Celebrating the restoration of Downtown Denver’s urban fabric—that is, replacing Downtown’s ugly surface parking lots with new buildings—is the primary focus of this blog. So, the announcement of this new infill project is particularly satisfying, as SkyHouse Denver will eliminate a big chunk of nasty asphalt that has plagued Downtown Denver’s urban landscape for decades. We’re talking the corner of Broadway and East 18th Avenue:
On the east is Lincoln, on the north is East 18th Avenue, on the west is Broadway, and on the south is the Mile High Center. Across Broadway to the west is the Brown Palace Hotel.
SkyHouse Denver will be developed by the Novare Group along with Baston-Cook Development. The high-rise development includes a 25-story, 354-unit apartment tower with ground-floor retail situated on the west half of the site facing Broadway and a 6-story parking garage on the east side of the site facing Lincoln. If all goes as planned, the project will break ground in late 2014.
Thanks to the good folks from the Novare Group and their design partners at SRSS Architects, here’s a rendering of the project as viewed looking east:
SkyHouse is one of several apartment communities with a similar design developed by Novare in other cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Orlando, and Austin. The development includes a pool, fitness center, lounge, and other amenities on the 25th floor.
For you long-time DenverInfill readers, you may recall this site, located on Block 003-B, was one of five nominees in our great “Downtown Denver’s Worst Parking Lot” contest of 2007. While it didn’t win—that dishonor when to the embarrassing asphalt wasteland on Block 039 in Lower Downtown (that still exists today)—Block 003-B is still a parcel in dire need of development. The site was once the home to the stately Cosmopolitan Hotel and the Hotel Metropole before they were demolished in 1984.
Let’s hope SkyHouse Denver rises from the ground as planned and contributes to the ongoing restoration of Downtown Denver’s urban fabric! We’ll keep you posted as this project works its way through the development review and preconstruction design process.
Beautiful!
I share you enthusiasm for this project. It’s nice to see a project with ambition – i.e. height. One observation about this side of the downtown area – it needs more restaurants and other attractions for people to hang out, compete with LoDo. By comparison this is an uninviting area and it’s a few blocks hike to either the 16th Street Mall or east 17th Avenue.
I second Dan’s comment. Hopefully this and other infill will increase the density of the hood enough to attract the pedestrian traffic required for a downtown restaurant and other attractions.
Wow, those two hotels formerly on the site were beautiful. What a shame they do not exist anymore. Great news, though, on filling in this big missing tooth.
Totally agree with you, Ken and all, about this sad, bleak parking lot at 18th and Broadway badly needing infill. Having long personal history with Trinity Church, I’ve stood at that corner so many times, looking at the empty space where the old Cosmo was torn down, across from the venerable Brown, the ugly parking lot like a bombed-out gap next to the Mile High Center, Denver’s first skyscraper. Since then, many bigger and taller towers in every direction — but at street-level, Broadway feels like nowhere, the old church surrounded by parking lot emptiness. So, fingers crossed, this project actually happens. It will be a huge step towards Denver’s biggest street finally living up to its name.
Let us not forget why the Cosmopolitan was imploded: for a skyscraper that never materialized. In the last days of the 1970s-1980s oil boom, someone thought they could ignore the reality of an over-built office market at the tail end of a natural resources boom subject to global geopolitics, and destroyed a big part of Denver’s historical fabric and this area’s walkability. And that parking garage a block north, facing 19th: I seem to remember that it was meant to be the first few levels of what would become a much larger garage to serve the office tower that never got built.
The Cosmo, while respectable, was never as luxurious as the Brown, but the Metropole next door, later incorporated into the Cosmo, was home to the Broadway Theater, the most architecturally spectacular theater space ever built in this city, where traveling theater acts from New York performed in the days before we had a performing arts complex on Curtis Street. The Broadway, accessed through the Metropole but actually backing up to Lincoln Street, was destroyed in or around 1955 to put in what is still there nearly six decades later: a surface parking lot (considered “progress” then, I suppose). The demolition of the Cosmopolitan simply enlarged what was already there.
If all goes as planning, meaning it will never be built.
skyhousedallas.com will be my new neighbor in the Fall of 2014. Looks like it will be a great looking building but they are small rental units. My building in Victory Park (thehouse.com) is a better choice for those who prefer size, luxury, amenities and ownership.
So much great and exciting building news today! I really hope all these projects spring up and keep Denver’s expanding skyline filed with sky cranes!
This look s to be a great development and the area really needs. Looking at the satellite image really brings home how much work we still have to go.
Let’s hope this one get’s built. It’s a handsome design and would compliment that intersection nicely. The rendering only provides a peek of the garage structure, but I hope it will serve as more than a garage and have some ground floor retail to help stimulate that part of town.
I have always thought this was one of the most important parking lots to be developed downtown. I am glad it is residential. This lot looks terrible next to beautiful Brown Palace and Trinity Church.
This is great to have another residential tower in this area, as there aren’t too many existing nearby. Thank you again, Ken!
This is the last of a few parcels in the core of downtown that could see a new tallest building for downtown. I’m surprise a much more aggressive development isn’t planned. I could imagine that building being twice or three times that height in that specific lot.
There’s plenty of parcels left that can accommodate higher buildings, but this specific parcel fall under the 400-ft height limit area in downtown:
http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/646/documents/Zoning/DZC/Art8_Downtown_DZC_040714.pdf
(Long time reader, first time commenter.) I’m all for filling in vacant parcels, and usually celebrate something like this that brings density to a dark corner of downtown, but as someone who lived in Midtown Atlanta for four years, I shudder to see this same design in Denver. Novare has been recycling this same darned building all over Atlanta (there are now two that are virtually indistinguishable from one another and a third on the way in Buckhead), and to see them parachute into cities all over the country with this architecturally forgettable building is really a pity. They are driven solely by their bottom line and have no incentive to put up better buildings, and I suppose if I were running the show at Novare I would be under pressure to do the same thing. But it’s such a disappointment to see something so mediocre plunked down in so many urban neighborhoods around the country. Ok, getting off my soapbox…
I work for Denver Public Schools and we just bought and are in the process of gutting and redoing 1860 Lincoln. We have already moved in Downtown Denver’s first elementary school as well as Administration offices. This summer Emily Griffith Opportunity School and High School will also be moving into the building. We have realized it really sucks being surrounded by surface parking so this would be a nice addition to a blight corner of Downtown. Hopefully this will spur more development.
I have seen engineers surveying and drilling (I assume for ground testing) the parking lot lately so maybe this is going to happen.