Sometime this year, the Haber family climbed onto a carousel built on the exact spot where their family's building had stood for more than a century. It was a strange kind of homecoming. The building that held their name and generations of downtown shops was gone. What replaced it spun in a circle and played music.
If you've walked West Elkhorn Avenue in the past year, you've seen the gap where the Haber Building used to be, and now you've probably seen what filled it. What most people haven't heard is why that building came down instead of getting fixed up like so many others on the block. The answer isn't really about the Haber Building at all. It's about what's underneath nearly every old storefront on that side of town.
Three Days, One Excavator, A Century Of Shops
The Haber Building went back to before 1920. Over the decades it held a rotating cast of Estes Park businesses: the National Park Outfitting Co. & Taxidermy Museum as early as 1919, RL Brown's dry cleaners in the 1920s, Estes Park Shoe Repair in the 1930s. A woman named Streib, who grew up in Estes Park, remembered working in those shops and watching a nearby log cabin cycle through lives as the Log Cabin Café, then the Log Cabin Waffle Kitchen, then the Trails End Café.
Taking it down took three days. An excavator operator named Jon "Hippy" Smith of High Plains Excavation ran a Case CX145D back and forth across the site like he was delivering a baby, according to the Estes Valley Voice, working from the Cleave Street side first before moving to the three storefronts facing West Elkhorn. One of the men operating the machinery, Tommy Kelly, had washed dishes in that same building decades earlier when it was still a restaurant.
"It's down and nobody got hurt. That's what you call a perfect takedown."
The crew was racing a deadline that had nothing to do with construction schedules. Debris needed to clear the site before Elkhorn Avenue's annual Halloween trick-or-treating party, a tradition the town wasn't willing to interrupt for a demolition job.
The Reveal Nobody Was Looking For
Here's the part that explains more than the Haber Building alone. Many of the buildings along Elkhorn went up in the early 1900s, before anyone was pouring foundations to modern code or thinking about accessibility standards. That's not a guess. It's what contractors keep finding when they open these buildings up.
When a builder named Cullen started renovating the Old Church Shops, a structure originally raised in 1909 as the Presbyterian Community Church, he found there was no foundation at all under the old sanctuary. Not a cracked one. Not an undersized one. None. The building had been standing on packed earth and faith for over a hundred years.
That's the pattern quietly running under West Elkhorn. A storefront looks solid from the sidewalk, but once someone starts the work of bringing it up to current building code and ADA compliance, they often find there's nothing underneath worth saving. At that point, restoration stops being a renovation question and becomes a rebuild question. The Haber Building wasn't torn down because someone decided it wasn't worth keeping. It was torn down because what was holding it up wasn't there.
What Actually Replaced It
The addition going up on the Haber Building's footprint isn't a standalone project. It's connected to the Stanley Chocolate Factory next door, part of the same push of investment that's been reshaping that stretch of West Elkhorn for a couple of years now. The new carousel building needed its own steel wall and steel pilings driven in to support a structure with nothing but soil under the old buildings that came before it.
The Chocolate Factory itself had already slipped its own timeline once. It was originally set to open on the Fourth of July, but equipment delays pushed the grand opening back toward the 2025 holiday season, with the building used for private events in the meantime. Whatever else changes on that block, the pattern holds: old wooden storefronts with no real foundation give way to new construction built to hold weight the original buildings never could.
The Corner Still Standing
A few doors down sits Simply Christmas, a log cabin built in 1902, maybe even as early as 1894 by some local accounts. It watched the Haber Building come down from a few feet away, close enough that the crew monitored its west side for safety during the three days of demolition. It's still standing, still doing business, one of the last originals on that stretch of Elkhorn built the same way and in the same era as the building that's now a carousel.
None of this means Simply Christmas or any other pre-1920s building on the block is next in line. What it does mean is that the next time an old storefront on West Elkhorn comes down instead of getting restored, it probably won't be a surprise to anyone who understands what's actually under these buildings. The town has already been investing in the corridor around all of this. The stretch of West Elkhorn from Moraine Avenue to Far View Drive went through its own rehabilitation project, wrapping up construction last May. That's a different project than the Haber Building site, but it's the same street, and it points to the same direction: West Elkhorn is being rebuilt piece by piece, sometimes because a business wants a fresh start, and sometimes because the ground finally asked for one.
Watching The Block Change
If you've lived here a while, you've probably had a moment like the Haber family's carousel ride: standing somewhere familiar, looking at something new, trying to reconcile the two. That feeling isn't going away. West Elkhorn is going to keep changing shape as more of these early-1900s buildings get opened up and more contractors find out what's actually holding them together, or isn't.
Understanding why a building comes down instead of getting a facelift is a small thing, but it changes how you read the next set of orange excavators and construction fencing you drive past on Elkhorn. It's not always a story about money chasing out history. Sometimes it's a story about a building finally getting the foundation it never had.
If you're curious about what any of this means for property on or near West Elkhorn, or you just want someone who actually pays attention to this stuff to talk through it with you, New Roots Real Estate is always happy to schedule a consultation and walk through what's changing in this corner of Estes Park.
