Another major office building has broken ground in Downtown Denver.
Construction of the 250,000 square foot One Platte office development at 1701 Platte Street recently got underway. The five-story project by Nichols Partnership will provide several ground-floor restaurant/retail spaces and a landscaped entry courtyard in addition to the office space. Parking will be accommodated on two underground levels.
We stopped by the site to bring you these photos showing that the asphalt parking lot on the property has closed and site work on the project has begun.
Here’s a rendering, courtesy of the Beck Group, the project architect. More renderings are available on our first post on the project in November 2018.
It’s nice to see another parking lot go away and a new infill project move forward that will bring more density to this mixed-use downtown street that is just a few minutes walk from Denver Union Station.
The increasing development of walkable neighborhoods is a counter-point the problems facing RTD in ridership. Walking is the ultimate mass transit, and the more that walkable neighborhoods are developed, the healthier Denver will be in every sense. What is missing on Platte street, however, are grocery shopping opportunities, and related low margin businesses. Low margin businesses typically cannot pay the rents that higher margins business can afford in offices and restaurants. Delivery services can address this problem, but again, that puts someone back behind the wheel.
With all of the high density development planned for the Platte valley in the coming decade at Mile High and Elitch Gardens, planning should include not only affordable housing, but affordable low margin spaces for every day needs in groceries, pharmacies and other services that will help us avoid the need to drive.
This has not happened on Platte Street.
I don’t know what it is about Denver, but we seem to be lacking drug stores in general. When I lived in SF, there seemed to be a Walgreens within a few blocks no matter where you lived. They were more ubiquitous than 7-11. They were everywhere. It was nice to always have one nearby.
I now live in the densest neighborhood in all of Denver (Cap Hill). Not one drug store.
Anyway, regarding One Platte… That rendering looks great and I’m looking forward to watching it rise. It will unfortunately block our view of the skyline from that part of I-25 (not that that really matters) but at least it won’t be hard on the eyes. I like that stretch of Platte St. Some attractive modern architecture.
I said the same thing when I moved here. In NYC, there were drug stores and grocery stores often within blocks of each other. Sometimes, it felt like there were too many drug stores in certain areas! I live downtown now and the only drug stores are on the 16th St. Mall and they are all in that one block radius. There are more dispensaries than drug stores and grocery store! WTF? Denver will never truly be walkable if this isn’t fixed.
I can’t speak to the lack of grocery stores and pharmacies in general around Denver. However, there is both a King Soopers and a Rite Aid within about a mile of One Platte. Definitely within walking distance. Businesses simply don’t build in areas where there isn’t demand. It’s simple economics.
There are plenty of houses/apartments in that area with new apartments going up all around. How is there not a demand for grocery stores and drugstores? If the weather is bad or if you have a bunch of groceries, who’s going to walk all that way?
In 1991 I worked in an office at the Platte River Rowing Club. It’s absolutely stunning to see how much this area has changed.