What Finally Moved Into the Old Clark's Market Corner in Basalt

For more than ten years, the building at the corner of Midland Avenue and Two Rivers Road sat there doing nothing. Longtime residents remember it as City Market, then Clark's Market, then a rotating cast of small tenants including a Habitat for Humanity outlet, before the whole thing went quiet. If you'd asked people walking past what would eventually fill that corner, the guesses probably would have leaned toward a ski shop, a spa, something built for the second-home crowd that keeps discovering Basalt.

That is not what filled it.

A Trailer for a Year and a Half

Start with Jimbo's, because Jimbo's never actually left. The wine and liquor store has been open since 1972, which makes it Basalt's oldest continually running business, and when the old building came down for redevelopment, owner Gonzo Mirich didn't close. He moved the entire operation into a 360-square-foot trailer parked in the construction zone and kept selling wine out of it for about a year and a half, through two winters and a summer.

Mirich came to Aspen in 2003 from Argentina, worked as a liftie, tended bar at Matsuhisa, and bought Jimbo's in March 2016. He has three daughters in Basalt schools. When the new building was finally ready, Jimbo's held its grand opening and ribbon cutting on Friday, June 12, in a space roughly four times the size of the trailer, at 128 Basalt Center Circle, with a loading dock this time. It's open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 10, and Sundays too. Same shop, same owner, same corner, just no longer squeezed into a trailer.

Sixty-Five Percent of the Building Has a Job to Do

Here's where the story stops being about a liquor store and starts being about something more interesting. The building above Jimbo's, called the Midland Residences, has 65 total units. A quarter of them, 17 units, are deed-restricted with income limits, and the town requires 65 percent of the building overall to be occupied by full-time residents rather than sit empty as someone's second home.

Colorado Mountain College was authorized by the town in a March 2025 ordinance to take up to nine of the income-restricted units for its own staff, and the college is among the buyers. The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies and the Town of Basalt itself also hold deed-restricted units. Aspen's school district and fire department bought free-market condos for their employees rather than income-restricted ones. The Roaring Fork Conservancy bought a deed-restricted studio too, paying off about half of its $340,000 cost outright and continuing to fundraise for the rest.

One of the people who will actually live there is Matthew Anderson, a 28-year-old water quality technician for the Conservancy who grew up in Basalt, helping out at his parents' pharmacy and playing soccer after school. He's planning to rent the unit from his employer.

"It's all about rivers here in Basalt," Anderson has said, describing how his high school teachers first introduced him to river ecology, an interest he later turned into a college degree and a summer internship at the same organization that now employs him.

Basalt's median income for a one-person household sits at about $97,770 in 2026. Of the 17 income-restricted units, 10 are priced for households earning up to 80 percent of that figure and seven for households up to 120 percent, which roughly tracks a regional housing assessment that found the most acute local need sits between 51 and 130 percent of median income. In plain terms, the building was designed around teachers, conservancy staff, and firefighters rather than the open market, and the ownership list so far backs that up.

The Restaurant Still to Come

The ground floor isn't finished filling in. CP Restaurant Group, run by Craig and Samantha Cordts-Pearce, is bringing a market and a boutique restaurant to the space next to Jimbo's. This is the same group behind Aosta Ristorante, CP Burger, Steakhouse No. 316 in Aspen and Boulder, The Monarch, The Wild Fig, and Woody Creek Tavern, so the concept has a track record in this valley even if the doors here aren't open yet. As of this writing that portion of the building is still being finished out, which means the corner isn't done changing. Anyone who's been waiting for a reason to walk that block again should expect one before winter.

The Rest of September on the Same Block

If you want to see the corner in person while it's still mid-transformation, this month gives you two easy reasons, both a short walk from Jimbo's new front door.

• The Town of Basalt and the Basalt Regional Library are running three free movie nights at Lions Park this September, using the library's own screen and sound system since Movieland closed. The first has already screened. Still to come: Hoppers on September 18 and Jurassic Park on September 25, gates at 7:30 p.m., movies at sunset. Bring a chair or a blanket, and expect popcorn, beer, and wine for sale, since ticket-free events like this depend on concession sales to come back next year.
• The 2026 Basalt Sunday Market runs along Midland Spur, right next to Lions Park and Town Hall, through September 27, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. After today, that leaves two more Sundays on the calendar, September 20 and September 27.

Walk from either event to the new building and you can see the same pattern the ownership records show: a business that never left, a restaurant that hasn't opened yet, and a residential tower stacked with people whose paychecks already come from this town.

That's the part worth sitting with. A corner that sat empty for a decade didn't get filled by chasing the next wave of buyers looking for a mountain address. It got filled, at least so far, by the people who already keep Basalt running.

If you're curious how a project like this reshapes what's available in downtown Basalt, or just want to talk through what the corridor looks like from here, Hank Carter is always glad to have that conversation. Schedule a private consultation whenever the timing is right for you.