Workers are making good progress on the Dairy Block project in Lower Downtown Denver. Our last update was about two months ago, so let’s check in on this major project.
Below is an updated ground-floor plan, courtesy of McWhinney, the project developer. The yellow areas are retail/restaurant spaces. As you can see, Dairy Block will add a substantial amount of retail space to Lower Downtown, including numerous stores that will front the project’s pedestrian alley and Blake Street passage (blue). The reddish area in the upper right at 19th and Wazee is the project’s hotel, and the entries to the upper-level office spaces are in green. The block of yellow in the lower right at 19th and Blake is the historic Windsor Farm Dairy building, and the block of yellow in the lower left at 18th and Blake are also historic properties. Those historic buildings’ ground-floor spaces will be reconfigured to provide entries facing the street, the alley, and the Blake Street passage.
Let’s start at 18th and Wazee and work our way clockwise around the block.
Approaching the Wazee/18th Street intersection, with Coors Field two blocks beyond:
The corner of Wazee and 18th:
In the center of the Wazee block face—the area above the blue dumpster—is the main entry for the upper-floor offices.
Moving closer to 19th Street, we see the main entry to the Dairy Block’s hotel component, known as The Maven, an independent property managed by Denver’s Sage Hospitality. Note the difference in floor-to-ceiling heights between hotel uses (left) and office uses (right). Here’s an updated rendering of The Maven, courtesy of Johnson Nathan Strohe, the hotel architect.
Now at the corner of 19th and Wazee, we see The Maven is almost topped out.
Along the 19th Street side of the project, we get a good view of the pedestrian shopping alley and how the office floors span across the alley to connect to the project’s new Blake Street building.
The Blake Street building is the furthest along. Here are three views, moving from 19th Street toward 18th Street, of the new building’s integration with the adjacent historic properties.
From the corner of 18th and Blake, we look back at where we started: the 6-story office component at 18th and Wazee.
The Dairy Block will provide a major infusion of pedestrian activity and energy to a part of LoDo that’s been fairly dead (blame: surface parking lots). Here’s a final overview rendering, courtesy of Shears Adkins Rockmore:
Let’s wrap this up with two final images I took about 10 days ago from Coors Field that nicely illustrate the Dairy Block’s contribution to the healing and enhancement of Lower Downtown’s urban fabric.
We’ll check in again on Dairy Block’s construction progress this summer.
Thanks for the update! This is shaping up to be one of the best developments in the last 10 years. It’s rare that a building can become an anchor or catalyst within a neighborhood, and simultaneously blend right in.
Love the post! I’m so glad to see builders using the Paseo (I think that’s right) concept to activate alleys. It reminds me a little of the space on the 16th Street Mall opposite the Tabor before it was all ripped out.
This project is going up fast. It is such an important development for LoDo and is a really nice design.
What a great looking project!
I really like the second to last picture. If you showed it to me without the infill logo I probably wouldn’t recognize it as a city block in lower downtown Denver. The infill really shaped that entire block.
I still think this building is ugly and uninspired. And it sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to its historic neighbors, particularly the Blake Street side of things. And I’m still not convinced that the pedestrian alleys will work in this location. I think we can expect a revolving door of restaurants, cafes, and shops that have frontage on the alley that will struggle to survive. We will see though.