On April 21, Callahan Capital Partners, the new owner of Downtown Denver’s Tabor Center, submitted a building permit application to the city for Two Tabor!

The second office tower at the Tabor Center complex, planned for the corner of 17th and Larimer on Block 068, was originally scheduled to be built following the completion of the first Tabor tower. Construction did begin on the second tower in the mid-1980s but then the oil bust put the project on ice. The developers back then got the elevator core for Two Tabor installed before they stopped construction in 1986. The core was capped with the gold-colored metal panels that still remain at 17th and Larimer, just north of the Tabor Center’s plaza along 17th Street. Not having to dig a big hole and spend a year putting in underground parking should be a big time and cost savings for Callahan–just peel off those metal panels and start going vertical! Here’s an aerial shot that shows One Tabor in the lower left and the covered elevator core for Two Tabor in the upper right:

The design of Two Tabor has also changed since the 1980s. The original design for the second Tabor tower was to be a duplicate of the first, just a bit taller. Here’s a rendering, courtesy of denverskyscrapers.com:

Callahan has a new design for Two Tabor. Designed by the internationally prominent architectural firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, Two Tabor will rise 43 stories, contain approximately 840,000 SF of rentable space, and be LEED Gold certified. Here is what Two Tabor will look like now:

Based on those renderings, I’m guessing Two Tabor will be about 630 feet tall. The Four Seasons tower currently under construction on Block 074 will be 640 feet tall to the top of its spire, so it may be a battle between Two Tabor and the Four Seasons for the new fourth-tallest tower in Downtown.

Two Tabor should start construction this summer and is scheduled to be completed first quarter 2011.