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Putting Our Best Foot Forward

Posted by  on December 17, 2008

To make an urban place exceptional, it all really comes down to the pedestrian. The ease, safety and enjoyment that a pedestrian experiences in an urban setting is perhaps the most fundamental factor in determining how that person will ultimately perceive the place as a whole.

Denver’s Downtown Area Plan identifies seven Transformative Projects. Here’s a description of each taken from the Plan:

Energizing the Commercial Core: Bolster economic development opportunities and enhance the pedestrian experience in the Commercial Core.

Building on Transit: Couple the regional transit network with an equally ambitious local Denver-serving transportation system that provides quick and efficient connections.

Grand Boulevards: Transform Speer, Broadway, Colfax, Park Avenue and Auraria Parkway into memorable, multi-modal boulevards as a complement to Denver’s parkway system.

Embrace Adjacent Neighborhoods: Enhance pedestrian, bike and transit connections between Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Connecting Auraria: Foster expanded physical and programmatic connections between the Auraria Campus and the rest of Downtown.

Downtown’s New Neighborhood-Arapahoe Square: Redevelop Arapahoe Square as a cutting-edge, densely populated, mixed-use area and center of innovative businesses.

A Rejuvenated Civic Center: Restore and reactivate Civic Center to attract more visitors, residents, workers, and students to the park.

In my opinion, the one thing that ties these seven projects together—the one thing that, if focused on, would facilitate the successful achievement of these seven projects—is pedestrianism. Let’s take a look:

Energizing the Commercial Core: We don’t have to look too far here, as the description above for this project specifically mentions enhancing the pedestrian experience. Anyone who has spent an afternoon wandering around the core part of Downtown knows that there are some great pedestrian experiences, and some not-so-great pedestrian experiences. Unfortunately, there are too many of the latter. Improve the pedestrian realm and you’ll energize the commercial core. After all, when we say “energize” in this context, don’t we really mean “sidewalks abuzz with people”?

Building on Transit: Quite simply, there’s little point in having a comprehensive and dynamic transit system if, once you exit the transit vehicle, you can’t get to where you want to go safely and conveniently on foot. As every transit rider is also a pedestrian at some point in their journey, a quality transit system and a quality pedestrian system go hand in hand.

Grand Boulevards: Why is it that the major Downtown Denver streets listed in the Plan need transforming? Basically, because they all suck for pedestrians. None of them are particularly fun to walk down, and none of them are certainly any fun to cross. Enough said.

Embrace Adjacent Neighborhoods: Here again, the Plan states first thing that enhancing pedestrian connections is key to tying our Downtown-adjacent districts with the core Downtown. For the prime example of the power of a strong pedestrian connection, look no farther than the trio of pedestrian bridges across the Central Platte Valley and how they have fundmentally bonded Downtown and Highland together.

Connecting Auraria: What is the main reason why Auraria and Downtown currently aren’t well connected? Go back to the Grand Boulevards comment: crossing Speer Boulevard. Any Auraria student knows that making the long walk across about a dozen lanes of traffic and Cherry Creek is a less-than-pleasant experience that feels rather suburban despite towering skyscrapers looming just a few blocks away.

Downtown’s New Neighborhood—Arapahoe Square: There certainly is no denying that walking around the Arapahoe Square district is no fun. The streets are unnecessarily wide and at many intersections, crosswalks are nonexistent. Broadway slices through the heart of the district like a dull knife, leaving behind triangle-shaped fragments of blocks and bizarre five-way intersections that are a pedestrian’s nightmare. Of course, right now there’s not much reason to have to walk around Arapahoe Square, but that’s a whole other issue.

A Rejuvenated Civic Center: Civic Center Park faces a number of challenges, but one of them is getting pedestrians to it. Once again, we have a major “crossing the street” problem. Fix that problem, and solving the park’s other issues becomes a lot easier.

So, if we focus our attention on the pedestrian environment in Downtown, that will get us a long way towards our other Downtown goals. To that end, this year’s Downtown Denver Partnership’s Leadership Program focused exactly on this issue. The 70 or so emerging leaders in the 2008 program did an exceptional job, and I had the opportunity to attend the presentation of their final report entitled “Putting Our Best Foot Forward: Enhancing Downtown Denver’s Pedestrian Environment.” The full report is now available at the Partnership’s website. Click here to go to the Leadership Program home page. A link to download the report is right at the top. I highly recommend reading it.

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Filed under Pedestrians, Plans & Policies, Streets.
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North by Northwest

Posted by  on September 28, 2008

In an issue directly related to my recent “Highland or Highlands?” blog, today let’s talk about… Does the Downtown grid point north or west?

The definitive expert on all streets Denver is Phil Goodstein who wrote the book Denver Streets in 1994. It traces the etymology of every street name in the entire metro Denver and Downtown street grids and provides insight into many other aspects of Denver’s physical development. It’s a must-have for anyone with an interest in Denver’s history and evolution as a city.

From his book, I quote: “Moreover, while downtown streets are diagonal, Denver also defined their directions. The named streets, which run northeast away from Cherry Creek, are said to be going ‘east,’ i.e., into old East Denver as the area on the downtown side of Cherry Creek was known after the merger of Denver and Auraria in 1860. The named streets heading southwest are defined as going west since the entire section of town the other side of Cherry Creek was West Denver. Numbered streets that go northwest across the Platte River are said to be heading north into the heart of North Denver where North High School is located near Speer and Federal boulevards. The numbered roads which run southeast toward the Capitol are south bound.” Because of Mr. Goodstein’s authority on the issue, throughout my DenverInfill website, I refer to the Downtown numbered streets as running north-south, and the named streets running east-west.

Fast forward to the recently completed 2007 Downtown Area Plan. In that document, wherever directional references are mentioned, the numbered streets Downtown are described as running east-west and the named streets as running north-south. While I was relatively involved in that planning process, I didn’t spot the error until near the end, and even though I brought it to the attention of the planning team, the final Downtown Area Plan document today still describes the Downtown grid as running counter to what Phil Goodstein states is the City of Denver’s policy on the direction that our diagonal Downtown grid officially points. The Union Station redevelopment planning process that’s currently in full swing repeats the Downtown Area Plan’s error, as it describes the Wynkoop side of Union Station as the “east” side and the Central Platte Valley side of the historic station as the “west” side.

The argument in favor of what is apparently the recently forgotten “official” position of the city on this issue is that the neighborhoods northwest of Downtown have been known for over a century as North Denver, as documented in my “Highland or Highlands?” blog and as anyone who grew up in North Denver, like my buddy Joe, knows from personal experience. If northwest Denver is “North Denver” then that means the numbered streets run north-south, not east-west, otherwise we’d refer to Highland as “West Denver.”

The argument in favor of the opposite perspective is that the numbered east-west avenues on the metro grid were originally designated to roughly align with Downtown’s numbered streets. As Denver continued to grow and the city switched the platting of streets to the more logical north-south-east-west grid, it decided to name the new east-west avenues south of Downtown in a manner that would associate them to Downtown’s numbered streets. Consequently, the avenue that ran east from the southern terminus of 17th Street was named East 17th Avenue, the avenue that ran east from the southern terminus of 16th Street was named East 16th Avenue, and so on. Following that system, the east-west avenues to the south were named in descending numerical order until the “zero” avenue was reached—Elsworth Avenue—which became the dividing line between north and south on the metro decimal street address system. Because the numbered avenues run east and west and they were associated with the numbered Downtown streets, there is some logic then in saying that the Downtown numbered streets also run east and west.

Our Downtown grid is aligned at almost a perfect 45-degree angle to the cardinal directions, not for an intentional mathematical reason, but because the Downtown streets were laid out to be parallel to Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, which just happen to intersect each other at roughly a 90-degree angle in a 45-degree rotated setting. So whether we say Lower Downtown is the “north” or “west” end of Downtown is really an even judgement call. Historical precedence points one way, recent usage points another. From my 20 years of living in Denver, it seems to me there is no consistency among locals as to a directional preference. We somehow manage to understand each other regardless, and as for the tourists and the newbies—they’re baffled by the diagonal Downtown grid anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

After 150 years, we apparently still haven’t come to any consensus. Perhaps that’s a good thing. The confusion of direction only adds to the uniqueness and intrigue of Downtown Denver.

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Filed under History, Streets.
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Reflections on the DNC

Posted by  on September 5, 2008

I’ve been busier than expected this past week, plus I wanted to give it a few days for the experience to sink in, but I’m finally ready to share a few of my observations about how Downtown Denver held up during the Democratic National Convention.

I agree with what I believe is the overwhelming majority opinion that Denver really nailed it on hosting the DNC. Despite the slow fundraising and some late logistical worries, the whole thing seemed to come off without a hitch. There were two broad areas in which things could have gone horribly wrong: widespread violence or destruction due to a terrorist act or out-of-control protester/police confrontations, or major logistical failures resulting in huge traffic jams, telecommunications breakdowns, etc. Neither happened to any serious degree. In fact, it seemed that the whole convention went smoother than perhaps any of us in Denver could have hoped. Even the weather cooperated, which, for those of us who live here know, is not at all an unusual situation, but we also know that any kind of freak weather could have easily occurred (blizzard in August anyone?). Add to all of that the fact that we got lucky and hosted a convention at which historic political events occured that will be remembered for generations, and I think we can conclude that the entire event was a huge success for our city. The repeated mention in all the print and electronic media of the word “Denver” about a million times in association with the week’s historic significance is PR virtually impossible to buy.

Wandering the streets of Downtown during the convention watching people, overhearing snippets of conversation by visitors, and talking to fellow Denverites who were doing the same, I think the tens of thousands of visitors to Denver were genuinely impressed with our city. Hopefully, some of those visitors will come back and invest in Denver in some form or another or, at least, return for a visit. Certainly, our successful hosting of the DNC represents another step forward in Denver’s emergence onto the world stage.

One very obvious observation was the appeal of the 16th Street Mall. It was like a river of humanity for most of the time and an exciting example of what Downtown’s main pedestrian corridor could look like every day if we continue to invest in Downtown. What was also just as obvious, however, was the lack of pedestrians on almost all of the other Downtown streets. Sure, there were some folks wandering along California, Welton, 14th, and a few other streets around the Convention Center or near a major hotel, and most of the LoDo streets usually had decent pedestrian traffic, but venture more than a block or so beyond 16th Street and in most cases you’d find yourself one of just a small handful of pedestrians. The reason why is clear: many of our blocks in Downtown don’t offer ground-floor uses to which pedestrians would want to travel. Through additional infill developments, retrofitting retail into the ground floor of some of our 1980s office tower lobbies, improving the physical qualities of the sidewalk and pedestrian amenities, and adding thousands of more residents Downtown, we will start to change that situation.

The DNC showed us exactly the strengths and weaknesses of Downtown Denver: the appeal of the Mall versus the lack of appeal to many of our other Downtown streets; the difficulties in crossing Broadway, Colfax, and Speer as pedestrians versus the ease of walking now from Downtown to the Highland district; the great sports, culture, and entertainment infrastructure we have in Downtown versus the spotty, fledgling retail scene; the remarkable diversity of transportation conveyances we saw being used during the convention versus Downtown’s streets which are still overwhelmingly oriented to accommodating the private automobile. The DNC experience for me clearly confirmed that the goals set forth in the Downtown Area Plan are exactly what we need to accomplish in order to spread throughout all of Downtown the many great qualities we currently find today only in certain places Downtown. I look forward to the day when dozens of our Downtown streets look like the 16th Street Mall did during the DNC (minus, perhaps, a bit of the craziness) on just a normal uneventful day.

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Filed under Events & Meetings, Pedestrians, Streets, Urbanism.
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Speer Boulevard’s Future

Posted by  on June 30, 2008

In the past couple of days, the Rocky‘s Art & Architecture section has featured two articles about projects that will shape the future of Speer Boulevard through the heart of Downtown.

First is Mary Chandler’s article on the proposed Bell Tower project. The article includes yet another view of the tower, this one even more clearly shows the articulation of the tower’s facade. Here it is below (credit Jason Knowles/Fentress Architects):

The other article, by the Rocky‘s Mark Shulgold, is about the presentations that were recently made by the six finalist architecture firms competing for the chance to do the redesign of Boettcher concert hall. Of note in this article is the concept, presented by a couple of the firms, of the possibility that the new Boettcher could extend forward toward Speer as a new building rather than being rebuilt entirely within the footprint of the existing concert hall. Intriguing.

Both projects illuminate the opportunity we currently face in deciding what we want Speer Boulevard to become when it grows up. Named after our great City Beautiful-era mayor, Robert W. Speer, the boulevard itself is our city’s grandest, with its special relationship to Cherry Creek, its enhanced streetscape, integrated pedestrian/bike path, and the various parks along its journey from Highland to the Cherry Creek district. Yet the building forms that line Speer Boulevard’s 4.5 mile length is a total mixed bag. In Northwest Denver, the buildings are low-scale but sit right up against the Speer right-of-way. Through the Central Platte Valley and Downtown, the boulevard’s wide setbacks give Speer a less intimate, more automobile-dominant feel. From Colfax south to Downing, a loose string of high-rises punctuate a low-rise fabric of historic street-edge commercial and suburban-like strip commercial with setbacks and surface parking.

Two of the seven Transformative Projects from the Downtown Area Plan (Grand Boulevards and Connecting Auraria) deal with Speer Boulevard. But what we really need to do is to create a vision for all of Speer Boulevard, and clearly define how Speer will serve in the future as the backbone of our urban core. I was recently in Atlanta, and that city’s Peachtree Street functions much like Speer does in Denver, as it connects Downtown with Buckhead, their equivalent to our Cherry Creek district. Along the eight miles between the two, Peachtree Street has become the premier urban street in Atlanta, complete with their main cultural centers and museums, and dozens and dozens—hundreds perhaps—of residential, office, and hotel towers of varying height with vibrant ground-floor retail everywhere. It’s an amazing corridor that could certainly serve as a model for what Speer Boulevard could become, if that’s what we want. Either way, it’s been almost a hundred years since Mayor Speer left us a remarkable, unique boulevard through the heart of our city. It’s time we articulate a vision for Speer Boulevard that will allow it to live up to its full potential.

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Filed under History, Plans & Policies, Streets, Urban Design.
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Lessons from London

Posted by  on August 20, 2006

When I travel, it’s impossible for me not to view the city around me from an urban planning and design perspective. While I’m having fun and enjoying the sights, I’m also still thinking about things like the spatial arrangements between the streets and buildings, the sidewalks and other public spaces and how functional and attractive they are, the types and intensities of uses and how they are integrated, and so on. I try to evaluate the urban environment around me and gauge how it makes me feel. Does it make me feel comfortable? Intrigued? Confused? Excited? Safe? And if so, why? What are the urban attributes and design elements that contribute to making me feel the way I do about a particular place?

So, while in London last week, undeniably one of the greatest cities on the planet in virtually every way in which a city could be judged, I found myself in a happy state of sensory overload. Countless people and buildings and vehicles and every form of urban accoutrement, all jumbled together in a messy yet organized manner, running like a well-oiled machine. It was awesome. Note: my experience was in central London only—from roughly Earls Court on the west to The City on the east, and Regent Park on the north to the South Bank on the south–an area slightly larger in size than greater Downtown Denver.

First, a few quick observations. After extensively exploring central London for a full week, I observed:

1 surface parking lot
4 homeless persons lying on the sidewalk
5 instances of graffiti

Can you imagine saying the same about Downtown Denver?

Now some additional observations…

Buildings:
Denver has more tall buildings concentrated in a central area than does London. So shouldn’t that make Denver a more vibrant, urban place than London? Of course not. Probably the number one lesson we can learn from London is… skyscrapers alone do not a great city make! You must have people—lots of them—and a well-maintained physical environment that has been thoughtfully designed for people, not vehicles. If you have those two things, then you can have a dynamic, thriving urban center with nothing higher than five-story buildings. Now there’s nothing wrong with having skyscrapers too as long as they relate well to the street and sidewalk in a people-oriented way and provide ground-floor uses that are welcoming and engaging to the pedestrian. But Denver’s future success does not lie in filling our core Downtown with 60-story towers. Our success lies in filling surface parking lots and undeveloped parcels throughout the greater Downtown area with four- and five-story buildings. Additional skyscrapers in the core simply become the icing on the cake. Plus, studies have shown that the ideal street-width to building-height ratio for creating an optimal pedestrian environment on an urban street is 1:1. In most cities, including Denver and London, that’s about a five-story building.

Ground-Floor Retail:
One of the core principles of contemporary urban planning is that you put ground-floor commercial uses in your multi-story buildings. Doing so not only provides space for needed retail services, but it also creates an appealing and engaging sidewalk environment and helps generate pedestrian activity. But we also have to be strategic about where we require ground-floor retail (especially outside the Downtown core) because we could never sustain that much commercial space if every infill project throughout the greater Downtown Denver area had ground-floor retail. Even in central London, most of the streets are not lined with storefronts. What you do find in London outside of the core office and commercial zones are little clusters of retail that serve a particular residential area. These are typically a few blocks in length and offer simple every-day commercial services like restaurants and coffee shops, newstands, markets, and some professional services. They are similar, in fact, to the little neighborhood commercial areas that Denverites love so much: Old South Gaylord, Old South Pearl, Highland Square, etc. What we need in Denver is a Downtown Area Retail Plan. We need to identify exactly where we want to require ground-floor uses in new developments, particularly in the Downtown residential districts, so that we create a well-defined retail area to serve each district. Where should the “Old South Gaylord” of the Ballpark district be? Where should the the “Highland Square” of the Golden Triangle be? We need to make sure we’re requiring ground-floor retail in new infill projects in Denver not as an automatic response to some urban planning trend, but as a means by which a Downtown resident can easily access by foot a compact neighborhood shopping area where they can find most of their daily commercial needs.

Parks:
Central London is loaded with parks. A few are huge, on the scale of Denver’s City Park or Washington Park, but most are relatively small and vary in size from a few acres to a single lot. In looking at my map I count well over 100 parks in central London. In the greater Downtown Denver area, I count about 20. If we’re going to ask people to live in attached or stacked housing with no private yards, then we must provide enough green spaces for them to find respite from the noise and harshness of the city. Parks are the shared “back yards” of the Downtown dweller, and in Denver we don’t have enough of them. They must be well-maintained, safe, relaxing, and attractive and, most importantly, they must be numerous. A Downtown Denver resident should not be more than a two-block walk from a green space, even if it’s just a shady little courtyard with a few benches and a flower garden. We must begin to invest heavily in establishing a grid of small urban parks throughout the Downtown Denver area while we still have so many undeveloped parcels to choose from. We also need to identify a long-term permanent revenue stream for their ongoing security and upkeep.

Travelways:
In central London, land not covered by a building is primarily used as either a park, or as a travelway for vehicles and pedestrians (streets and sidewalks). Consequently, travelways are equally important as elements of the public realm as parks, if not more so. The quality of the travelway environment in central London has been given great care and attention, with not only plenty of pedestrian amenities, but well-marked travel lanes, pedestrian crossings, etc. In central London, walking down the sidewalk can be just as pleasant as strolling through a park (although you do have to watch out for those crazy British drivers). With no empty lots and all buildings built to the sidewalk’s edge, every street becomes a unique open-air public “room” and the turn of every corner presents the pedestrian with yet another new room to discover. In Denver, our travelways have not been built as important public spaces to be viewed from the pedestrian perspective, but as mere conveyances for the motorized vehicle. Denver’s streets have been designed to be experienced from 30 m.p.h., not from 3 m.p.h. I’d say the few exceptions in Downtown Denver would be Larimer Square and a few of the streets in LoDo. At least for the Downtown area, Denver needs to turn its traffic engineering over to the urban designers and pedestrian/bicycle planners and fundamentally change the way in which it views the role of the street. We also have to make additional investments in public transit beyond FasTracks that will connect our urban neighborhoods with each other and the core Downtown. We need to rebuild the urban streetcar network we had 70 year ago.

1. and 2. Typical quiet residential street in central London
3. Typical mixed-use commercial street with the occasional high-rise
4. Typical commercial district in a residential area

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Filed under Blocks, Public Spaces, Streets, Urbanism.
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