As we all know, Cherry Creek is going through a significant infill boom with apartments, hotels, and office buildings going up all over the neighborhood. Along with the boom, there are also a few great minor projects that are underway which we will be focusing on in this post, primarily a project on 1st Avenue and Cook Street, the same block as the Alexan Cherry Creek project.

In any great urban neighborhood, the street level is the most important aspect given that’s where the pedestrians are. These new immaculate, glassy buildings have the potential to be a total failure if there are blank walls along the street, or small parking lots occupying the corners. Luckily for the Cherry Creek neighborhood, that’s not the case.

Developers in Cherry Creek are actively pushing retailers and projects to the corner to help improve the urban form of the neighborhood. Two very recent examples are the Room and Board on 2nd Avenue and Detroit Street and the Restoration Hardware on 1st Avenue and Fillmore Street. The Room and Board expanded to the street corner, supplanting the surface parking lot next door and the Restoration Hardware was extended from the Cherry Creek Mall and pushed to the street edge along 1st Avenue.

2016-05-09_RoomandBoard 2016-05-09_RH

1st Avenue, with wide roads and complicated intersections, is a bit messy to pedestrians but that’s not stopping anybody from making it a better street for those on foot. Built in 1980, 3300 East 1st Avenue was built with parking and easy automobile accessibility. Present day, the parking structure that was built with this building is being replaced by an 8-story apartment project, and the office building is now receiving a ground floor retail addition.

2016-05-09_1standCook-01 2016-05-09_1standCook-03

Along with the retail addition, new curbs, sidewalks, and landscaping are also going in, drastically improving this stretch of 1st Avenue.

2016-05-09_1standCook-04 2016-05-09_1standCook-02

A neighborhood that was once automobile oriented is slowly turning into a multi-modal corridor. Now all we need to work on is some dedicated transit to serve this area better!