The undeveloped parcel at the east corner of 16th and Market streets in Lower Downtown Denver may soon be developed as a hotel.
T2 Hospitality of Newport Beach, California, has submitted an application to the Lower Downtown Design Review Board for an 11-story, 222-room hotel at 1600 Market Street. The property was acquired by T2 in November 2015 from Integrated Properties, the firm that developed the 16M project across the street. The property sits at a key corner along Downtown Denver’s 16th Street Mall, across the street from Continuum Partners’ proposed Market Station redevelopment of RTD’s former bus facility. Here are aerial and street view photos of the site from Google Earth:
The Lower Downtown Design Review Board will have their first look at the proposed building on February 11, where they will review the project for mass, scale, and context. Several rounds of review and approval are required by the LDDRB, along with additional approvals by the city before a project can begin. The following images are from the project’s February 11 application to the LDDRB and are very preliminary and conceptual in nature and are subject to further modification and refinement. The project architect is DLR Group.
Massing diagram, Market Street view:
Massing diagram, 16th Street view:
One level of underground parking is planned for the project, containing 37 parking spaces and room for an additional 17 valet-parked vehicles. The porte cochere and underground parking will be accessed via Market Street near the common wall with the historic building next door. The ground-floor uses also include 7,500 square feet of leasable restaurant/retail space fronting the 16th Street Mall, with the hotel entry facing Market Street. Hotel patrons will head up one level to the second floor, where the hotel’s main lobby, lounge, and meeting rooms will be located. Here’s a ground-floor diagram:
Hotel rooms will occupy floors three through eleven. The building will rise 130 feet, the maximum allowed for this parcel.
While this project is very early in the approval process, the prospect of another vacant corner lot being developed in Downtown Denver is exciting. Corners are so important to good urban design as they define and help activate the public realm (the streets and sidewalks) for not just one street, but for two. And certainly, we celebrate the removal of another surface parking lot, those soul-sucking black holes in the urban fabric!
The proposed 1600 Market Hotel joins the recently announced 1701 Blake Hotel and the Market Station and Dairy Block projects as significant infill developments in the heart of Denver’s most beloved and walkable districts, Lower Downtown, where an intact urban form and an exceptional pedestrian experience are so important.
Hi everyone. Ryan here. I’m hijacking Ken’s post to share two photos of this site taken from a couple hundred feet up. In these photos, you can clearly see how much of an eyesore the surface lot is.
This project will bring a huge improvement to this corner of Lower Downtown Denver!
I look forward to watching this move forward through the planning process.
Hope this causes some change one block up where the parking garage/delivery bay of 16th & Larimer sucks the life off of that section of the mall.
Perfect! T2 seems to be moving quickly after acquiring this property. Good for them. And good for Denver! I’m very excited to see this parking lot erased. And happy to see another hotel on the 16th street mall. There aren’t many of them. It’s sure to put a few more people on the mall.
A question that came to mind yesterday was, without any specific project or lot in mind, whether there generally used to be (historic) buildings where these parking lots are that are bordered by a windowless wall. This lot is a perfect example. The reason for this question/curiosity is all about whether those blank walls were built in anticipation of another building being put in (either 100 years ago or much later), or if there were actually buildings there, thus the blank walls made sense (whether they came first or second) and the buildings have subsequently been torn down for whatever reason.
Clearly this is a very generic question/comment. But some discussion or information from more knowledgeable people would be awesome.
Short answer, yes. If you look at aerial photos of downtown Denver in the early 1900, there wasn’t a single vacant lot, or if a building burned down or something, it didn’t stay vacant for long. Back then, we had 100% lot coverage on essentially every block in Downtown (excluding, of course, the more railroad-y parts behind Union Station).
Specifically, this corner was once home to the offices of the Denver Tribune, one of our early daily newspapers. The building had been built by Henry Cordes Brown in the late 1860s or early 1870s (I’m at work so I can’t refer to my files) as a home for the newspaper which he then owned. He later sold it, and it was moved to (I think) Arapahoe Street between 15th and 16th, and at that location it was edited by Eugene Field, the famous humorist and poet. The Tribune building, probably after years of being vacant or used for storage (and disfigured by later owners) was torn down probably by Dave Cook when they built their headquarters store (see AC’s comment below). Cook had originally been located across the alley, on the 16th & Larimer corner, but was forced to move after voters passed the Skyline Urban Renewal Plan in 1967 (67% voted YES, a mandate to be sure), which caused for demolition of everything on the Larimer side of the block (along with all or part of 26 other blocks). I have in my book on Sixteenth Street a photo of the Tribune building taken not long before it was demolished.
I also remember some similar old structures on the opposite side of Market Street, torn down by RTD circa 1979-80 to create Market Street Station.
Very glad to see this project, which will fill in the second-to-last hole on 16th (the other being at Wazee, a smaller plot of land, probably more difficult to design a project for).
Hey everybody. Thanks for the great info. I love the passion and personal knowledge you all bring. Definitely looking forward to this lot being built out, and have a birds-eye view from the office. Very recently I worked in the 1900 16th St building overlooking all the Union Station development for the last 5 or 6 years, and that had been really fun to watch, so I am excited to be able to watch this and (eventually) the Market Street Station redevelopment. Speaking of, does anybody know of any new info regarding the timing and plans for Market Street station? The excavation part of that will be exciting.
From what I’ve heard on the market street station, 3rd quarter of this year will be a possibility for breaking ground.
I love it, this small parking lot has long been in need of redevelopment.
This is a response to Kojones, Yes, when I was a child in the 1960s, this location used to have a wonderful old building on it, and at the time, the building housed the “Dave Cook” sporting goods store and had a parking lot across 16th Street (this was before the 16th Street Mall was built). Sometime in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, Dave Cook built a new, ‘more efficient’ building on their parking lot and tore down the old building to make a new parking lot on this site. Dave Cook remained in that new building until Dave Cook was bought out by Gart Brothers Sporting Goods, and since Gart’s had their giant Sportscastle at 10th and Broadway, the store was closed. Gart’s later became Sports Authority.
After a period of being empty, the store eventually became the Office Depot that remained on that spot until just few years ago when the old 70’s vintage Harvest Gold and Pre-Cast Concrete Office Depot store was torn down to make room for the new building on that site… While I think the newly proposed building is neat, I think if the old historic building was there, the whole block would have been intact as a historic block and that would have been very cool.
Given that so many new buildings are built with huge parking garages, the one-level parking garage in this proposed development seems small. Would the hotel use the parking garage under the building across the 16th Street Mall for some hotel guests?
Thanks for the history!
Hotels generally don’t have many parking needs. Employees don’t require spaces, nor do 95% of travelers, who are taking other modes of transportation. Even a larger hotel, such as the Four Seasons, has only two floors of parking for the hotel — even with all the conference/ballroom space. The rest is for the private residences.
So here’s a wild question: what effect does the disappearance of a downtown surface lot have on somebody’s driving habits?
We’re very fortunate to have seen so many surface lots disappear over the past few years, but as I read this post it dawned on me that as these lots turn into infill, drivers are either (a) parking further away from their destination, (b) parking in the same area but paying a premium to do so, (c) not coming downtown at all or (d) opting for public transit.
Thoughts?
If they work or live in the building that replaced the parking lot, they are probably still parking on site since most projects offer sufficient parking for their tenants. In the case of other people, I think it’s a mix of paying more for parking, using transit, or other options like using Uber. As downtowns become more dense, it becomes increasingly more expensive to accommodate the private automobile so people either recognize that there’s a cost to the luxury of being able to park your private vehicle in a place with high land values, or they seek cheaper alternatives. In the case of hotels, it’s not uncommon for hotels to offer fewer parking spaces than rooms since they know that a lot of travelers will not be arriving by car.
Nice. I like it.
I like how this design continues the street wall of Victorian facades along Market St. the upper levels are then set back and have a contrasting modern aesthetic, which compliments the nearby modern buildings along 16h St. All at an appropriate scale of a building for he site. Well done so far.
Cass Gilbert famously defined a skyscraper as “a machine that makes the land pay,”
No mixed use of hotel and apartments or condos? How very backwards looking.
How are they going to get approval to relocate the bus stop? The bus stop on Market Street is very busy, with multiple routes including the 15L which has 60′ long articulated buses. The plans only leave room for 40′ buses (and barely)! Furthermore, the hotel loading areas have a tendency to get backed up and I fear with how tightly the hotel driveway encroaches on the bus stop that cars will end up idling in the bus stop. This is not well thought out from a transit perspective. I do like the way this project would complete what is a very attractive street wall, but more care needs to be put into the pedestrian and transit experience.
“…those soul-sucking black holes in the urban fabric…” LOL. And I’ll add to that – I’m glad that that ‘soul-sucking’ towering black wall will no longer ruin the grace and continuity of the historic row of buildings that remain on Market Street. The proposed design looks appropriate and complements the block nicely. Kudos. How wonderful to have this coming our way! I hope there will be updates soon.