Cities around the world have wisely built and maintained balanced transportation systems that include rail transit, cars, busses, bicycles, and a variety of contraptions in between. In the United States, we started out well, with streetcar systems (first horse-drawn, then electrified) running on the streets of just about every major city in the country. But then we abandoned all of that after World War II and went on an automobile binge that we have come to realize may not have been all that wise. Cars are awesome machines and the personal freedom they provide is phenomenal. But just like so many other things in life… too much of a good thing can be bad. So better late than never, cities across the US, including Denver, are bringing back rail transit to provide some balance to our transportation systems. It’s called having a diversified portfolio of transportation assets. I am proud of Denver for taking such a bold step in the right direction.

FasTracks is more than just an ambitious regional public transit program. It will also positively influence our regional land use decisions. Major employment centers, residential developments, shopping malls, and other land uses that draw or produce high numbers of people will be/should be located in the future along our transit corridors. That is one of the principles on which Denver’s regional MetroVision plan is based. It’s also common sense.

But let’s be very clear about what FasTracks is and what it isn’t. FasTracks is a regional transit system primarily designed on the hub-and-spoke model to move people from the suburbs into and out of Downtown Denver. Such a system is absolutely necessary and I wholeheartedly support the FasTracks program, as should you. But we also have to recognize that for those of us in Denver proper, FasTracks is only one side of the transit coin. FasTracks doesn’t provide Denver with the transit connections we need and desire within and between our denser urban core districts. That is where a new Denver streetcar system would come in, but that’s a topic for future blog posts.

If FasTracks alone wasn’t enough, we have the whole Union Station redevelopment to celebrate as well. Many cities destroyed their historic train stations or converted them beyond repair into shopping malls or festival marketplaces or whatnot. Fortunately in Denver, our Union Station remains intact and is now poised to once again serve as the rail hub for the city and region. Along with its associated private sector development, the Union Station project will complete the transformation of the Central Platte Valley as a dynamic transit-oriented extension of Downtown. Downtown Denver just keeps getting better and better…

This is a great day for metro Denver!

This federal funding commitment will allow the Gold Line and the East Corridor Line to move forward. Construction is expected to get underway on the East Corridor Line this fall. For more details, check out Kevin’s post at the Inside Lane.

The presentation will include 3 alternative concepts for the Mall’s functional, operational, and physical future.  And as if that weren’t enough to get you excited, Laurie Olin (one of the original designers of the Mall and an internationally-respected landscape architect) will be on had to offer his impressions.  The details below:

16th Street Mall Urban Design Plan Public Meeting #2, Thursday February 4 (today)

5:30 – 7:30 pm, Wellington Webb Building, Room 1.B.6 (enter from Court Place)

Where once there was a planter at the corner of Larimer and 16th, there is now a raised terrace (outside the entrance to the Overland Sheepskin Co.).  Seems it’d be a great location for a coffee cart and some seating… or a similar social space.  In fact, there is a sign within the terrace advertising just such activities.  However, access is a bit of an issue…

At Union Station Advocates, we’ve been working for over a year to help raise funds for the film’s production. Along with many other community groups and contributors, we are thrilled that this feature-length movie on Denver’s Union Station is now ready for its big debut. General Admission tickets are $15 and available at 6:00 PM. Patron Level tickets are $100 and include a hosted bar and hors d’oeuvres reception at 5:30 PM. To purchase tickets in advance or to check out a trailer of the move, click here.

Denver’s Union Station redevelopment has been a long time in the making. First, Lower Downtown blossomed in the 1990s. Then, the Central Platte Valley emerged in the 2000. Waiting patiently in between those two vibrant districts has been our historic Union Station and its neighboring parcels, which is now poised to be the star of the 2010s.

The excitement about this project is palpable. This past fall, 800 people packed Union Station for a party the likes of which the old station hasn’t seen in generations. Fundraising is underway to bring back the Welcome/Mizpah Arch to the Union Station site. New projects like the relocation of IMA Financial’s headquarters to the Union Station site are being announced. Design work for the massive project is nearing completion and the project authority, DUSPA, has a new website with all the latest renderings, plans, and diagrams. And now… Denver Union Station-The Movie… is set to premiere. Please join us this Friday to celebrate not only a movie, but the launch of Denver’s most important civic project since Denver International Airport.

Back in the day (you know, way back in the spring of 2009), lighting of the outdoor spaces of Writer Square was provided by referential gas lamp style fixtures, installed on a fairly regimented grid across the block.  During the warmer months overflowing baskets of flowers hung from the light posts, lending color and interest to the different spaces.  The grid, however, seemed to have as its origin a line directly along the visual axis of the central corridor connecting the north and south plazas.  Because of this alignment, walking through the already-tight corridor was made perceptively tighter.  With the adherence to the lighting grid, many of the lights are located very close to building walls and interfere with restaurant patios.  And while the flowers were beautiful, I found myself dodging the fixtures so that my thick mane of hair wouldn’t be attacked by overzealous petunias.

In the redevelopment of the outdoor spaces of Writer Square, the referential lighting has (largely) been replaced by a contemporary fixture – triangular and columnar, with visual porosity through the lens area.  This fixture recalls the triangular footprint of the light fixtures along the Mall – a nice reference to an iconic design.  It appears that the lights have been placed on the same grid, at the same locations, as the previous poles.  (The image above on the right highlights the locations of the lights within the current design of the site.) 

While it is understandable that the new fixtures would be located at the same place as the old (due to the cost to relocate electrical service, for instance), the effect of the new fixture is to make the lighting appear more prominent.  Where the former fixture had a large luminaire atop a narrow pole, the new columnar fixture is 2 to 3 times as wide as the previous post – creating 2 to 3 times the mass in the pedestrian’s frame of view.  And when viewed along the axis of movement through the central corridor, divides an already-narrow space.

In certain cases, it appears that the sanctity of the lighting grid trumped all else.  For instance, one light along Larimer Street was located so close to an existing tree that it appears somebody had to physically lift a large limb in order to get the pole in place (yes, the branch is resting on the light fixture).  In another case, a light serves as the focal point of a secluded seating area – and I’m not sure about you, but if I’m sitting in a secluded area I don’t think I want to be illuminated as if on stage…

I always found the lighting of Writer Square to be comfortable in the evenings, and the new fixture replaces in kind the lighting levels provided by the former pole.  But the spaces today are far brighter at night than in the original design, thanks to relatively new technology that allows lights to be placed in handrails.  In the previous post, the proliferation of handrails on the stairs of the 16th Street plaza was mentioned – but these do not represent even half of the handrails located throughout the site.  And every handrail is equipped with an LED light.  The effect is to overwhelm the space with light – and higher light levels do not necessarily equate to higher comfort levels. 

The redesign of the Square was an opportunity to rethink the lighting of a public space.  A mentor explained to me long ago that lighting should be used to light the edges of a space rather than the movement corridors – so as to illuminate the shadows (and the scary things they may hold) and not the pedestrian.  Opportunities abound within Writer Square to use ambient light from retail storefronts to light the edges of the outdoor spaces.  Certainly, some level of additional lighting is both necessary and desirable, and the use of light fixtures as visual site interest has much merit.  It seems, however, that lighting as an element of interest in this case has perhaps been too-highly regarded.

The project will occupy the entire block bounded by 14th, Broadway, 13th, and Lincoln and contain two buildings linked together: a 4-story, 150,000 sf courthouse for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, and a 12-story, 450,000 sf office tower for the Department of Law including the State Attorney General’s office. The project will seek LEED-Gold certification.

Here’s the photograph from the Post article of a model of the new complex (photo by Jason Knowles, Fentress Architects):

The courthouse will include a 4-story glass-walled atrium and rotunda at 14th and Lincoln facing the State Capitol. Demolition of the existing Judicial Building and Colorado History Museum is scheduled for May, with construction beginning on the new judicial complex in September. The project will be complete in 2013. I’ll see if I can get some additional images of the project to share with you.

By the way, Ralph L. Carr was Colorado’s governor from 1939-1949 and was one of the few public leaders in the country who openly opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and bravely fought to protect their citizenship and rights as Americans—not a popular thing to do during the war.

It is really exciting to see this project becoming a reality. With construction of the new Colorado History Center underway a block  to the south of the Judicial Complex site, and with all the new things planned at Union Station, the two ends of Downtown Denver will be busy with construction for the next several years.

But one thing I never did, in those years waiting tables or later during grad school at UCD, was spend any time in the outdoor plaza space. I never dined on the restaurant patios, never sat on a planter wall, never rested on a bench. Writer Square, to me, was always a short-cut to the 16th Street Mall or a convenient place to park… not a place to be.

During 2009, Writer Square underwent a transformation. The changes are broad, and have been met with many opinions, both favorable and not. This post is the first part in one blogger’s view of the changes. And while it is not my intent to “pick on” one specific space, it is seldom that we get an opportunity to critique a re-imagined plaza space in Downtown Denver.

In part one, we discuss the 16th Street Plaza.

While I was never a big fan of the design of the large planters that populated the 16th Street plaza in the original design, they did prove to be quite functional. Not only did they provide space for shade trees and colorful annual plantings; they also served as transition elements to reduce the perceived impact of the grade changes that occur within the block. The planters also defined movement corridors and gave opportunity for rest within the large plaza space. With the changes to the Square, the planters are gone – replaced by a large stair and water feature as the centerpiece of the northern plaza.

Water and stairs are long-standing design tools for creating usable space. The sound of water is soothing, and broad stairs provide both pathways for movement and places for seating. With the redesign of Writer Square, both are used in an apparent attempt to create a social space at the core of the north plaza. However, there are some inherent issues that stand in the way:

The stairs. The northern plaza of Writer Square is, in large part, a connector from the 16th Street Mall to Larimer Square, and the majority of people using the space walk diagonally through the plaza. The orientation of the stairs, however, is orthogonal to the street grid – in conflict with the diagonal pattern of movement that pedestrians expect. This wouldn’t be so bad if the stairs were clear of obstacles; however, the proliferation and orientation of handrails along the stairs serves as both a physical and visual barrier to clear pedestrian movement. To further exacerbate this, rows of benches and planter pots between the stairs and the Mall provide further additional barriers and visual clutter to the 16th Street plaza.

The fountain. The idea of bringing water into the plaza is certainly an intriguing one. When appropriately considered, water provides interest to a space and a reason to stop and stay. However, water is most successful when it is accessible. And while you can certainly walk up to the water feature in this space, accommodation has not been made to engage with the water. The sloping walls discourage people from sitting on the edge of the water feature, and the orthogonal placement of the basin to the street (rather than to movement patterns) makes the fountain an impediment to movement rather than an object to engage.

The materials. In short, the plaza has been visually-muted. Gone are the raised planters with brick caps, as is the grid of paver bands that gave some richness to the ground plane of the plaza – all replaced by a monolithic concrete surface. The historically-referential benches and light poles have been removed, with silver/gray contemporary fixtures installed in their place. Small planter pots are provided throughout the space, but these will never be able to support the growth of shade trees or greenery that the former raised planters provided. The plaza is, well, gray.

The exception is the fountain, which appears to be constructed of black granite. However, the scale of the object and materials lacks “weight” – where the fountain should stand as the centerpiece of the plaza, it feels small and insignificant.

A noticeably successful addition to the space are the tables placed in the upper portion of the plaza between the (fantastic) barbeque vendor and Starbucks. In multiple trips to the Square during sunny lunch times, the tables have been well used – while the stairs and adjacent bench seating have been almost completely unoccupied.

The true measure of the success of a space is not found in opinions about its visual design, but in the nature of the way people use the space. The Writer Square 16th Street plaza should be a place that people are comfortable moving through and resting in – and, given its location, could be a space full of energy and vitality. Only time will tell if the updates can provide a dynamic social space at an important downtown pedestrian crossroads.

Next up in our visit to Writer Square:  lighting.

Thanks to the good people at Union Station Neighborhood Company, here is an official (and high resolution!) rendering of the proposed Denver Union Station “north wing” building—the future headquarters for IMA Financial. Image credit goes to the project architect, Anderson Mason Dale.

Click to embiggen: