved in, using the building for training purposes.
In the mid-1980s Western Electric left, and for two decades the building has been fenced off with weeds poking up from every crack in the asphalt.
In 2004, the building’s owners filed plans with the city to tear down Fan Fare and build two high-rise condominiums on the site. The building would have been the largest in the city, and officials said they could help turn that stretch of Havana Street into a posh, upscale neighborhood.
But the developers needed some incentives from the city to pull off the project and as those negotiations dragged on, the plan fizzled.
After that, the owners briefly floated an idea to clean up the building and use it as a storage facility until they could get the tower project moving again. But that idea flopped, too.
There were later rumors of smaller condos on the site but that idea, like seemingly everything with Fan Fare over the years, went nowhere.
Along the way, Fan Fare found some supporters, including the Aurora Historic Preservation Commission, who in 2010 launched an effort to save the building. The building was one of the first large-scale shopping centers in the area, and the commission pointed to its unique architectural design that used exterior supports instead of interior columns to prop-up the ceiling as a reason to save it. But their efforts didn’t go far and eventually the city stepped in.
In late 2014, after the land was purchased through Aurora Urban Renewal Authority — the city’s de facto organ for urban renewal projects — and the building had been demolished, AURA put out a request for plans to redevelop the area. Just two developers presented projects, and neither fit the city’s requirements for the sort of mixed-use development that could revitalize the neighborhood.