About the Third Street Center

Carbondale, Colorado has a history of forging creative solutions and enlisting individual talents to accomplish great things for the Roaring Fork Valley. Where a need has been identified, Carbondale has rallied to meet it. This is especially true of the 45,100-square-foot renovated Third Street Center.

The mission of the Third Street Center is to promote community and sustainability.  We do so by using a multitenant, mixed-use facility that models sustainability in its design and practice. By providing long-term, affordable rental space, the Center brings together a diverse collection of nearly three dozen nonprofit organizations, artists and small businesses under one roof, leveraging their unique strengths. It offers them opportunities to work together more closely, creatively, efficiently to develop impactful solutions for common problems facing the region and their clients. In sharing a home, the non profits are encouraged to share skills, talents and resources, enabling them to more effectively pursue their missions.

An endeavor of this magnitude has required the collective expertise and good faith of many individuals. Challenged and inspired by their common vision, diverse constituencies – ranging from private citizens and design professionals to nonprofit leaders and elected officials – negotiated a series of steps to ready the old Carbondale Elementary School for its renovation. In October 2008, the Town of Carbondale and the Roaring Fork RE-1 School District completed a land swap that brought the school and the land under the Town’s ownership. The Town subsequently executed a renewable 49-year lease with the Third Street Center Nonprofit Board of Directors, allowing years of planning to move to the tangible reality of renovating the building.

Transforming a 1961 school building that had undergone expansion over the decades presented the Third Street Center’s Design and Development Team with unique challenges … as well as enormous opportunities. The project team, led by developer Gavin Brooke of Land + Shelter and architect Jeff Dickinson of Energy and Sustainable Design, made sustainability a core design principle. Using LEED guidelines, they developed a renovation plan that unifies the building’s sections, honors a commitment to managing longterm costs for tenants, and minimizes the facility’s carbon footprint.

Flooded with natural light, animated by art, and filled with innovative green design elements, the Third Street Center provides an attractive, productive environment for its tenants. Shared spaces, such as a board room, break areas and community room, further conserve resources by reducing the amount of space tenants must lease individually to conduct their programs. Additionally, these common spaces foster a culture of collaboration that has synergistic benefits for the community at large.