This Saturday, September 12, the Highlands neighborhood turns four blocks of West 32nd Avenue, from Irving Street to Perry Street, into its third annual Oktoberfest. Stein-holding contests, keg bowling, a stretch of Bavarian street food and beer from Colorado breweries, running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. If you walked this same stretch two Septembers ago for the first one, the shape of the day will feel familiar. What you pass on the way there might not.
That's the part worth paying attention to. The neighborhood's outdoor calendar, the Oktoberfest, the Sunday farmers market, the fall Harvest Festival, holds its shape year after year. The corners those events run past have not held nearly as still. Some of the businesses behind the same storefronts have changed hands, changed concepts, or changed the person cooking the food more times than a resident who checks in once a season would expect.
Three Septembers, Same Four Blocks
The Highlands Oktoberfest and Market is now in its third year on West 32nd Avenue, and the footprint hasn't shifted: the same four blocks between Irving and Perry, the same Saturday-in-September slot, the same mix of local vendors, live Bavarian music, and stein-related contests. It's a short, walkable event by design, which is part of why it's become a fixture rather than a one-off.
The Sunday farmers market at Highland Square runs on its own steady rhythm too. This year's season stretches from May 10 through October 25, every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 32nd and Lowell, produce, pastries, a market bar, live music. Later in the fall, the neighborhood's Harvest Festival and Trick-or-Treat Street takes over the same stretch of 32nd Avenue between Perry and Lowell, with a costume contest, a pumpkin patch, and trick-or-treating at the businesses along the strip.
None of that is new information if you've lived here more than a year. What's easy to miss is that the businesses hosting trick-or-treaters, pouring beer for stein-holding contests, and lining the market route aren't the same cast every year, even when the calendar says they should be.
The events are the constant. The people running the buildings behind them are the variable. That's the actual story of 32nd Avenue right now.
The Building That Never Stopped Baking
Take the corner at 3200 Irving Street, a block off 32nd and next to Highland Park. The building dates to 1910 and has functioned as a bakery for roughly the last three decades, most recently as Denver Bread Co. before chef Miles Odell took over the space and opened Odell's Bagel. Odell trained in Michelin-starred Japanese kitchens in New York, including Nobu and Masa, before the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture selected him for a culinary ambassador program in Kyoto. None of that background points toward bagels, which is what makes the shop worth mentioning: hand-rolled, naturally fermented, built from a three-flour blend, with toppings that lean on his Japanese training, house-cured salmon and sablefish, salmon roe, hamachi, furikake alongside the expected sesame and everything.
The building never stopped being a bakery. The person running it, and what comes out of the oven, changed completely. Odell's is open Wednesday through Sunday mornings, and on weekends the line for a bagel with lox now stretches out the door of a building that's been feeding this corner of West Highland since before most of its current customers were born.
What Repeats, What Turns Over
Laid side by side, the pattern gets easier to see.
| What repeats every fall | What's changed underneath it |
|---|---|
| Highlands Oktoberfest, now in its third year on the same four blocks | 3200 Irving St: Denver Bread Co. gave way to Odell's Bagel |
| Highland Square Farmers Market, Sundays through October 25 | 2227 W 32nd Ave: Bar Dough has had at least four executive chefs since 2015 |
| Harvest Festival and Trick-or-Treat Street, same stretch of 32nd Ave | Bar Dough's kitchen leadership: Max Mackissock, then Carrie Baird, then Russell Stippich, now Stefy DeVita |
Bar Dough's Fourth Chef, Same Address
Bar Dough opened at 2227 W 32nd Ave in 2015, founded by chef Max Mackissock alongside restaurateurs Katie and Juan Padro, the same team behind Highland Tap & Burger a few doors down at 2219 W 32nd Ave. This fall, the restaurant is marking a decade in the neighborhood. What hasn't stayed the same is who's been in the kitchen. By 2018, Top Chef alum Carrie Baird had taken over as executive chef. At some point after that, Russell Stippich was running the menu. As of this year, Stefy DeVita holds the title, in what the restaurant describes as a full-circle moment in her own career, and she's hosting a Chef Stefy & Friends dinner on September 24.
Four chefs, one address, one restaurant group that never left the block. If your mental picture of Bar Dough is still built around whichever menu you had there three or four years ago, it's probably out of date, even though the building, the hours, and the wood-fired oven are exactly where you left them.
What Hasn't Moved
None of this means the strip is in constant flux. Some of Highland Square's anchors have simply outlasted the turnover around them. 32nd Avenue Books has been running its shop at 3633 W 32nd Ave for years, and Westside Books, a few blocks down at 3434 W 32nd Ave, deals in new, used, and rare titles. Over on Tejon Street, Lechuga's has been serving its own invention, a sausage-and-jalapeño "canoli," since 1961, alongside spaghetti, meatball sandwiches, and lasagna that haven't needed reinventing.
Those places are the exception that makes the pattern at Bar Dough and the old bakery building worth noticing in the first place. The neighborhood doesn't turn over indiscriminately. Its restaurant scene turns over its people more often than its addresses, while its bookstores and its 1961 sausage shop just keep doing what they've always done.
The Walk This Saturday
None of this changes what Saturday looks like. The four blocks between Irving and Perry will fill up the same way they did last September and the September before that, and the market at 32nd and Lowell will keep running through late October the way it has for years. But if it's been a while since you walked the full stretch slowly, past Odell's counter and Bar Dough's patio and the storefronts in between, you'll probably notice a few things have changed hands since the last time the calendar looked exactly like this.
Katie Knop has spent nearly two decades working Denver's central neighborhoods, and the Highlands is one she tracks block by block, not just by median price. If you're curious what a home on one of these blocks is actually worth this fall, or you just want a second set of eyes on the market before you decide anything, Home A Mile High offers a free home valuation with no pressure attached.
