The Old Eric's Bar Building Is Back in Local Hands, and the Experiment Has a Clock on It

Carol Breen, a silversmith, worked out of her house until this summer. Now she has a studio upstairs at 315 E. Hyman Ave., across from the Wheeler Opera House. She told the Aspen Daily News that the space has let her experiment more and start selling her work, with a jewelry collection she hopes to launch by December.

Her studio is one room in ThreeFifteen, which held its grand opening on Sept. 17, 2026. The building now holds a neighborhood market, an all-day restaurant, eight artist studios, a vintage shop, a tattoo studio, a newsroom and a flexible event space in the basement that used to be Eric's Bar. The artist studios are running on a lease measured in months. ThreeFifteen is a test of whether local operators can make a prime downtown address work financially, and the test has a deadline.

A Building With a Lot of Aspen History

Wheeler Square has turned over several times in a few years. In late 2021, the Aspen Times reported that Su Casa, Eric's Bar, Aspen Billiards and the Cigar Bar would close for good. The Aspen Daily News later dated the Su Casa and Eric's closures to 2022.

Developer Mark Hunt's group had bought into the property by then. According to the Aspen Times, the group paid $10.6 million for a majority of Wheeler Square in January 2020, then bought the remaining condominium interest from Gideon Kaufman for $7.4 million that August.

Gravity Haus came next, a members' club with a coffee shop and a restaurant. Later coverage puts its time in the building at under three years. It shut down after Aug. 31, 2025. Its office spaces went unused.

What came after that started almost by accident. The Aspen Daily News was sold to Hoffmann Media Group in February 2026, and the new owners chose not to renew the paper's lease at 625 E. Hyman Ave. Publisher David Cook went looking for what he called a "soft landing" and asked Hunt about leasing a couple of the empty offices at 315 E. Hyman. Hunt encouraged him to take on much of the building instead. Cook is one of ThreeFifteen's partners, so the Daily News is reporting on a building it helped create. Where possible, the details below are also confirmed by the Aspen Times or the tenants' own sites.

What's Inside Now

Local operators run every part of the building:

• Eddy's Market. Sisters Liz and Sondra Savickas took over both upstairs food-and-beverage spaces. The market sells coffee, baked goods, groceries, gifts and grab-and-go food such as chicken salad and breakfast burritos. Its website lists it as open daily from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Eddy's Kitchen, Sit & Stay. This is the sit-down side, with indoor and outdoor tables. Liz Savickas calls the food "all-American," with an all-day menu of salads, sandwiches, wraps, chicken Parmesan and a meatball sub made from a family recipe. The Kitchen page currently lists Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with happy hour from 4 to 6. No offseason schedule is posted, so check the site before you go.
• Aspen Arts Club. Buckhorn Public Arts, founded by Tim Sack, turned eight empty offices into rent-free studios, with backing from donors Mark Pincus and Hilary Shaw. The first resident artists are Rae Lampe, Axel Livingston, Jamison Menard, Abril Ramos, Greta Zaveckaite, Carol Breen, Aggie Flores and Kendra Lauren. The group includes painters, a sculptor, a macramé artist, an art teacher, two silversmiths, a photographer and a musician. Lauren makes custom hats in her studio.
• The Grove. Buckhorn also runs this downstairs event space where Eric's Bar used to be. So far it has hosted comedy, yoga, breathwork and private gatherings. During Filmfest, Aspen Film held a passholder reception there on Sept. 29. On Oct. 8 it hosted a Teen Art Night for grades 9 through 12 with resident artist Rae Lampe, at $20 with scholarships available.
• The rest of the building. Tattoo Aspen is still here. The new shop Mischief Vintage has opened, longtime Aspen businesses have moved into offices and coworking space, and the Aspen Daily News newsroom is now in the building too.

Cook calls The Grove a "one-of-one" space in Aspen because it changes depending on who is using it. Liz Savickas describes the whole building as something like a downtown block party: you can get coffee, run into a friend, find an artist working upstairs and stay for an event downstairs.

The Bet Behind It

The tenant mix comes from a deliberate choice. At a time when most downtown landlords are pursuing leases with national and international companies, Cook wanted to try the opposite.

"We wanted to set out to prove that locals could do something that was as reliable and meaningful, both from an output perspective as well as a well-curated perspective. We're really hoping to shift the trend back towards favoring locals for these important buildings in downtown Aspen."

The key word in that quote is "reliable." The open question is whether a building full of local businesses can be a dependable tenant for a landlord. Cook has said the project would not have happened if the Hunt family had not given the idea a chance when they could have pursued much larger commercial tenants.

The broader numbers show how high the bar is. In an April 2026 report, Aspen Public Radio cited city estimates that average downtown retail rents run $275 to $325 per square foot. The same report said earlier efforts to protect locally owned businesses had not stopped rising rents or store closures. The city's newer approach is the Aspen Area Community Trust, which is set up to buy commercial property and keep it available to local businesses. The city's 2026 community survey ran from June 8 to Aug. 3 and drew 569 responses from 4,200 households. Access to affordable goods and services, commercial diversity and preserving historic character all came up again as concerns.

The two approaches work differently. The Community Trust tries to solve the problem through ownership. ThreeFifteen leaves ownership with a private landlord and tries to show that local tenants can make the rent work. The Aspen Arts Club's model shows how one tenant plans to do that. According to the Aspen Times, the club wants to be "a self-sustaining ecosystem," earning money from coworking memberships, public events and on-site retail, with a donor covering the studios. That income goes back to Buckhorn's mission of supporting artists.

So a coworking membership, a ticket to an event at The Grove or a purchase at an artist's studio is part of how the arts side of the building pays for itself.

The Dates That Decide What Stays

The arts side of ThreeFifteen runs on a fixed calendar:

The lease behind the studios is short, but the reports don't agree on its length. The Daily News says Buckhorn leased the eight offices for one year. The Buckhorn release quoted by the Aspen Times describes an 18-month lease. Either way, the agreement covers two or three residency cycles at most. Whether it gets renewed will depend on whether the self-sustaining model works.

That gives this winter a particular role. After Jan. 1, a new group of artists can apply for the studios, so this fall and early winter are the last weeks to see the first cohort's work in the rooms where they made it. Sack has said he hopes giving artists space to work, plus a chance to sell what they make, is "where the magic happens." Six of the eight artists had never had a dedicated studio before, by his estimate.

Hunt has described the building as coming back to life and becoming "a place where people want to spend time." Whether it stays that way after the first cohort leaves will be decided at 315 E. Hyman over the next year, between the market's counter and the room where Eric's Bar used to be.

Who owns downtown buildings and how long the leases run shape what Aspen looks like at street level. If you want to talk through how that works on Hyman Avenue or anywhere else in town, Michael Latousek is glad to share what he's seen over 25 years here. Let's Connect.