East Village Is Building Its Second Half, and It Faces the River

Walk down Robert D. Ray Drive on a weekday evening this fall and you'll pass the historic Des Moines city hall, a chain-link fence around a narrow strip of vacant land, and, a few blocks south, a patio full of people holding beer flights next to a building that used to pump oil out of the ground. That stretch used to be the part of East Village nobody photographed. It's about to be the part that decides what the neighborhood becomes next.

Most people picture East Village as Court Avenue and Grand Avenue: brick storefronts, a tiki bar inside a pizza place, a gallery that doubles as the meeting point for the neighborhood's biggest wine walk. That version of the district is real and it's still running. But the investment dollars right now are landing four blocks east, along the river, in a stretch developers call the Market District. Understanding both halves explains why East Village feels different depending on which direction you walk.

The half you already know

The Court Avenue core still supplies the neighborhood's daily rhythm. Fong's Pizza reopened at 317 E. Court Ave. in the spring of 2025, bringing back its Chinese-inspired pizza and tiki bar to a building that had sat between tenants. A few blocks over, Ocha Bubble Tea & Dessert Cafe opened its third Des Moines metro location at 221 Fourth St. in December 2025, joining the chain's Ankeny and Windsor Heights spots. Liz Lidgett Gallery and Design still functions as the unofficial check-in desk for Winefest Des Moines' Vino in the Village stroll each spring, where Wall to Wall Wine & Spirits pours samples up and down the block.

This part of the district also runs the entertainment calendar. The Garden hosts a rotating drag brunch series that maps almost exactly onto the fall and winter social calendar: a Mamma Mia-themed brunch in September, a Horror Halloween Drag Brunch on October 17, a Nickelodeon and Disney edition in November, and an Ugly Christmas Sweater brunch closing out December. A few doors down, Coa Cantina marks National Taco Day on October 6 the way most Mexican restaurants do, with no excuse needed.

None of this is new information to anyone who already spends weekends here. What's changed is where the next round of investment is pointed, and it isn't this stretch.

The half being built right now

Four blocks east, in the aged industrial pocket the city calls the Market District, Twisted Vine Brewery relocated in 2023 into a building nearly 150 years old, originally the Central Oil Works warehouse, at 112 S.E. Fourth St. The move came with a $6.3 million historic renovation and a 5,000-square-foot patio that wraps the building. The brewery still runs more than two dozen rotating taps and continues to draw a steady stream of reviews into 2026. When the deal was first announced, brewery partner Dalene DeGeest predicted downtown could become "a small brewery row," pointing to the half dozen breweries already nearby. Now, the patio still fills on Friday nights, and it sits inside a redevelopment plan that always called for more than beer: the same reporting on the Market District's renovation described plans for an event venue, a hotel, office and commercial space, apartments, and condominiums.

That plan is now visibly under construction. Heart of America Group, the hospitality and real estate company behind much of the recent activity in East Village, opened its Tempo building at 317 E. Sixth St. in 2024 and gave press a June 2026 walkthrough of its next project, the Aston of East Village at 603 E. Sixth St., a mixed-use building planned for 161 residential units and 6,000 square feet of commercial space. Company president Mike Whalen has said the firm's recent investment in the neighborhood tops $100 million.

The newest piece of that investment is office space, which East Village has almost none of. Heart of America Group first floated the idea in June 2026, asking the city council to review a five-story building on a 0.39-acre city-owned parcel at 401 Robert D. Ray Drive, wedged between the historic city hall building and a parking garage. The proposal came back to the council this September with firmer numbers: a roughly 75,000-square-foot mass timber building costing an estimated $24 million, with construction targeted to start next spring and finish by spring 2028. Whalen has said the mass timber design would appeal to tech, architecture, and engineering firms looking for a distinctive workspace.

Whalen has described the neighborhood's pull on his company in blunt terms, calling it "a pretty healthy ecosystem" the firm wants to keep building in. In separate remarks to the city council, he put the demand side more plainly: people want to work in East Village, and there isn't much office space to let them.

That's the detail that reframes the rest of it. East Village has spent the last decade building itself as a place to eat, drink, and live. It has not, until this proposal, had much of a place to work. Adding office space to a neighborhood already stacked with apartments and restaurants doesn't just add square footage. It closes a loop that residents living in Tempo have had to commute out of the neighborhood to complete every weekday morning.

What that means for the way the neighborhood is used

The practical effect this fall is a district doing two different jobs depending on which end you're standing in. Court Avenue and Grand Avenue continue running on their established calendar of drag brunches, taco specials, and gallery walks. The Market District, four blocks toward the river, is running on a construction calendar: a brewery already open and drawing a crowd, an apartment building finishing out, and an office building now cleared for its first regulatory step toward a 2028 opening.

Both halves are already walkable from each other, which is part of why the plan works. A resident can start an evening with a drink on Twisted Vine's patio, walk past the Aston's construction fencing and the future office site on Robert D. Ray Drive, and end up at The Garden for a drag brunch or Coa Cantina for tacos, all inside a fifteen-minute loop. That loop is the thing actually changing this fall, not any single opening or groundbreaking. The neighborhood's center of gravity is stretching east toward the river, and the fastest way to see it is to walk the whole four blocks instead of stopping at Court Avenue.

A quick look at what's actually on the fall calendar right now:

The next few months in East Village belong to both halves of the neighborhood at once, the established one running its usual calendar and the newer one pouring foundations a few blocks away.

If you're watching this stretch of downtown Des Moines because you're weighing what a home or investment here might look like once that office building opens, Ingrid Williams Real Estate Team knows this corridor block by block and can walk you through what's actually changing on the ground.