Walk First Avenue where it curves along the river in Central Coralville and you'll still find plywood over the windows. Construction fencing rings the old brick building that housed Iowa River Power Restaurant for 46 years, the place where Hawkeye recruits ate brunch with coaches and where half the neighborhood had at least one anniversary dinner. If you've been half-following the story, you probably think it's reopening any week now. The 2024 press releases said late summer 2026. That's this season. That's now.
It isn't happening. Not this fall, not this winter. The building's own owner has moved the target to 2027, and the reason why says more about what's actually alive on this stretch of 5th Street than the restaurant news does.
The Timeline That Quietly Slipped a Year
When Mark Kaufman, a University of Iowa alumnus and the founder of Athletico Physical Therapy, bought the building in the fall of 2024, the plan was straightforward: restore the historic power plant, bring in a restaurant group, reopen by late summer 2026. That's the version that ran in the Corridor Business Journal and The Gazette at the time, and it's still the version that shows up when you search the address.
A Gazette follow-up published in May 2026 tells a different story. The scope has grown. Kaufman's group is no longer planning just a restaurant. The building will now house a restaurant and bar, a coffee shop and bakery, a cigar and cocktail lounge, event space, and a rooftop deck. Kaufman told the paper he's now hoping for a soft opening in 2027, not this year.
That's not a delay hiding bad news. It's a bigger project than the one that got announced first, and bigger projects on 124-year-old buildings with structural issues take longer than a press release timeline ever admits. Randy Ward, who owned the building before Kaufman, once told a local paper the place was so worn out it could have imploded. Restoring the original glass front and keeping the exposed steel and brick isn't a coat of paint. It's the kind of renovation that gets measured in seasons, not months.
What the Fence Line Actually Says
If you've walked past and wondered whether anyone's actually working on it, the answer is yes. Kaufman brought in Dubuque-based Stickley Morton Architects for design, Gronen and Heritage Works for the renovation and historic preservation push, and a former college roommate, Tom Beardsley, to oversee construction. The project has also picked up $1.3 million from the Iowa Economic Development Authority's redevelopment tax credits, the kind of funding that comes with its own compliance timeline and doesn't move fast by design.
Kaufman has been candid about what's driving the project beyond the balance sheet.
"I have some genuine love and affinity for the area and the community."
That's a nice sentiment, but it's also useful information if you live nearby: this isn't a flip. It's a long-hold renovation by someone with local ties and no reason to rush a building this visible into a soft opening that embarrasses him. If you're the kind of resident who's been checking the windows every time you drive past on First Avenue, you can stop checking for a while. The next real update on this one is more likely to land in 2027 than in the next few months.
The Corridor Didn't Wait
Here's the part the plywood obscures: while the anchor restaurant sits mid-renovation, the rest of 5th Street kept its own calendar running, and it didn't slow down waiting for one building.
On August 8, Coralville's 5th Street Social filled the block between 6th and 12th Avenues for its eleventh year running, an event that traces its roots back to the street dances that used to happen on this same stretch of Historic Route 6 in the 1950s through the 1970s. The 2025 event pulled in more than 3,500 people. The city set its sights on 5,000 for 2026. Pat and Fran's Irish Pub stayed open through the night, and the Classy Chassy Cruisers parked their show cars on 10th Avenue while The Regular Joes, Heavy Indx, and headliner Birdchild worked the stage at 5th and 8th. Whether or not you made it out for the block party, the fact that it drew that kind of crowd on a stretch of street a few hundred yards from a shuttered restaurant tells you something about where the corridor's actual foot traffic energy is coming from these days. It isn't waiting on one building to reopen.
What's Actually On the Marquee This Fall
If you want the real answer to "what's happening on 5th Street this fall," it's not at 501 First Avenue. It's a few blocks up at 1301 5th Street, inside the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts, the theater built into the upper floors of the Plaza on Fifth mixed-use building.
The fall lineup is set:
- September 11 to 20 — City Circle Theatre Company stages Come From Away, the true story of 7,000 stranded passengers taken in by a small Newfoundland town after 9/11. Performances run the weekends of the 11th through 13th and the 18th through 20th.
- September 25 — A Tommy Dorsey Orchestra tribute takes the CCPA stage, leaning into the same Big Band history that made Dorsey's orchestra one of the defining acts of the era.
That's a real season, with real ticketed shows, happening over the next few weeks, in a building that's fully open and running. It's worth remembering that the CCPA itself, and the condos above it, are part of the same Plaza on Fifth development that's been anchoring this stretch of 5th Street since 2011: ground-floor retail, second-floor commercial space, and four floors of residential units on top, with a rooftop garden that looks back over downtown Coralville. The theater was the first dedicated theater facility the city of Coralville ever built. It didn't need a renovation to reopen. It's been the corridor's actual cultural anchor the entire time the old restaurant building sat dark.
The Anchor That Never Left
There's one more piece of this corridor worth naming plainly, because it's easy to take for granted precisely because it never made news: New Pioneer Co-op, the member-owned grocery at 1101 2nd Street, is still open seven days a week, still running its bakehouse that's been turning out hearth bread since 1994. It's not a new story. That's the point. While the Iowa River Power building has spent three years as a headline about what's coming next, New Pi has spent those same three years just being the place people actually shop.
That contrast is the honest read on Main Street and Central Coralville right now. The corridor's identity was never going to hinge on one riverside restaurant, however beloved it was for four decades. It's a theater with a real season, a grocery co-op that's been steady since before most of the newer condos went up, and a block party that keeps growing its own crowd every August. The Iowa River Power building will eventually reopen, and when the fencing comes down it will likely be a bigger, more ambitious space than the one that closed in 2023. Until then, the corridor isn't paused. It's just running on the parts that were never behind schedule to begin with.
If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for a home's long-term value, whether you're the one living a block off 5th Street or thinking about what it means to be this close to a corridor with this much civic and commercial investment behind it, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood-level read Adam Pretorius builds into every listing conversation. Reach out to request your home valuation and get a read on what this part of Coralville is actually worth right now, not what a headline from two years ago implied.
