When the Tattered Cover Book Store relocates from Cherry Creek next week, its old 48,000-square-foot location will get a major overhaul custom-designed to suit a new tenant.
Banker Don Sturm, who has owned the building since 1999, said he’s looking for a retail tenant to lease the entire five-level space. Located in a prime spot at First Avenue and Milwaukee Street, the building was originally occupied by Neusteter’s department store.
Sturm has hired national retail leasing consultant Dan Foy of the Foy Bradford Co. of Chicago to help market it. Foy helped market Clayton Lane in Cherry Creek North and will work with Sturm’s real-estate manager, Linda Kaboth. Neither would discuss potential tenants.
“We are smart businesspeople, and we’re looking at every option that comes to us,” Kaboth said. “We aren’t putting any limits on it.”
Ground-floor space in Cherry Creek leases for $30 to $45 a square foot.
Several neighborhood merchants said they had heard that Borders bookstore is negotiating for the space, but none had heard anything definitive. The Cherry Creek Shopping Center has a small Waldenbooks store, but otherwise the shopping district is without a bookstore.
Leasing the space to a bookstore makes sense, said Randy Nichols, developer of Clayton Lane, because it’s difficult to find a retail tenant that can succeed on multiple levels.
“I think the whole reason another bookstore is not there is the Tattered Cover,” he said.
Even large-format bookstores typically require only 25,000 square feet, said Mary Beth Jenkins, president of the Laramie Co., a Denver retail brokerage and consulting firm.
“But it’s such a wonderful building and a great location that a bookstore might break the mold to look at that project,” she said. “There aren’t many 48,000-square-foot tenants nationally. The key is how you carve up a building that’s multilevel to attract the tenor of tenants that want to be in Cherry Creek.”
The average household income within 1 mile of the site is $104,900, according to Sturm’s marketing brochure. The district has 26 blocks of art galleries, boutiques and restaurants.
The Tattered Cover is moving to the former Lowenstein Theatre on East Colfax Avenue. The Cherry Creek store will close at 6 p.m. Saturday and reopen in the new location at 9 a.m. Monday.
Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskis refused to cast Sturm as the bad guy or discuss speculation that he raised her lease rates until she was forced to relocate.
“This was a confluence of circumstances that didn’t work out,” she said. “We each have our businesses that we need to tend to, and that’s it.”
The Tattered Cover’s move comes on the heels of another neighborhood institution’s demise. Cook’sMart closed its doors this spring. That didn’t help the ice-cream business, said Sherman Bowman, manager of the nearby Marble Slab Creamery, and he expects the bookstore’s relocation to have a similar impact.
“About 10 percent of our customers come in with Tattered Cover materials or let us know they’re going there,” Bowman said.
That may be in part because the city charges for on-street parking and the Tattered Cover validates parking for its customers in an adjacent garage, said Christina Brickley, marketing director for the Cherry Creek North business-improvement district. Customers who already are parked in that garage often walk through the neighborhood and make three to four additional purchases.
But more important, Brickley said, Meskis and the Tattered Cover will be missed for the example they set for other area businesses.
“They are really the role model for so many independent businesses because independent business is difficult,” she said. “Our merchants look to her for leadership.”
Cherry Creek North already has been working to counteract the impact of the Tattered Cover’s move by doubling the number of events it is sponsoring.
“Clayton Lane has been helping us with parking for the film series and other events,” Brickley said.
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-820-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
Spending power in Cherry Creek
A statistical look at potential shoppers within 1 mile of the Cherry Creek North shopping area:
- 13,800 Residents in 7,850 households
- $104,900 Average household income; 18.1 percent have an income of $150,000 or more, compared with 7.3 percent within a 30-minute drive
- 48 Median age 75% Own their home
- 60% Age 25 to 54 51% College graduates
- 75% Have no children living at home
Sources: Sturm Group and Foy Bradford Co., from Denver assessor’s office data
