First off we will start with a project located on the corner of Zuni and Caithness Place: Highland Park. This project has also been named the “Core Power Yoga” since Core Power Yoga will be the main commercial anchor. Back in February, Ken made a post with renderings and details which can be found here.

It appears most of the foundation work is done.

Looking down from the other side of the project, there is a great view of downtown.

As I was walking up Zuni, I stumbled across a project titled Zuni VI Townhomes; it is located at 32nd and Zuni Street.

From what I gathered on the sign and their website, they are going to be three bedroom, four bathroom units with rooftop decks. There will be six units in total with ground floor office space.

So far not much progress has been made but there is activity on the site.

This next townhome project is located just south of 32nd and Vallejo Street; named Vallejo Street Townhomes. This is a ten unit project. Renderings and details can be found on the project’s website.

It looks like this project is almost complete.

Even though the front of the project is covered by trees in this shot, you can see what the back side is going to look like.

Next up there is a project nearing completion on 34th and Tejon Street. This project also has a website which can be found here. It looks like this is the first phase of townhomes in this project.

Looking from the backside, workers were installing appliances in one of the units. I asked one of the workers if I could get a glimpse at one of the units but they wouldn’t let me in.

There isn’t much around the 34th and Tejon Street intersection. This building adds quite a presence in the area.

Last but not least we are going to look at the Highland Crossing Final Phase. Back in April I did an update and it has come along nicely since then.

It appears the name for this phase is Prospect on Central. It looks like the building is topped out and the siding is being installed.

Looking at the project from the other side you can see how far up Kensing Court it goes.

Looking down from 17th Street you can see there is a great view of downtown.

Looking down from Kensing Court, you can see there will be some spectacular views of downtown from these residences.

There are a lot of little projects in Denver’s neighborhoods that all contribute to the urbanization of Denver and provide great infill taking away one empty lot after another.

The challenge focused on a 46-acre site that included the Coliseum and its parking lots to the southwest toward Globeville Landing Park. The site sits at the crossroads of the redeveloping area north of Downtown that features nearby the RiNo arts district, future FasTracks transit stations, South Platte River amenities, and excellent highway access. One of the competition’s main assumptions was that the Coliseum had to remain the property of the city and continue as an entertainment venue. For all of the program’s rules and requirements, review the document included with the April 20 post.

Last night, over 600 people packed the ballroom at the Downtown Marriott to hear the two teams’ presentations and the selection of the winner. The result: the University of Colorado was victorious and snapped a four-year DU winning streak. Congratulations CU!  Both teams, however, put forth excellent presentations that offered innovative, yet different potential futures for the Coliseum area. I’m happy that DenverInfill is able to present both teams’ proposals from last night.

CU envisioned the site as the Denver Center for Creating Art, with the Coliseum reconfigured as a performance and rehearsal venue and new development providing space for the Art Institute of Colorado and other arts-related businesses. Below is CU’s proposed site plan and here are links to PDFs of CU’s executive summary (1.6 MB) and full presentation (14.7 MB).

DU, on the other hand, envisioned the site as the Frontier Center at the Denver Coliseum, a complex focused on “agri-tech” and alternative energy education and business development, with a conference center and incubator space for entrepreneurial businesses focused on these evolving industries. A site plan from the DU presentation is below, and here are links to PDFs of DU’s executive summary (0.6 MB) and full presentation (6.1 MB).

While both plans represent academic exercises only and do not necessarily reflect what will eventually be planned for the Coliseum, the potential for the site as described by both teams is exciting and gives Denver citizens and its leaders plenty to consider as the Coliseum area transforms into a vibrant extension of our urban core. Congratulations to the students from both schools, and many thanks to everyone at NAIOP and the City involved in organizing this year’s Rocky Mountain Real Estate Challenge and for their efforts to enhance the quality of both universities’ real estate programs and to promote excellence in Denver’s urban environment.

Hangar 61

It seems that a buyer may have been found for what is certainly the coolest remaining historic structure on the Stapleton redevelopment.

The Stapleton Fellowship Church has posted a blog announcing that its members have voted to move ahead with the purchase of the Hangar 61 building. According to the website, the Christian congregation has been eyeballing the the 9,000-square-foot structure, hyperbolic spaceship-looking shell of concrete and glass at 8800 East 21^st Avenue more since December. Currently the church holds services a few hundred yards away at the Denver School of Science and Technology.

There is little that Hangar 61 is better suited for than an event space, with its streamlined roof arching like a clamshell toward an expansive wall of windows.  It’s hard to imagine that the building was ever intended as an airplane hanger. It’s even more impressive considering how deteriorated the structure was before state and local preservationists stepped in to save it.

Hangar 61 in 1959

In 2004, I remember sitting in on a meeting of the Denver Planning Board for a reason I can no longer remember. The subject of Hangar 61 came up on the agenda and this guy named David Walter stepped up to the microphone and started talking about why the building needed to be saved from demolition during the crusade to convert the old Stapleton Airport into an upscale, mixed-use dreamscape.  Walter is a local artist who co-founded Ironton Studios and Gallery. Walter described how Hangar 61 was built in 1959 by the Boettcher family-owned Ideal Cement Company to house its Fairchild F-27 turbo-prop airliner. The unique structure was designed by Fisher, Fisher, and Davis, and engineered by renowned concrete-shell engineer Milo Ketchum. Plus it just looked cool.

But it had also been vacant for more than a decade prior. It would cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to secure the 160-foot, diamond shape concrete arch (impressively engineered without center supports) and necessary environmental clean-up. Plus there was a complex tangle of ownership between the city and private development entities.

In 2004, Hangar 61 faced demolition

Board members voted to kick the issue to the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission. Eventually the statewide group Colorado Preservation, Inc. stepped up with a $200,000 grant to purchase the building and get the rehab process started. Then, last spring, developer Larry Nelson bought the building with the goal of taking it to market.

Nelson’s “620 Corp Inc. has spent about $1.3 million on the project, including constructing a parking lot and adding the frame for a new entryway,” arts critic Mary Voelz Chandler reported for the Rocky Mountain News in last January. “He estimates another $300,000 to $400,000 will be necessary to bring the hangar up to the point at which someone can lease or buy it to use as office space.”

I wasn’t able to get a hold of Nelson or the church, so no word yet on the sale price or if the deal has been finalized.

Everyone has an opinion about the Stapleton development. For some, the lots are too small and the homes too close together and too pricey for their size—it’s just a little too urban. For many others, the project isn’t urban enough, with insufficient density and diversity for a project so close to the region’s urban core. On the urbanity spectrum, Stapleton falls somewhere between suburban and urban at a point that differs depending upon who you talk to and which aspect of the project you discuss.

Every time I go to Stapleton, I find myself intrigued, impressed, disappointed, amazed, conflicted. On one hand, I think the quality of the development—the streets, parks, plazas, bridges, and the buildings in general—is quite high, with a clear design intent and attention to detail that permeates the project. On the other hand, some of the neighborhoods give off a bit of a Truman Show vibe, and the residential architecture strikes me as perhaps more of a caricature of Denver’s historic neighborhoods than a modern interpretation of them. Yet, after spending a fair amount of time in Stapleton, I find its neighborhoods more interesting and appealing than just about any suburban development I’ve been to.

The heavy investment in park space has its pros and cons in my opinion. The parks are very well done and the natural areas along Westerly Creek are incredible. Central Park is a great public space and it will mature and be mentioned one day in the same breath as our city’s other great urban parks like City, Sloans, Washington, and Cheesman. However, there may be too much open space at Stapleton. One-third of the project’s land area is planned as parks and open space, which seems too high of a percentage to me, and that there’s some good urban land there that should be developed to capitalize on Stapleton’s central location.

Most disappointing are the commercial areas. The Stapleton master plan completely lacks any of the easy-to-walk-to, intimate, commercial corners tucked within a neighborhood like we have in our historic Denver districts. If Stapleton is supposed to be old Denver urbanism that’s new, then where is Stapleton’s Old South Gaylord, 32nd & Zuni, 11th & Ogden, or 12th & Elizabeth? The 29th Avenue Town Center is nice, but Quebec Square and Northfield are wasted opportunities. Both rely on the same big-box-power-center-that-could-be-anywhere-in-suburban-America design. Where is the mixed use? Where is the structured parking? Where are the apartments above the retail? At a minimum, Northfield and Quebec Square should have been a Belmar, but instead, we got an Aspen Grove.

One thing is certain, however, about the Stapleton project: it has been hugely popular and it has had a major impact on Denver’s growth and development. It has provided landlocked Denver with a type of development that it hasn’t had much of a chance to offer in many years. As the largest urban infill and New Urbanist project in the country, Denverites and urbanites across the country have watched Stapleton grow over the past decade and will continue to view it with interest as it matures, as Stapleton represents a notable experiment in how we build our cities in the new century.

When discussing the urban evolution of Denver, it is the high-profile projects that tend to get the enduring ink.   Large-scale development projects, sports and cultural facilities, transportation projects, and downtown high-rises are typically (and worthily) the posterized snapshots of progress.  However, the improvement of the urban fabric of our city is perhaps more contingent on smaller moves that provide momentum to larger change, and ultimately have a more profound impact on the day-to-day lifestyle of urban residents and workers.  Over the coming weeks, I’ll be discussing some of the physical, economic and social factors that are sometimes overlooked but supply our neighborhoods with richness and vitality.

Today’s topic – Successful cult business enterprises:

Many of our urban neighborhoods are home to locally-grown businesses with cult-like followings (and no, I’m not talking about the pot shop phenomenon).  These businesses tend to offer some combination of great food, funky atmosphere, and highly-personal service – and are, more often than not, found in low-rent buildings that serve (or once served) as de facto business incubators.  Dozens of examples exist across center-city neighborhoods – Snooze restaurants, Stella’s on Pearl Street, the Perfect Petal in Highlands, to name a few.

One very current example of the effect of successful cult businesses on the community is Happy Cakes, the Highlands cupcake shop.  Opened in a tiny space at 32nd and Newton Streets in 2007, Happy Cakes is in that not-quite-Highlands-Square fringe that – at the time – needed an entrepreneurial kick-start.  Enter Happy Cakes (and their co-tenant Generous Servings), some delicious confections, and a hungry public… and, well, a sweet success story was made.  Combined with additional re-purposing of long-standing buildings along 32nd Avenue west of Meade Street, Happy Cakes and its neighbor businesses have extended the length and vitality of the Highlands Square business district.  This, in turn, enhances the walkability of the larger neighborhood, increases property values, and encourages investment.  But it gets even better…

Sometime in the next week or two, Happy Cakes will be moving.  Success has bred the need for more room, and more room was found just down the street.  Recently, the West Side Books space – the long-tenured used book store near 32nd and Julian – underwent a small-scale but important infill of what had long been an underutilized street frontage on 32nd Avenue.  This infill not only brings more vitality to the street, it also provides a new home for a neighborhood icon in the heart of a district that has been built on neighborhood icons.  And the move of Happy Cakes to the heart of Highlands Square opens up a spot for the next locally-grown business to gain its own following.

If you’re keeping score: that’s one vital business, one street-enlivening infill project, one hopefully-successful future endeavor, and the continued satisfaction of many a Denver stomach.

Next up:  Dedicated community-oriented open space – with a purpose.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of the site from Bing maps:

The southwestern corner of the project area is a quarter-mile from the Evans light rail station on the Southwest line; a bit far to be considered a true Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), but close enough for it to be considered “transit proximate”, and certainly a selling point for the project overall.

The Lumberyards will have to compete with the other big TODs that didn’t get very far along during the last boom, like the Gates project just up the road at Broadway and I-25 and Continuum’s project at I-25 and Belleview. When the next boom finally arrives, TOD may be king of Denver development, with Downtown Denver serving as the biggest Transit-Oriented Development site around.

Overall, this is a good project and one that will hopefully succeed in offering additional housing opportunities for people who may want to live in a denser, urban environment, outside of the Downtown area.