Dogtown: the business district where the neighborhood shows its newer face

If the campus is the oldest institutional anchor in the area, Dogtown is one of the clearest expressions of the neighborhood’s newer public identity. Dogtown’s official site describes it as a business, dining, and entertainment district in the heart of the Drake Neighborhood, and Drake’s own economic-development materials call it a place where culture, diversity, connectivity to downtown, and neighborhood partnership all come together.  The Varsity Cinema is one of Dogtown’s strongest anchors. The Varsity’s official history says the building was built in 1917, first opened as a theater on December 25, 1938, and has been Des Moines’ art house cinema for the last 40 years. That gives the district a very particular kind of cultural credibility. It is not simply a restaurant node or student strip; it has a long-standing arts institution at its center.  Dogtown has also been trying to grow into a more intentional entertainment district. Drake’s page on the Merge Dogtown project says developers envisioned a mixed-use project that would link campus and Dogtown and help make the culture-and-arts district a stronger destination. The City of Des Moines describes the first phase as a 5-story, 110,000-square-foot mixed-use building on the block bounded by 24th and 25th Streets, University Avenue, and Carpenter Avenue.  The district’s artistic ambitions have shown up in smaller ways too. Axios reported in 2021 that Dogtown Chromatic, an interactive lighting installation, was designed to animate storefronts and bring people together through music and light along University Avenue. That kind of project tells you Dogtown is trying to cultivate atmosphere, not just tenant mix.  At the same time, the district is still very much in motion. Axios reported in 2025 that Toppling Goliath was no longer planning to open its second taproom in the neighborhood, even though the broader development at 1236 24th Street would continue. That is a useful reminder that neighborhood districts are always partly made of plans that change, tenants that come and go, and momentum that has to be rebuilt more than once.  So Dogtown belongs in this package because it shows the Drake area trying to evolve without losing its neighborhood soul. It is where art-house culture, food, entertainment, redevelopment, and student-neighbor crossover all become visible on the street. In the Drake area, Dogtown is one of the places where the future is being tested in public.