Are Larry Sells’ dreams of a shiny Uptown district finally coming true?

Cautiously optimistic is how you might describe Larry Sells, owner of the Uptown Theater, these days.

In 1989, the historic theater, at 3700 Broadway, closed after the previous owner failed to pay back taxes. The building eventually fell into the hands of the Land Trust of Jackson County, which Sells was president of at the time. He spent a few years trying to sell the property to developers, but nobody was biting — the building and the area around it were crumbling.

“There wasn’t anything in the neighborhood,” Sells recalls. “It was totally crime-ridden. There were prostitutes everywhere, drug houses all along Washington behind the theater, drug dealers living in hotels, and rotting high-rises. It was bad.”

Still, Sells saw an opportunity to preserve a historic building and make some cash. So in 1994, he resigned from the Land Trust and bought the Uptown himself. He planned to restore not just the theater but also the commercial corridor of Broadway between, roughly, 38th Street and Armour Boulevard. He lined up investors and accepted millions in tax-increment financing from the city to secure the Uptown’s renovation. And he purchased the strip mall north of the theater, eventually renaming it the Uptown Shoppes.

But over the years, various factors have prevented Sells from transforming the area into the vibrant district that he had envisioned. Stalls in labor and battles with the city and with neighborhood associations meant that five years went by before the new Uptown started booking concerts. When it did finally get on solid footing, there were issues across the street.

“The shopping center was a mess,” Sells says. “It was full of asbestos and it had an antiquated HVAC system. And we had to overcome all that during two terrible recessions in the 2000s, during which there were not a lot of funds available.”

More recently, the area that Sells has hoped to revitalize was best-known as a go-to spot for the synthetic marijuana drug K-2, which was sold at dubious coffee shops along Broadway. Most of the prostitutes had been cleared out, and a handful of respectable businesses had leased space, but the overall upgrade was relatively minor. The area had gone from “really sketchy” to just “kind of sketchy.”

Now that the nation — at least those in the upper middle class and higher — is crawling out of a recession, there are encouraging signs that Sells’ 20-year-old goals for the Uptown district might finally be realized.

A few weeks ago, the local owners of gay-friendly burger joint Hamburger Mary’s — Eric Christensen and Jeff Edmondson, of ECCO Holdings — announced that they were fed up with Crossroads rent and would be relocating to the Uptown Theater. The restaurant means to take over what is now the Conspiracy Room, an event space adjacent to the theater, next summer. Christensen and Edmondson have also announced a second venture: a video-themed bar of some kind, which may open next to the Conspiracy Room as soon as December.

That is not the only chatter out of the ECCO Holdings camp. It plans to open two additional nightlife spots across the street, in the Uptown Shoppes, by 2015. One will be a sports bar, and the other will be a combination Tex-Mex restaurant and microbrewery (possibly with a country-music theme), according to Edmondson.

“It’s a big project, a very big project,” Edmondson tells The Pitch. “The Uptown is very eager to work with us, and we’re ready.”

Meanwhile, comedy club Stanford and Sons — a Westport staple in the 1990s and early 2000s but now located at the Legends — is dipping its toe in midtown again with a winter comedy series at the Conspiracy Room. It starts November 21, with comedian A.J. Finney, and runs eight weekends. Owner Craig Glazer says opening a permanent location in the neighborhood is a strong possibility, should the series draw well. Sells wants Stanford’s to move into the Uptown Shoppes, next to Prospero’s Uptown (a satellite of the 39th Street bookstore that opened last year) and the GymKC fitness center.

“I think Larry’s trying to make this area an ‘area,'” Glazer says. “The Valentine district or Uptown district, whatever you want to call it, has been sort of a pass-through between the Crossroads and Westport. Not very many big anchor tenants besides the Uptown. But I think if you put us in there, this Hamburger Mary’s stuff, the new jazz club, it starts to look like a pretty happening place.”

About that jazz club: It’s called Broadway Jazz Club and it’s located in the space formerly occupied by Outabounds (3601 Broadway). Pat Hanrahan (the former Jardine’s general manager) is going to run the place, which is set to open in early December.

Broadway Jazz Club is just a few doors down from another culture-minded establishment, the Uptown Arts Bar. It opened last year and has been quietly hosting poetry nights, live music and all kinds of midtown misfits.

Also slated to open in the near future on the east side of Broadway: the French-Vietnamese bistro iPho Tower (3623 Broadway) and an Edible Arrangements (3629 Broadway).

Greg Patterson, who owns a good chunk of the real estate on that side of the street, says, “It’s been difficult and depressing at times over here. I’m the longest-running property owner in the neighborhood — going back 28 years. We’ve seen P&L come along and impact our businesses and Westport’s businesses. But now we’re getting better-quality tenants excited about being over here. And there’s a lot of spectacular historic renovation happening with these old high-rise apartments, too.”

The Valentine Apartments, a run-down high-rise just south of the Uptown, at 3724 Broadway, has been restored and is now leasing. The Chatham building across the street, at 3701 Broadway, was a vacant squatting place for 20 years before it was recently renovated and converted into elderly housing. And MAC Properties is in the process of rehabbing the Ambassador Apartments (the old Ambassador Hotel), at 3560 Broadway. “It’ll be open to the public next year and offer $15 million in market-rate housing,” Patterson says. (Sells is also mulling entry into the booming apartment game, with a possible four-story tower on the west side of the Uptown Shoppes.)

Sells’ Uptown utopia is far from a sure thing. CSL Plasma (3715 Broadway) continues to be a blighted scuzz magnet in the neighborhood. Some of these prospective tenants are still a question mark, and the ones who do move in might find that they can’t get the numbers to line up right. And there is certainly a precedent for quashed hopes on this stretch of Broadway.

“Changing a neighborhood, it takes an inordinate amount of time,” Sells says. “You work on it for years, you invest in it, you see improvements, you see setbacks. Now you look outside around here and you see people jogging up the street, you see new buildings. And all of a sudden, there’s this wave of new businesses set to come in. It’s kind of that thing where, you know, when it rains, it pours.”