If you drive First Avenue with any regularity, you already know the building. Red brick, big windows facing the river, plywood where the glass used to be. For most of the last three years it's just been part of the scenery, the place everybody assumes is "coming back soon" without anyone quite knowing what that means.
Here's the part most people have gotten wrong: the restaurant is not coming back. The building is. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them explains almost everything about what you're actually going to get on that stretch of the river.
The Restaurant Didn't Fade Away. It Was Evicted.
Iowa River Power Restaurant ran for 46 years before it closed in November 2023, and it didn't wind down the way most long-running places do. Danise and David Petsel had owned it, along with the Irish pub Flannigan's next door in the same building, since December 2002. Flannigan's closed first, in December 2022, after roughly two decades in business. Then came a dispute over the lease itself. Danise Petsel told a local TV station in October 2022 that she'd exercised a five-year renewal option. Building owner Randy Ward said he never received it and considered the arrangement month to month. A little over a year later, the Petsels got an eviction notice they hadn't been expecting, and a 46-year run ended.
The Petsels didn't disappear from the local dining scene, either. Danise Petsel resurfaced with a new supper club at the Highlander Hotel in Iowa City, partnering with Angela Harrington. So in a real sense, if you're missing the Petsels specifically, they're already cooking again, just somewhere else. What's sitting empty on First Avenue is the building they used to work in, not their business.
The Buyer Nobody Expected
The person who bought 501 First Avenue isn't a restaurateur. Mark Kaufman is a University of Iowa graduate from the class of '86 and the founder and executive chairman of Athletico Physical Therapy, a company with more than 900 locations across 24 states. He lives in the Chicago area. He bought the building because of a drive.
In the fall of 2023, Kaufman was making repeated trips up and down First Avenue while a family member received treatment at a university hospital, and the sight of the vacant building kept pulling at him. He closed on the purchase roughly a year later, working with fellow UI alum Tom Beardsley and Tippie College of Business student Peyton Weber to form the development group now known as Old Gold, LLC. The Corridor Business Journal put the purchase price around $3 million.
"Within a few more trips up and down First Avenue, my inner voice said, 'Why not you?'"
That's Kaufman's own account of how a physical therapy executive from Chicago ended up owning one of Coralville's most recognizable buildings. It's a genuinely personal story, and it also means something practical for anyone waiting on a menu: as of the most recent public reporting, Kaufman himself has said it will be up to whoever eventually operates the restaurant to decide whether the Iowa River Power name even survives. No restaurant group has been named. No menu exists yet. The building has an owner. The restaurant does not.
Who's Actually Paying to Bring It Back
This is where the story gets more interesting than "local landmark reopens," because the renovation is not being paid for the way you'd assume.
The project received $1.3 million from the Iowa Economic Development Authority's redevelopment tax credit program, which classified the property as a grayfield site, meaning it's either sat vacant long term or needs significant infrastructure work to be usable again. That state program distributes about $15 million a year statewide specifically to get properties like this one back into productive use.
The city of Coralville is also in on it, but not by writing a check. In October 2024, the city council approved an amendment to its urban renewal plan that gives Old Gold, LLC a 100 percent rebate on any additional property tax revenue the renovated building generates, for ten years, starting in 2028. The building currently generates roughly $86,000 a year in property taxes at its existing assessed value. That baseline is what the city continues to collect. Whatever the renovation adds on top of that, in a building that's about to undergo a full historic restoration and presumably jump in assessed value, goes back to the developer instead of the city budget for a decade.
That's the trade Coralville made to get its landmark back: preserve the building, but wait until at least 2028 before the city sees any of the tax upside from doing it.
There's a preservation layer to the timeline too. The project is aiming for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, which means the State Historical Preservation Office has to sign off on renovation plans, including restoring the building's original glass storefront and replacing windows to match. Coralville's Community Development Director, David Johnson, has said the city expects Old Gold to lean on the International Existing Building Code rather than standard new-construction codes, since that code is built for exactly this kind of flexibility in older structures. All of that adds real time to a project that already has state and local approvals stacked on top of a private renovation.
What "Late Summer" Actually Looked Like in May
Here's the timeline as it's actually played out, not as it was originally pitched.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| October 2024 | Coralville City Council approves the tax rebate agreement |
| November 2024 | Old Gold, LLC publicly announces the project, no restaurant name yet, targeting a late summer 2026 opening |
| Ongoing | Old Gold's own site describes the timeline as "hopes of reopening by fall 2026" |
| May 2026 | Gazette photos taken on site show plywood still covering the windows and construction fencing still blocking access |
| Late August 2026 | No restaurant name or operator has been publicly confirmed |
Late summer is right now. If the original announcement had held exactly to plan, you'd expect a grand opening sometime in the next few weeks. Instead, the most recent on-the-ground documentation, from early May, shows a building still fenced off and still boarded, which is not what a project three months from completion typically looks like. That doesn't mean the project is in trouble. Historic renovations tied to state tax credit review routinely run past their first announced date. It does mean that if you've been checking the windows every time you drive by, waiting for a name, you're probably not going to see one this season.
Why This Matters Beyond One Restaurant
The building isn't just a nostalgia project. Greater Iowa City Inc., the regional economic development group led by CEO Nancy Bird, launched its Strategic Investment Districts initiative in 2024, and Coralville's district centers on the Fifth Street corridor. The plan there is deliberately about connective tissue, easing the transition between the single-family neighborhoods on the west side of that corridor and the mixed-use development on the east side, and the plan names the Iowa River Power building as the point where that transition culminates. In other words, city planners are treating this one building as the hinge between two very different parts of Coralville, not just as a restaurant that used to be there.
It also sits in a genuinely good spot for it. Flood mitigation work done in earlier years put the building's foundation flush with the river's edge, and the adjacent pedestrian trail offers close views of the roller dam, where locals regularly spot eagles and other wildlife along that bend of the river. Whatever eventually opens there will have one of the better river views in town, restaurant name or not.
So if you've been waiting for the sign to go back up and the smell of a Sunday brunch to drift out over First Avenue again, the honest answer is: not yet, and possibly not for a while. What's actually happening is bigger and slower than a restaurant reopening. It's a building being rebuilt under a state historic tax credit, financed in part by a city that's agreed to wait years for its own tax return on the investment, anchoring a corridor plan that stretches well past 501 First Avenue.
We keep an eye on stories like this one because it's the kind of thing that shapes what a neighborhood actually feels like to live in, long after the headlines move on. If you've got your own memory of a birthday dinner or a Hawkeye recruiting visit at the old Iowa River Power, or you're just curious how this stretch of Coralville keeps changing, we'd genuinely like to hear about it. The Jill Armstrong team lives in this corridor too, and we're always glad to talk about what's happening in it, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar.
