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.
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.
Along with the retail addition, new curbs, sidewalks, and landscaping are also going in, drastically improving this stretch of 1st Avenue.
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!
Restoration Hardware’s new structure may be the worst new building in Denver in this decade. And the competition is stiff.
I couldn’t disagree more. It’s obliviously done in a very 1950’s modern architectural style to reflect the furniture they sell. The materials, clean lines and craftsmanship are a refreshing break from the half-block monoliths sprouting everywhere.
I believe you are thinking of the Room & Board building on 2nd Ave, while Susan is referring to the Neo-Tuscan mishmash that is the Restoration Hardware on 1st.
Oh yes, thank you for correcting me. That RH building is god awful!
Agreed.
Great post – especially for us out-of-towners.
The new sidewalk in front of 3300 E. 1st Avenue is a failure on a couple counts if the intent is to create a comfortable pedestrian experience on that segment of 1st Avenue. It’s too narrow to accommodate anything more than very low volume pedestrian traffic. It should be at least a couple feet wider. If widened, it would be uncomfortably close to the fast traffic on 1st. Closely spaced, substantial bollards or a raised continuous planter high enough to provide a sense of separation from traffic, in conjunction with the above mentioned sidewalk widening would result in a far better pedestrian experience.
But I suspect we’re stuck with the “economical” solution that’s evident in the photos.
In high volume pedestrian traffic areas, just don’t have a tree lawn. Place the trees in grates like is done in other similar areas of the city and widen the sidewalk to the curb. Also redesign the streets so you don’t have 12 ft lanes and not street parking.