Meow Wolf plans to expand S.F. office
Art collective wants to build four-story space at Creative Studios on Camino Entrada
Meow Wolf is going to Phoenix; Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Las Vegas, Nev. — and now it’s time for a second expansion in Santa Fe.
The renowned arts collective apparently plans to build a four-story, 75,000-square-foot office addition at its Creative Studios and corporate headquarters facility at 2600 Camino Entrada.
Meow Wolf had a July 18 predevelopment meeting with city officials. The first public look at the project will be a city Early Neighborhood Notification meeting at 5:30 p.m. Monday at the Southside Branch Library, 6599 Jaguar Drive.
These are all preliminary actions before plans are officially submitted to the city Land Use Department.
“They told us of the concept. It’s looking like [an] office,” said Noah Berke, planning manager at the city Land Use Department. The predevelopment meeting schedule mentions a “warehouse addition.”
Meow Wolf spokeswoman Laura Hudman did not respond to a call from The New Mexican.
Meow Wolf acquired the 52,000-square-foot former Caterpillar plant on Camino Entrada in 2017 — the company’s first expansion after opening its House of Eternal Return in March 2016. The facility is home to its Creative Studios, where the formulation of the exhibits for the new Meow Wolf facilities takes place.
All the Meow Wolf expansions fed from the Creative Studios will be much grander and larger than the converted bowling alley for the original, 20,000-square-foot Meow Wolf House of Eternal Return on Rufina Circle. Author and Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin, the author whose books were adapted into HBO’s Game of Thrones, invested nearly $3 million to launch
House of Eternal Return.
Meow Wolf Las Vegas will be the anchor tenant of a new, 40-acre Area 15 “radically reimagined” retail, art and entertainment complex, as described by the developers, Fisher Brothers. Meow Wolf has reported an early 2020 opening for a 50,000-squarefoot Las Vegas attraction.
In Denver, Meow Wolf is building a 90,000-square-foot, triangular structure between two viaducts in the Sun Valley community, south of Broncos Stadium at Mile High.
Meow Wolf got a head start by opening a Kaleidoscape amusement park ride at the neighboring Elitch Gardens in April.
Meow Wolf in December announced its third expansion, this time to Washington, D.C., in 2022. It is expected to debut a three-level, 75,000-square-foot permanent art installation that will be an anchor feature of the second phase of Cafritz’s Art Place at Totten Park.
Meow Wolf didn’t wait long until announcing a fourth expansion in February in Phoenix, where it is collaborating with True North Studios to build a 75,000-square-foot Meow Wolf, plus a roughly 400-room hotel with rooms designed by artists. An opening date has not been announced.
Meow Wolf was launched in 2008 as a scrappy collective of outcast artists. Now, it has nearly 500 employees and 87 investors who have put up $158 million to finance these expansions.
Meow Wolf in 2017 also won $1.1 million in state and city grants to support the Caterpillar plant acquisition with a $250,000 from the city’s economic development fund and $850,000 from the state’s Local Economic Development Act fund.