"This project started with a simple idea: create a spot in the neighborhood people would really want to spend time in." That's John Goscha, standing in the newly retiled annex of the Tears-McFarlane House on the morning his café opened. He lives a few blocks away. He's been eyeing the Morgan's Historic District since he was a kid. The quote reads like the start of every small-business origin story Congress Park has heard before.
What it leaves out is the part longtime patio regulars already know: the building's owner didn't change. Only the name on the awning did.
Two Cafés, One Address, One Landlord
The space at 1290 N. Williams Street has now hosted two different restaurant concepts in under three years, and both of them answered to the same commercial landlord: City Street Investors. Secret Garden Bar & Café opened there in August 2024 to instant popularity, its patio backing directly onto Cheesman Park's north lawn. It closed abruptly on October 10, 2025, mid-service, nine days ahead of its own announced shutdown date. City Street said the restaurant had operated at a significant loss for 13 months and wasn't financially sustainable. The 22 employees who lost their jobs that day, organized under UFCW Local 7, said the timing told a different story: the closure came the night before a scheduled contract bargaining session, days after workers began circulating a petition asking the company to open its books.
Neither side changed its account in the aftermath. What did change, ten months later, is who's running the café. What didn't change is who owns the real estate underneath it.
That distinction matters if you've walked past that patio a hundred times and are wondering whether this is a fresh start or a familiar arrangement wearing new paint. It's some of both, and the difference is worth knowing before you order a coffee there this fall.
What Actually Happened, In Order
- 1976: The mansion earns National Historic Landmark status.
- 1977: The City of Denver purchases the building, folding it into public ownership.
- 2005: Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods, the nonprofit founded in 1969 to preserve the character of the surrounding blocks, takes over day-to-day management.
- 2015: CHUN assumes full management responsibility, but the aging mansion's upkeep costs outpace what the nonprofit can cover alone.
- 2021: CHUN partners with City Street Investors on a major renovation, bringing a private commercial operator into a public building for the first time.
- August 2024: Secret Garden Bar & Café opens under that arrangement.
- October 10, 2025: Secret Garden closes abruptly amid the union dispute.
- July 28 to August 6, 2026: The Carriage House opens in phase one, under new tenant-operators Goscha and Jake Riederer, with City Street Investors still holding the lease.
- September 2026: Phase two arrives, adding a full cocktail bar and later hours.
Laid out that way, the story isn't really about a café closing and a café opening. It's about a public asset that a nonprofit couldn't afford to maintain on its own, so it brought in a private landlord to fix that problem, and that landlord's first tenant relationship blew up in public. The second tenant relationship is now underway, on the same lease structure, in the same historic annex, under the same commercial owner.
What's Genuinely Different This Time
The operators are. Goscha financed The Carriage House himself, with no outside investors, a choice he's been direct about in interviews. Riederer brings a résumé built inside Denver's independent restaurant scene rather than a private equity portfolio: Work & Class, Congress Park Market, Super Mega Bien, OPEN Sandwiches. The menu came together with Melissa Yanc, a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist known locally for Quail & Condor, who developed dishes like a French onion grilled cheese served with onion consommé for dipping and a North African tuna pan bagnat loaded with olives, artichoke hearts, and preserved lemon.
The build-out is also a genuine renovation, not a rebrand over old bones. White marble counters replaced whatever Secret Garden had. A Parisian-style checkerboard floor went in. Oversized French doors are slated to open the interior directly onto the park view once phase two lands in September. Coffee comes from Novo Coffee, roasted for the shop. Pastries come from Black Box Bakery. None of that existed in this configuration eighteen months ago.
And Goscha has said publicly that all profits from The Carriage House will go to local community causes, a structural commitment that puts distance between his operation and the corporate ownership model that ran into trouble last fall. Whether a self-financed, profit-donating operator with no outside investors changes the incentive structure that produces disputes like the one at Secret Garden is a fair question. It's also one that only plays out over time, not at a ribbon-cutting.
What Hasn't Changed, and Why It's Worth Watching
The lease is still City Street Investors'. The company that told Denver7 its restaurant "operated at a significant loss since opening 13 months ago" and that the closure was "entirely unrelated to the recent employee unionization" is the same entity that now leases the annex to Goscha and Riederer. Nothing about that arrangement is unusual in commercial real estate. Landlords lease to one operator, that operator's business fails or falls apart, the landlord leases to the next one. It happens on Colfax, on South Pearl, in strip centers all over the metro.
What makes it worth flagging here is specific to this building. This isn't a landlord who bought a vacant storefront and is now trying a second tenant. This is a private company holding a lease on a piece of city-owned, nonprofit-managed public land, one that became a flashpoint for a labor dispute that made television news across the metro. Neighbors who watched that unfold, some of whom signed the petition or read about it in Westword or watched the CBS Colorado coverage, are the same people deciding whether to walk over for a croissant sandwich this September. Their memory of who owns the ground under that patio isn't going away just because the sign changed.
What This Means for the Rest of the Year
Practically, if you live near Cheesman Park, here's what's actually different starting now versus what's coming. Phase one, live since early August, gets you coffee, sandwiches, salads, pastries, and a retail case with bottled wine and six-packs you're allowed to carry out into the park itself under existing park policy, open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Phase two, arriving in September, adds the full cocktail bar, a longer happy hour, and extended hours into the evening, along with those French doors connecting the dining room directly to the patio.
That's a real, useful thing to know if you're planning a fall picnic pickup or wondering when this becomes a place to grab a drink after work rather than just a morning coffee stop. It's also worth remembering that the building's underlying arrangement, a public landmark leased through a nonprofit to a private commercial landlord, is the same structure that produced last year's headlines. The new operators are betting that different people running the same lease can produce a different outcome. The neighborhood will find out together, one patio season at a time.
If you're weighing what a home near a park like this is actually worth, not just in square footage but in the kind of daily life it supports, that's a conversation Buildings & Residences of Denver has with Congress Park buyers and sellers all the time. Contact us when you're ready to talk about it.
