The proposed hotel located on the Auraria campus has taken another step forward with the Metropolitan State College’s Board of Trustees approving the project at their June 4 meeting. Next in the process is the college issuing a Request for Proposals to the development community for developers to respond with a specific hotel design and secured financing. For more information about the project, here’s an article by Dominic Graziano of The Met Online, the college’s online newspaper.

In a nutshell, the hotel would be 12 stories and about 100,000 SF in size and would be located somewhere on the existing parking lot that faces Speer Boulevard between Auraria Parkway and Larimer (see the aerial photo on the Auraria district page). That site is across Speer from Mr. Geller’s proposed 33-story “Bell Tower” on Block 242/044.

These projects are important in our goal of transforming Speer Boulevard from a wide open automobile-dominated thoroughfare into an urban, pedestrian-friendly boulevard framed by a strong street wall of buildings and lined with a great mix of uses and public spaces worthy of our signature urban parkway.