The city of Glendale claims a local developer that sued over a land deal for a planned entertainment district last year just wanted to get out of the project.
“Developer had no intention of completing the Project, so it manufactured a dispute to avoid closing on the purchase of the Phase 1 Property,” Glendale said in a court filing earlier this month.
Denver-based Central Street Capital, led by Rob Salazar, struck a deal with Glendale in 2021 to develop a 10-acre retail-centric project along Virginia Avenue, south of a Target and north of the Cherry Creek bike path.
Most of that land is owned by Glendale, and was to be sold to CSC in two phases when it hit certain project milestones. The company was to pay just $1 each time.
CSC branded the project 4 Mile District and planned to anchor the project with an Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, which the Salazar family would own.
In summer 2024, CSC began infrastructure work, including underground utilities and a parking garage. But less than a year later, in March 2025, the firm sued.
Today, the project is a parking garage for nowhere. Work on the project ceased earlier this year.
The lawsuit stems from a dispute that arose when CSC met the first milestone, allowing it to buy the first tranche of land from the city.
Glendale and CSC had agreed that the entire project would contain at least 90,000 square feet of sales-tax-generating users. It was a critical component, as the sales tax was to pay off bonds that financed the project.
As it prepared to hand off the land to CSC, the city drafted a “use covenant” to record against the land, which mentioned the required 90,000 square feet across the project.
That was problematic. As CSC interprets it, the city’s language required it to build that 90,000 square feet on just the Phase 1 property — not the entire 10-acre site.
In its filing earlier this month, Glendale claims thatap not true.
“This requirement exists only in the mind of Developer,” Glendale wrote, saying CSC’s “interpretation is inconsistent with the parties’ agreements and their prior conduct concerning the Project.”
But Glendale did alter the language of the use covenant three weeks after CSC’s lawsuit, consistent with how the firm had wanted.
Glendale also argued this month that CSC should have worked with it to resolve the use covenant dispute, saying time was left before the deadline to close on the deal and that the deadline could have been extended. CSC, meanwhile, claimed that it tried to work with Glendale.
“Developer requested that the City remove the Recorded Use Covenant before that deadline, but the City refused,” CSC wrote last week.
Daniel Richards, a Davis Graham attorney representing the developer, said Glendale’s claim that CSC didn’t plan to complete the project was “false, unsupported, and directly contradicted by the public record.”
Richards said Glendale Development Partners, the specific CSC entity set up to do the project, spent four years and millions of dollars on the project.
“On the scheduled closing date, GDP placed all required funds and closing documents in escrow and repeatedly confirmed that it was ready, willing, and able to close. Those are not the actions of a developer that had ‘no intention’ of completing the project,” he said.
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