Construction has commenced on a new office building in River North. Developed by Schnitzer West at 3615 Delgany, The Current will rise a total of 12-stories and provide 238,000 square feet of office space. While the office market still seems a bit up in the air, there appears to be a demand for premium office space around Downtown and River North.
Currently, excavation is taking place for the underground parking structure. A tower crane was also recently erected at the project site making this the fourth new crane for River North in recent weeks. Here are a few aerials of the project, including a ground-level photo.
Below is a rendering refresher of The Current. The architect on record is Davis Partnership.
All things considered, with the events over the past year, it is great to see all these new projects take off this year.
I was kind of hoping that once Union Station was built out, we’d get the new office construction shifted back over to downtown proper. Alas, it looks like we’re building satellite office hubs all around Denver. Nothing wrong with, I suppose as CBD sprawl is something pretty common in most dense cities.
I’d rather see the CBD filled in with housing. It’s still basically a ghost town outside of 9-5 and an infusion of housing could help fix that and spur the retail market.
Why in God’s name would someone come into Union Station and then spend 15 to 20 minutes walking to the CBD? Until Denver improves mobility options along the 15th/16th/17th axis I don’t think you’ll see a ton of synergy benefits from transit at Union Station into the CBD.
Absolutely true that the CBD needs more residential and there are a ton of older commercial properties that are ripe to be repositioned as residential.
Living in Union Station here are my observations from when I tootle around: People go up to about Arapahoe / Larimer from DUS but mostly everyone goes towards CBD. Right now, the Union Station neighborhood is very hit and miss with not a ton of retail (especially from 16th and Wynkoop to the bridge). Not to mention, both pavilions / 17th St Gardens are overrun by loiterers and unruly characters. LoDo / CBD could be completely packed and the US neighborhood would be completely quiet. It’s really strange and I hope the situation in US improves as we are finally on an upswing.
Denver needs to build a gondola somewhere in town! This could be the perfect use-case. We have tourists, but no identifying factors or unique-nesses in town, I am comparing us with Seattle (Space Needle) St. Louis (Gateway), this would not be on the same level, but it would be unique enough that it would be highly instagramable. It also doesn’t hurt that we shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds us and give everyone a reminder that “hey we have skiing here!” every time they are in town.
I have thought the best location for this would be from US, then behind the Rockies Stadium with a midway stop, then to the Rockies parking garage on Blake Street, which would greatly improve access to the shops on Larimer from US, I guess this overlaps with the A-Line, but no one has ever taken the A-Line from US to go to a bar on Larimer.
This version would probably be best achieved by placing the Gondola so it goes straight down 16th street all the way to the Civic Center Transpo center (guess what, they have room for a Gondola landing area there).
I have been doodling with gondola plans from DUS to Cherry Creek. It would be a great, cheap source of transport to connect the two most urban neighborhoods.
Hey, that was my idea
Did we just become gondola friends? 🙂
RiNo with 38th & Blake is one stop away on the A-line from Union Station. So imho, if you are going to build satellite hubs, RiNo seems like a good choice. And luckily it does look like they are building an actual hub around the transit station, as opposed to just uniform sprawl. So imho this is actually a smart choice, as opposed to simply cramming everything into down town. Having a number of distributed medium to high density hubs connected by transit and then surrounded by more family friendly medium to low density housing option seems overall preferable to having a hyper dense single core and then nothing but sprawl surrounding it.
Oh, and if only they would actually build the L-line extension to hook the L-line up to 38th and Blake, then that would really nicely tie DUS, 38th & Blake and CBD together, and would give a really nice dense core of Denver that is a walkable, together with mass transit, integrated mixture of work, housing and entertainment.
Groovy.