The California landlord that once controlled four historic office buildings across Denver is down to its last one — and now that building is on the market too. Harbor Associates has hired JLL to market the vacant, nine-story Vault building at 821 17th St., a 105,000-square-foot property at the corner of 17th and Champa streets that once served as a WeWork hub before the coworking giant pulled out.
The listing, reported by The Denver Post, describes the Vault as fully unencumbered by existing leases, giving a buyer the option to keep it as office space or pursue an adaptive reuse, residential, or hospitality conversion. Harbor purchased the building for $17.6 million in 2017, and it was the first of four Denver properties the firm acquired between 2017 and 2019, according to the same report. A Harbor executive did not respond to a request for comment, per the Post’s reporting.
A Century-Old Concrete Landmark
Built in 1907 as the Ideal Building for cement industrialist Claude Boettcher, the property was the first multistory office building constructed of reinforced concrete west of the Mississippi River, according to History Colorado. Architects Montana Fallis and John Stein designed it using Colorado Portland Cement specifically to showcase the material’s structural potential. A 1930s redesign, completed when 17th Street was known as “The Wall Street of the West,” featured Ronnebeck friezes and Thompson murals, according to the Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives.
Before Harbor bought the property in 2017, it served as headquarters for Colorado Business Bank and was home to The Broker Restaurant, a steakhouse where diners once ate inside the building’s original steel bank vaults, according to Bisnow’s account of Harbor’s 2017 purchase. Local developer NAI Shames Makovsky had completed a full historical restoration of the building in 2001.
WeWork’s Exit Left a Big Hole
Harbor leased 40,000 square feet in the Vault building to WeWork in 2018, and that footprint later expanded to 73,000 square feet, according to CoStar data cited in the Post’s reporting. WeWork shut down its Vault location in 2021. The coworking company’s broader collapse followed its 2023 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, during which it sought to reject leases, per Bisnow…