Coming soon to a Millennium Bridge near you… 16 Chestnut!
16 Chestnut is East-West Partners‘ proposed office tower at 16th Street and Chestnut Place that will anchor the fourth and final corner to Denver’s Millennium Bridge.
Way back in 2000, when Denver’s Central Platte Valley was just beginning its transition from industrial wasteland to hip urban neighborhood, the Millennium Bridge’s dramatic 200-foot tall mast stood alone as a symbol of the area’s potential as Downtown’s newest urban district. Shortly thereafter, the Park Place and Promenade Lofts buildings joined the bridge as neighbors on its western corners, and now the DaVita building is wrapping up construction at the third corner. Once 16 Chestnut is built, the Millennium Bridge’s destiny as an iconic public space embraced by contemporary development will be complete. From an urban morphological perspective, the bridge will go from being the figure surrounded by open ground to being, in a way, the ground surrounded by many figures (that’s for my planner/architect geek friends!). Whatever your perspective, this is an exciting milestone for the Union Station area.
Here’s the scoop on 16 Chestnut:
It’s a 320,000 square foot, 18-story, 240-foot-high office tower located on the rectangular parcel bounded by 16th Street/Millennium Bridge, Chestnut Place, and 17th Street. The site is surrounded by the new Mall Shuttle loop at the Union Station light rail station. Here are two views of the site:
The development is currently in the concept design stage. Therefore, please note that all of the following images, provided courtesy of East-West Partners and their design partner klipp architecture, are very preliminary in nature and subject to change. Nevertheless, these renderings do give you a general sense of the mass and scale of the proposed building.
The general building program includes a level of underground parking, ground floor retail and entry, a second-level lobby that includes a cool walkway that spans across the mall shuttle lane and connects to the Millennium Bridge (a pedestrian bridge to a pedestrian bridge!), a few more levels of parking, and about a dozen or so floors of office space. Here’s a conceptual ground-floor site plan and building section/stacking plan—again, very much subject to change:
Finally, how about a couple of building concept renderings:
First, the view from 17th and Chestnut, showing the building’s unique helical parking garage ramps:
Next, the view from 16th and Chestnut, showing how the building spans across the Mall Shuttle lane plus the pedestrian connection to the Millennium Bridge:
East-West Partners is now actively marketing the building to prospective tenants, and the design will be refined as marketing efforts continue. More information on this exciting addition to Denver’s Union Station district will be forthcoming.
is anyone else perturbed that this development dedicates more than 25% of its square footage to parking? something has gone terribly wrong if the city’s $500 million investment in public transportation can’t convince a developer that people will not need to drive to their building.
Dave,
Actually, this building will have one of the lowest parking space to rentable square footage ratios in Denver. At .90 parking spaces per 1,000 feet. If you assume 330 square feet per employee, which is about right, that means we are anticipating that two out of three employees will take some alternative form of transit to the building.
We do continue to expect people to drive. We just think less will do so.
Chris
EWP
Five out of eighteen stories dedicated to parking at Denver’s transit hub still seems like a lot to me, but if that represents an improvement I guess I’ll take it. At least this building will have an active street presence with retail which is more than can be said about davita.
Dave, one other thing to consider regarding the parking: the rentable portion of the building sits on its entire block. Typically, a parking garage or deck covers a large portion of a site and then the tower rises only over a portion of that. A good example would be the Tabor Center, where the parking garage extends far beyond the footprint of the tower. We cannot build as deep underground here because of water table issues and we are building the maximum density on the site. Either way, our ratio to rentable square footage is substantially lower than most modern high rises.
But, fundamentally, I think we all have the same goal – more buses and trains, less cars.
That is really exciting to see this piece of land developed!
I have a question about that extension bridge, though. Do you think there will be enough pedestrian traffic into this office building from Riverfront Park to justify a special pedestrian bridge?
I would anticipate the majority of pedestrian traffic to come from the light rail station across the street, not from the Millennium Bridge. I am interested to hear what other people think about this part of the concept design.
Good question, but I suppose if the developer is paying for it, then I won’t mind.
Kio,
There are a surprisingly large number of foot commuters coming from the Highlands and Riverfront Park. We really expect traffic to the building to come from four directions: the bridge, the transit, the parking garage and the 16th Street Mall Shuttle.
We are going to continue to explore, but our goal is to make this connection. As Ken noted, it just seems cool!
Neat, thanks for the response! I agree, that the bridge is pretty cool!
It will also be good for office workers that want to spend their lunch hour in the park or at one of the restaurants and cafes around the park. And yeah, it’s pretty cool too.
Ken, thanks for all the posts. Any chance you could post a blog that has a link to all the buildings that will be in the Union Station development? I’m sure you’ve posted on each one. It’d be great to easily access all of them. I can’t seem to find anything like that on Denverunionstation.org or Unionstationdenver.com.
I wish you could find someone to update the website; it was a great resource. But thanks for the blogs.
Ginty. A good idea. After I’ve finished with the buildings in the Union Station area (there are a few more to go!) I’ll try to put something like that together.
The potential for this building is very exciting. The sky lobby/ped bridge connection to the millennium bridge is a great idea. I’m envisioning something along the lines of what you have at the old Denver Post building above civic center station, but about 10x cooler.
On a kind of realted topic, I’ve been thinking that it’s time to unify the entire redevelopment area from Union Station to the Platte River under a common neighborhood. The area is very fragmented as far as identity goes. Technically the entire site is part of the Union Station Neighborhood, but nobody uses that terminology when marketing their developments. As far as I can tell, you’ve got the Union Station Redevelopment, Riverfront Park, Commons Park, and Central Platte Valley monikers all being thrown about in this relatively small area about the same size as Lodo.
UrbanZen,
Fascinating topic. Part of the problem is the difference between the city’s names for places, the names of the metropolitan districts, and the marketing names we developers have created. However, as the largest owner here, we have really settled on two names and are hoping our terminology will stick with everyone else.
Riverfront Park is a distinct neighborhood with its own character. It fronts Commons Park and is residential in character. It’s also bound by definable landmarks: Little Raven, Cherry Creek, 20th and the Consolidated Mainline.
The Union Station Neighborhood is another distinct neighborhood with its own character – true mixed use, including, of course, transit – and its own clear boundaries: the Consolidated Mainline, 20th, 15th, and the Historic Station.
That’s the two neighborhoods, in my mind. The Commons, of course, is the name of the park but it’s also the name of the entire PUD which includes a big portion of the Union Station neighborhood and Riverfront Park. The Central Platte Valley is the geographic area and includes the Commons PUD and the Union Station redevelopment. Things are further complicated by the names of the six metropolitan district that exist here, all of which use the Central Platte Valley moniker.
But, that’s just our thoughts. I’m actually curious what others would think, if people are still following this thread.
Chris
EWP
And to further complicate things, the term Central Platte Valley was used for many years to include the entire Pepsi Center/Elitch Garden’s area as well, as everything from 20th to Colfax, the Platte River to roughly Wynkoop/Auraria Parkway was part of the original Central Platte Valley master plan from 1988.
Chris,
Good analogy about the two sides of the CML having their own character and feeling. Part of me still thinks of the two sides as being more like sub-sets of the same neighborhood, kind of like river-side and station-side, which fits in with the branding you’re going with. But as the area develops and densifies, it does feel more like each side will be their own neighborhood. I’ve always pulled for Riverfront Park as the unifying brand for the park side. I was trying to think of names for the station side, like “Union Plaza” or “Union Square”, but Union Station is just so iconic and really fits. The type-A in me would love to see the City and County of Denver divide the offical Union Station neighborhood into the three distinct neighborhoods of LoDo, Union Station and Riverfront Park, as well as carve out an official area for the Uptown neighborhood. But even a lot of the great “neighborhoods” of New York are unoffical areas that just kind of grew, either organically or through shrewd marketing by developers, into their own.
I agree with everything you said, but most strongly with your final point. Names take time.
I agree that the bridge is a good idea as long as it doesn’t take much away from the overall design of the Millennium Bridge. The Promenade Lofts have a private bridge off of the Millennium Bridge and I found it to be a very nice feature when I lived there.
Overall, I like the building. I like that it has an interesting roof line and different forms in the building shape. I do think I like the original concept, with the big white support beams on outside of the building, a little more.
Kyle,
There were a couple of issues with the support beam idea:
1. It wasn’t clear where those beams would land. We didn’t, don’t and won’t own the land where they were landing.
2. Secondly, there seemed to be some consensus that the beams would take away from the Millennium Bridge.
3. They were superfluous, and, as such, added cost with no intrinsic value.
4. The design review board in the Valley felt like, because they had no real function, the support beams were too much.
I did like that building. But, from those days, my favorite was the “drape” plan. I don’t have a quick link to it, but you may have seen it. But, more than anything, those buildings didn’t work for site reasons. They required two vehicular entries and that we use the bus lane next to the light rail for service access. That just doesn’t work. The new design’s helical garage is actually in place to solve that problem.
Chris
EWP
Awesome, that’ll be a nice addition to the area. And I love the helical garage, it will be a nice contrast to the other “boxier” buildings in the area, including the non-helical part of this building.