The great little infill project at 15th and Market Street in Lower Downtown has gone up at an incredible pace and is nearing completion. We first reported that 1500 Market, formerly 1510 Market, was under construction just under nine months ago. As a refresher, this is a four-story building with 16,000 square feet of office space.
Let’s start out with the exterior of the project. The facade is complete and the finishing touches are being made on the ground floor. The structural steel is integrated into the facade versus being covered up by another material, such as brick or glass. See our first update for more details on how this went through the Lower Downtown Design Review process.
For the next part of this update, we are going to take a look inside the project. A big thank you to Fred Glick of Seed Acquisitions LLC for inviting DenverInfill on a tour! Let’s start on the roof and go down from there. Both the Rocky Mountain Seed Building, which will be integrated into this project (more on that later), and 1500 Market feature a rooftop patio. The rooftop gives you a great view of Denver’s most modern skyscraper cluster.
GoSpotCheck is going to be tripling their space from next door and will be occupying the entirety of 1500 Market. The top floor, which is even with the rooftop deck, has an opening down to the third floor creating a great open space between both floors. The pictures below show both the top and third floor.
All of the lighting fixtures in 1500 Market will contain LED bulbs. In addition, the distribution for the heating and cooling is through a fabric duct system making the air disperse more evenly throughout the floor. All of the ceiling finishes you see, such as the exposed ducts and beams, is final.
The second floor, pictured below, is unique as it will directly connect to GoSpotCheck’s offices in the Rocky Mountain Seed Building. In the last picture, you can see a temporary wall, which will be taken down eventually connecting both buildings. This is possible on floors one and three as well, but is only being utilized on floor two as GoSpotCheck only occupies, and will retain, the second floor of the neighboring building.
As far as parking is concerned, there are limited spots in the building as there is only one underground level of parking. The total stall count is currently undetermined and more bicycle parking is being discussed as there is a lot of unused space under the Rocky Mountain Seed Building.
The target date to hand over 1500 Market to the tenant is August 11. There is still a bit of work to be done on the ground floor, such as landscaping, so we will swing by in a few weeks to do a final update on this project.
Clean lines, glass (yielding lots of light), and plenty of angles without diminishing the older buildings it stands next to – perfect contemporary design for Denver.
Fantastic! Looks great.
This parking lot used to be my office view. What an upgrade. Modern yet complimentary to the existing surrounding structures.
blends in seamlessly…stunning project
Brilliant. Small projects like this are needed in Denver!
I love it! If given the choice of a new 50 story tower in Denver, or 10 projects like this filling in corner voids within the urban fabric, I’d go with the smaller developments that are great for the pedestrian experience.
This building will be a nice addition to this neighborhood. Another parking lot gone. Has anyone heard if the Born Hotel is open? I have not seen a final update on this project.
Bill: their website has a countdown clock, the grand opening is Aug. 15th 🙂
Neat building. But they should have planned another level of parking. We continue to be short on parking spaces. I know the dream is green, mass transit etc., but the reality for a number of years in the future is automobiles. Garage space can be converted to other uses when we don´t need it any longer.
That’s certainly a costly proposition. As for the “short on parking spaces”, that tall tower behind this project at 1144 15th is going to have 13 floors of parking if my memory serves me correctly, and the Block 162 development dedicates more than a third of the building space to parking and renderings show even more in further stages, both projects near light rail and/or the 16th Street Mall bus route. All these new projects are spending tens of millions of dollars (if not more) on parking structures. So parking is certainly not scarce downtown. In fact, quite the opposite.
But the best way to get folks riding the bus is to stop subsidizing parking and give them a transit pass. And that’s a solution we can start doing now that’s a heck of a lot cheaper than building more parking.
Ryan. I just want to comment about the 1881 16th street building. I feel that the placement of this building was a horrible, greedy example of poor planning. The view of the beautiful canopy of the train station has become unavailable due to this building’s placement. It would have been much better located in the useless plaza to the south that would have opened the train area up to the 16th Street mall. I know it’s too late but would like to see your comments about this tragic error by the developer (who put their name on the building) as well as our city planners.
Michael,
From the beginning of the Union Station project under FasTracks, there was a known major funding gap between the amount of money set aside in the FasTracks budget for Union Station and what the Union Station project would cost. In 2008 when the final design and placement for the now-built DUS transit infrastructure was decided, the funding gap was determined to be *only* $300 million (the previous infrastructure design had a funding gap of closer to $700 million). RTD owns the station and the land around it, and once the infrastructure design was settled, that left five parcels on RTD’s DUS property that could be sold to private developers: the north wing building, the south wing building, the “triangle” block, the “A” block (which is L-shaped and includes the Platform Apartments, the Born Hotel, and 1881 16th office building) and the “B” block where the Coloradan condo tower is going up.
It is the proceeds from the sale of these five parcels to the private sector and the significant sales and property taxes these new buildings generate (aka the “increment” in Tax Increment Financing) that is the means by which we are paying back the $300 million loan we took from the federal government to cover the funding gap. Not putting a building where 1881 16th Street is would have reduced the money available to pay back the loan, and the project needed every penny and dime it could scrape together to make it happen. Once the DUS Master Plan Update was finalized in 2008, the city approved the zoning on the five RTD parcels that would dictate the scale of buildings that could be built. The developer who built 1881 16th Street simply built a building as a use-by-right per the zoning approved nearly a decade ago by the city.
While I can certainly understand the desire to see the stub end of the canopy/platforms area visible from 16th Street, from an urban design perspective, having the three “A” block buildings wrap around the stub end of the canopy/platforms area, along with the south wing building, provides a sense of enclosure to that area–a key principle in urban design for successful public spaces. One could argue that an open plaza where 1881 16th Street is might also work from an urban design perspective and it would be interesting to debate the merits of both approaches, but the need to maximize the future tax revenue from the private-sector development to pay for the Union Station project was the primary consideration.
The open space where “tail tracks plaza” is between the EPA building and the Triangle building is the old Wewatta Street right-of-way, owned by the city, and considered an important part of the pedestrian flow and public space network in the DUS area. I never heard any discussion of putting a building there for that reason.
I hope this helps. Thank you for the good questions.
Just some general comments and questions. I know everyone is beyond busy, but the updates seem to be fewer and fewer (and much of the map is outdated – 12th and Grant for instance which is a large hole in the ground) so just wondering if things have changed such that the site will be less vigorous (and love the site by the way). Also, parking vs transit is a constant thread, but I have to say that the transit option is becoming a joke. I live 20 blocks east of downtown on a major RTD bus route and in the last month or so, my usual bus is a no show up to 80% of the time and to constantly change times to see if some other time will show is a bit ridiculous. I honestly need to consider driving as RTD reliability is anything but and totally counters all of the transit initiatives that get thrown around.
Thanks for the comment Paul. Ryan and I took some needed breaks from the blog this summer, but we will be back with more regular posts now that we’re heading into the fall. Thanks!
Pheew! Was worried. Have a good break!