3003 S Platte River Dr
Ryan Cos. has filed a concept plan with the City and County of Denver to redevelop the General Shale brick plant at 3003 S. Platte River Dr. into a four-building, 542,784-square-foot office and warehouse distribution campus. The application, submitted Oct. 12, covers roughly 50.5 acres at West Dartmouth Avenue and South Platte River Drive and is currently in intake review with the city.
The filing describes a project built in two phases. The first phase includes two warehouses of about 94,000 square feet each, followed by a second phase with buildings of 206,136 and 138,934 square feet. The plan also calls for 698 parking spaces, truck courts, loading areas, outdoor storage, internal access drives, stormwater detention and landscaping. The city has attached a floodplain proximity notice to the record, and assessor maps place portions of the parcel within AE and X floodplain designations.
No demolition permit has been filed, and the plant remains in operation. The concept plan lists General Shale Brick Inc. as the property owner, and no sale has been recorded. A separate sewer use and drainage review for the site was opened in July and later withdrawn.
Brick has been made on this stretch of the South Platte for 65 years. Robinson Brick Co. was founded in Denver in 1880, and the current plant dates to 1961. By 2005, the company's Denver headquarters operation was producing about 100 million bricks a year and supplied a network of block plants and sales centers across six states. Robinson added a building on the site for its Thinbrick clay veneer line as recently as 2007.
In 2006, Vienna-based Wienerberger AG acquired Robinson Brick from chairman F. George Robinson and his family in an $88 million transaction, folding the company into its Tennessee-based subsidiary General Shale. The deal was Wienerberger's first entry into the western U.S. General Shale, which describes itself as North America's largest brick, stone and concrete block manufacturer, has continued producing brick at the Denver plant from local clay.
The triangular parcel is bounded by the South Platte River to the east and rail lines to the west in the College View-South Platte neighborhood, just north of the Englewood border. It is zoned I-B, Denver's general industrial district, and sits within a state enterprise zone. The Denver assessor currently values the property at $9,463,200.
Ryan Cos. is a national developer, builder and property manager with a Denver office. The proposal follows a broader pattern of legacy industrial land along Denver's rail and river corridors being repositioned for modern logistics space, as large, flat, industrially zoned sites close to the urban core become increasingly scarce.
The filing also lands while Denver's one-year moratorium on new data centers, approved by City Council in May, remains in effect and the city's Data Center Working Group weighs permanent rules. Large industrial parcels with rail and utility access have drawn attention as potential data center sites, but the Ryan Cos. concept plan describes a conventional office and warehouse campus.
Concept plan review is the first step in Denver's site development process, and the project will still need site development plan approval and building permits before any construction. For now, the kilns along the South Platte are still running, and their replacement exists only on paper.