If you drive past Belleview Avenue and Ulster Street on your way into the office or out to dinner, you've probably noticed the fencing. The old retail center on that corner, the one that used to anchor the intersection with a grocery store and a scattering of shops, has been sitting behind construction barriers for months. No signage explains what's happening. No banner announces a grand opening date. It just sits there, half torn down, while traffic moves around it.
That lot has a longer history than most people realize. It opened in 1979 as Marina Square, one of the earliest retail and social destinations built when the Denver Tech Center itself was still young. For more than four decades it did what strip malls do. Then it stopped working, the way a lot of first-generation retail in DTC eventually stops working when the buildings age out and the parking-lot format loses its appeal.
What's replacing it is not a rebuilt version of the same thing. Shea Properties, the same developer that has owned and shaped large parts of DTC for years, is building something called On The Square on the site. The plans call for roughly 40,000 square feet of retail and dining, a 481-unit residential building named Eclipse On The Square, and a 68-foot sculptural eclipse that will anchor a new public plaza at the center of the development. The first phase is expected to start opening in late 2026, which means the fencing you've been driving past all year is finally close to coming down.
Two Signed Leases Tell You What Kind of Corner This Is Becoming
Here's the part that actually matters if you live or work nearby: two restaurant groups have already signed leases for space at On The Square, and neither one is a placeholder chain.
The first is The Coastal Service, a new East Coast-inspired seafood and oyster bar from Shucking Good Hospitality, the local restaurant group led by founder Sean Huggard. It's a sibling concept to Huggard's Blue Island Oyster Bar & Seafood, which draws its identity from the group's own oyster farm on Long Island's Great South Bay. The Coastal Service pulls from a different chapter of Huggard's career, his years working as a chef on Nantucket, and will center on a raw bar, seasonal coastal dishes, and premium steaks. Huggard has said the idea came from noticing DTC didn't have an oyster bar of its own. The restaurant joins his existing Oliver's Italian just down the road in Greenwood Village.
The second is Barcelona Wine Bar, an upscale Spanish tapas concept known for pairing Mediterranean and South American dishes with an extensive wine list. This will be the brand's second Denver-area location, following one that's operated in Five Points since 2018, and it's expected to bring around 80 jobs to the corridor. The company's CEO has described the DTC site as architecturally interesting enough to pull him into a second Denver location he wasn't actively pursuing.
Both restaurants are targeting early 2027. That's more than a year out, which is worth saying plainly so nobody drives past the fencing next month expecting a soft opening. But the fact that two chef-driven, locally rooted concepts committed to this specific corner, on a lot that spent nearly five decades as ordinary retail, tells you something about how the developer and the tenants both read where DTC dining is headed.
What's Already Open While You Wait
Not everything worth knowing about is still under construction. A few blocks from the Marina Square site, the dining scene has already been filling in.
| Already open | Opened | Coming to On The Square | Target opening |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Loma (8000 E. Belleview Ave.) | August 2025 | The Coastal Service | Early 2027 |
| Chicken Salad Chick (5322 DTC Blvd.) | March 2026 | Barcelona Wine Bar | Early 2027 |
La Loma's DTC location seats 255 people, includes a covered outdoor patio, and can host private events for up to 100 guests. It's the same Mexican restaurant group known elsewhere in Denver for its award-winning recipes, and this location gave the brand its first real foothold in the tech center itself.
Chicken Salad Chick opened its DTC location on DTC Boulevard in March 2026, run by franchisee Maureen McFerson and her husband Luke Hadden. It's McFerson's second Colorado location after she opened a Littleton store in September 2024, and it's the eighth Chicken Salad Chick in the state.
Layer those two openings on top of DTC standbys like Ocean Prime in the Belleview Promenade, Shanahan's Steakhouse, Snooze A.M. Eatery, Pint Brothers Alehouse, and ViewHouse Centennial, and the corridor already has more everyday dining options than it did even two years ago. On The Square isn't creating a food scene from nothing. It's adding to one that was already building momentum.
The Pattern Shows Up Elsewhere in DTC, Too
If On The Square were the only project like this in the tech center, you could write it off as one developer's bet. It isn't. A short drive away, near the Belleview light rail station, Belleview Station is going through its own version of the same shift, and it's further along.
Two new high-rises are under construction there right now, known together as Block F, sitting at 6705 E. Layton Ave. The first tower is 22 stories and has already broken ground, with construction expected to take about two years. The second, at 21 stories, will include 314 apartments, an 11,000-square-foot market, and a rooftop deck with a pool and outdoor kitchen. Combined, the two towers add more than 944,000 square feet to what's already one of the more walkable pockets of the tech center. When Belleview Station reaches its full planned buildout, the numbers on the table are over 3,300 homes, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and 185,000 square feet of retail and dining.
That kind of buildout only means something once people actually show up to use the ground floor, and Belleview Station has already proven that part works. Every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., People + Produce runs what's marketed as DTC's only farmers market at 6785 E. Chenango Ave., with more than 50 vendors, live music, and a beer garden next door. Leashed dogs are welcome, and there's a dedicated dog park nearby open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. This year's season runs through October 11, which means there are still a handful of Sundays left this fall if you haven't made it out yet.
Put the two projects side by side and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence. A legacy retail lot from 1979 is being rebuilt around a plaza and a public sculpture. A transit-oriented development nearby is stacking apartment towers on top of a farmers market that already draws a crowd every week. Both bets assume the same thing: that people who work in DTC, or live in one of its growing number of apartment buildings, want a reason to stay in the district after 5 p.m. instead of driving somewhere else for dinner or a Sunday morning outing.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Already Here
None of this means the fencing at Belleview and Ulster comes down next week. The Coastal Service and Barcelona Wine Bar are both more than a year out, and Eclipse On The Square's residential units won't be move-in ready on the same timeline as the retail. But the signed leases are the real signal here, not the construction fencing. Restaurant groups don't commit to a location fifteen months in advance unless they believe the corridor around it will actually support what they're building.
For now, the practical version of this story is simple. If you're already eating your way through DTC, La Loma and Chicken Salad Chick are open today, and the Sunday market at Belleview Station has a few more weeks left in its 2026 season before the vendors pack up for winter. The oyster bar and the tapas restaurant are worth watching for, not worth waiting on. And the next time you drive past that fenced corner, you'll know exactly what's supposed to show up there, even if it isn't there yet.
If you're thinking about what a corner like this means for property values, timing a move, or whether DTC's shift from office park to neighborhood makes sense for your own next chapter, that's a longer conversation. Next Chapter Partners knows this stretch of the Denver Tech Center block by block. Start Your Next Chapter whenever you're ready to talk it through.
