DenverInfill Blog

This one is a no-brainer, right? Since starting DenverInfill, I can’t count the number of people who have asked me in person or by email “when are we getting a grocery store Downtown?”

Frankly, I think we need two grocery stores in Downtown: a King Soopers or Safeway type that offer “regular” groceries, and a Whole Foods that offers the upscale and more gourmet items. There have been a lot of people who have been talking about a Trader Joe’s too, which hasn’t established a Colorado store yet.

Then there’s the location question. I feel strongly the stores should be as close to the 16th Street Mall as possible. Since they’ll need to serve the greater Downtown area, we’ll want as many people who live and work Downtown to be able to access them via foot or public transportation. The stores will still have to have sufficient parking no doubt, but it doesn’t make sense to put them in a location where few people are likely to walk to reach them. Right now we do have one Downtown grocery store proposed: an upscale King Soopers that would be part of a Nichols Partnership mixed-use residential project on Block 005-H in the Union Station district. However, due to the restrictions that give East West Partners the exclusive right to develop residential units in the Central Platte Valley until 2011, it seems the earliest that store could open would be 2013 or so.

Anyway, what do you think? One Downtown grocery store or two, and where should they go?

This is not a new idea with me, of course. I’m just repeating here the mantra of change we’ve heard from so many urban Denverites for many years now: we need a Downtown Denver department store.

We used to have in Downtown a May D&F, J.C. Penney, Joslins, the Denver, and perhaps a few other retailers that would qualify as department stores as we’ve traditionally known them. They are now all gone from Downtown. In return, we have Cherry Creek, a phenomenal retail district that is in the upper echelon of urban retail centers in the United States. But given the proximity of Cherry Creek to Downtown, it is unlikely that we will see a traditional department store in Downtown any time soon.

However, department stores that take the form of a mass merchandiser like Target—that’s another story. In fact, I’d rather see a Target in Downtown Denver than a Macy’s or whatever anyway, since Target sells a far greater range of household and personal goods than a Macy’s or a Penneys. As I mentioned in my post on streetcars, approximately 205,000 people, including me, live within a three-mile radius of the intersection of Broadway and Colfax, yet in order to go to the closest Target, we all have to go to Glendale or to Edgewater—different municipalities! That’s just not right. There is the Kmart on South Broadway, but that’s almost three miles from Downtown and I’m not a big fan of Kmart anyway.

You may recall that a developer once had plans for an urban Target on Block 162, but the deal fell through because the developer couldn’t assemble the land. Since then, I’ve heard a few rumors about a possible urban Target in Downtown Denver here or there, but so far they’ve never amounted to anything. I’ve also heard that Target Corporation itself has Denver at the top of its list for an urban store, but Target doesn’t develop their own stores; we need a local developer to take on the challenge of finding the right site and getting the project built—then Target will come.

Any Downtown Target should have, to maximize the utility of the land, some kind of tower above it, whether it’s housing or office or whatever. That will further complicate putting the deal together for the developer, but it’s the right thing to do in the long run. A Target in Downtown Denver should be located within a block or so of the 16th Street Mall to allow for Downtown workers and residents to get to it conveniently via the mall shuttle. A Target would certainly have underground or structured parking, but it should be located as close to public transit as possible.

Finally, I bet a bunch of you out there are going to post a comment to this blog saying we need a Downtown grocery store too. Hold your horses… you’ll get your chance in #5.