Construction is ramping up in the Golden Triangle neighborhood, with many new projects either breaking ground or working their way through the permitting process. Over the next few years, we are poised to see a lot of investment in the Golden Triangle, from the 5280 Trail to multiple new projects taking over surface parking and underutilized lots. With new zoning in place, this neighborhood will also start to see taller projects in the future.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Citizen 10. The project under construction at 10th and Acoma is close to completion with move-ins expected early next year. Currently, finishing touches are being made around the project.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Stories | 373 apt homes | 460 parking | LMC | Shears Adkins Rockmore | Weitz |
Modera Golden Triangle. Back in late 2019, we announced that a site development plan was filed for Modera Golden Triangle that would replace the former Rocky Mountain Public Media building along with a surface parking lot. The plans called for two 16-story towers in a point tower configuration. Since then, the plans have changed and now call for an eight-story building spanning the entire lot. Demolition is currently underway and we should hopefully see this project go vertical in the coming months. Below is a new rendering and photos of the project site.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 Stories | 326 apt homes | 4,500 sq ft retail | 391 Parking | Mill Creek | Davis Partnership | Milender White |
Evans West. A large project at the corner of 11th Avenue and Bannock Street is now under construction. Named Evans West, due to its proximity to the historic Evans school, this building will provide 19 stories of new housing, replacing a surface parking lot and single-story retail building. Excavation is now underway at the project site. Below, we also have an updated rendering of the project.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 Stories | 420 apt homes | 516 parking | LMC | Davis Partnership | GE Johnson |
Art Studios. The former ten-story Art Institute building at 12th Avenue and Lincoln Street is getting a new life as a residential building. The 1960s office building will now feature 194 studio apartments and a single ground floor retail tenant. Work has already commenced for this adaptive reuse project and is expected to complete the first quarter of 2023. Below, we have a rendering and current photos of the building.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Stories | Adaptive Reuse | 194 studio homes | Nichols Partnership | Johnson Nathan Strohe | Sprung Construction |
PROPOSED
990 Bannock. Back in early 2019, a five-story office building was demolished to make way for a new residential development. Developed by the same developer of the project next door, Citizen 10, 990 Bannock is making its way through the permitting process with a building permit issued. Work has yet to begin on the project site but it’s safe to assume once Citizen 10 wraps up, work will probably begin on this project. Below, we have a few updated renderings of the project.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Stories | 224 apt homes | 205 parking | LMC | Shears Adkins Rockmore | Weitz |
AMLI 8th and Broadway. A new 16 story building is working its way through the city permitting process. This project will replace a single-story building along with an underground parking structure. This portion of Broadway is a bit of a no-mans-land, so this project will help to activate the street in a positive way.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Stories | 366 apt homes | 507 parking | AMLI | Norris Design | TBA |
1115 Acoma & 1199 Bannock. Taking advantage of the new Golden Triangle zoning, a pair of 30-story towers have been proposed a block apart from each other. 1115 Acoma will be directly north of the historic Evans School, replacing a surface parking lot, with 1199 Bannock down the block replacing a single-story retail complex. These two projects will literally “raise the roof” in the Golden Triangle breaking up the flat, mesa-like skyline that the Golden Triangle is today. Currently, both projects are very preliminary and only concept plans have been filed with the city.
| Project Description – 1115 Acoma |
Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Stories | 100 homes | 165 lodging | 2k sq ft retail | 175 parking | Urban Villages | SHoP Architects | TBA |
| Project Description – 1199 Bannock |
Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Stories | 275 homes | 2,600 sq ft retail | 200 parking | Urban Villages | SHoP Architects | TBA |
COMPLETED
Anna and John J. Sie Welcome Center. Heading over to the Denver Art Museum, a new building has been added to the Denver Art Museum complex connecting both the Martin and Hamilton Buildings. The Anna and John J. Sie Welcome Center is a 50,000 square foot building featuring a restaurant, cafe, and flexible program spaces. The facade of the welcome center features a concave glass curtain wall giving off incredible reflections of the surrounding buildings.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Stories | 50,000 sq ft | Denver Art Museum | Fentress / Machado Silvetti | Saunders |
That’s a wrap for the Golden Triangle. It’s great to see more investment being made into this neighborhood to help make it more of a seamless urban extension of Downtown Denver.
poor Evans school is going to be absolutely buried by that Evans West turd… 420 units, 516 parking spaces awesome.
Oh no the NIMBYs from Denver Fugly found Denver Infill. Stop the development everyone, we can’t build anything new until the Denverites who moved here in the 90’s feel all projects are up to their architectural standards.
M…Why do you resent anybody that does not adhere to your low standards? Who are you to be making such presumptions about someone you don’t know. Please, move away.
LOL! Nice that your comment was approved. Glad to see opposing views…now we can have more objective stimulating conversation rather than oh it’s only the agreeables again. And if you’re not goin’ along you must be negative.
LOL! Well the YIMBYs merged with the NIMBY’s recently. But no, All looks great! And my standards are high because I like buildings over 20 stories, preferably over 70 stories. Say one per million in the metro population but wait hasn’t the pandemic in concert with climate change changed the concept of taller buildings? Too bad we’ll settle as usual, not much of a striking variety then. No no! No more forever and ever.
should have been 420 units, 690 parking spaces
Nice
Nice.
I’d argue that Evans school is the turd. It has been sitting there useless for a decade. Doesn’t it currently have a chain link fence around it? Better to have a new apartment building that people can actually interact with in my opinion.
Awesome update, thank you Ryan! I can not wait to see this neighborhood fill in. Any new information on the progression of the 5280 Trail?
Two thirty-story towers is a pretty major announcement. Quite a bit more action being proposed here than expected. It really does make more sense, as you mentioned, to start creating more residential opportunities in the area, because so many nearby businesses suffer from the big thoroughfares that bisect the neighborhood. Too easy to drive right by everything on Speer, 6th, or Broadway.
Not far away I just saw that the old daycare (or similar) building has been demolished and is being cleaned up to make way for the Populus building.
Over all a great posting, BUT you might want to check your description of the project described as at “1115 Acoma Street.” That address is the old Evans School, which is a designated landmark and is not going anywhere. It seems the address is incorrect. Urban Villages does have a second project, which is just north of Evans School. The map location depicted as “1115 Acoma” is something different…another project perhaps? Unclear. Given the large # of project currently in the Golden Triangle, any confusion is understandable.
1115 Acoma is the official listing in the permit system and references the parking lot just north of Evans School for the 30-story tower.
The map has the marker at 13th and Bannock, though, not 12th and Acoma.
Odd… I fixed the map. The pin is now in the middle of the project lot.
This means there will be three towers surrounding Evans School – Evans School West (19 stories) to the west, Evans School East (16 stories) to the east and this 30 story tower to the north, which I have no knowledge of.
I think the confusion lies in the fact that the pin in the map above for 1115 Acoma is incorrectly placed at the southwest corner of 13th and Bannock instead of the southwest corner of 12th and Acoma.
Welp, looks like we’re losing most of our surface parking lots. Try finding surface parking in Barcelona. Of course, they have an extensive public transport system as do many other countries and cities around the world. And if you need to park in Barcelona, underground lots exist. Denver has a poor system by comparison–OK, so underground parking will be a bigger thing for us but is it? Or are most all of these new buildings created with parking only for residents? It seems our solution is drive and park in a garage away from the city center and then take light rail. How is that working out?
Parking within the city has always been challenging, that is unless you’re privileged enough to work or live somewhere with parking. Ten or fifteen years ago, when I was working downtown and not making very much money, the $9 per day I had to pay to park in a nearby garage was really challenging. But my job would pay for an RTD pass, so I learned to ride the bus and have built my life around public transportation ever since. I had to shift the way I grew up understanding how to get around in suburbs and exurbs, where everything had a giant parking lot. For the first time, I walked and biked places, took cabs to events, and made sure to learn the locations and frequency of useful bus and train stops. It was an adjustment, but ultimately one that made my life better.
For some things, you can induce demand through incentive; for others, you do so by necessity. We’ve got to stop coddling drivers. It’s such a dated mode of transportation. The BetaMax of mobility.
Respectfully, driving a car is no more outdated than traveling by bus or by train. I would also suggest (probably to the chagrin of most people on this forum) that building parking spaces up to the current demand isn’t coddling drivers any more than building increased bike lane infrastructure would be coddling people who prefer or require an alternative mode of transportation. I’ll cede that occasionally a proposal comes along which is blatantly too heavily skewed in terms of the ratio of parking spaces to available rental units, however I find that it tends to be blown way out of proportion here on DI. My opinion, of course — your mileage may vary.
The best thing about a well built city would be to properly accommodate all modes of transportation appropriately, including though certainly not limited to driving.
This argument inaccurately assumes all modes of transportation are equal, and they most certainly are not. Busses, trains, and streetcars transport many times more commuters per vehicle. A bicycle transports an individual within a much smaller footprint and without the energy emissions necessary to power a vehicle. Automobiles (particularly the ones powered by internal combustion engines) create pollution, traffic, noise, and danger to pedestrians and other motorists. And the land resources we allocate to park them when they’re not in use, which is a great majority of the time, is positively comical. I’m no ideologue—and understand paradigm shifts take time—but it’s silly to think there’s any sort of future in individuals transporting themselves by car between parking lots in cities when literally every other option is multitudes more efficient in every possible way. Not making even minimal effort toward this future is a colossal cop out and failure of the imagination. So why build urban structures with automobiles in mind at all?
Bluntly put, there’s a profitable demand for parking real estate. Whether or not certain individuals find personal vehicles to be a less than ideal mode of transportation long term, there is currently still plenty of demand for it at the moment. Otherwise why would a development firm make a point to include parking spaces? What would be the incentive? It’s not coddling drivers so much as acknowledging other factors currently at play.
To clarify another point above, I never suggested each mode of transportation is equal — obviously this is not true — merely that traveling by bus or train isn’t exactly “new”. So the term “outdated” didn’t make much sense when singling out just automobiles as the BetaMax of mobility. Bus and train transportation have their benefits and drawbacks, much like personal automobiles offer their own benefits and drawbacks.
To your point about paradigm shifts taking time, I’m willing to bet more and more residents of the city will start utilizing public transportation or other alternatives as soon as it becomes more widely feasible. The light rail and bus services have made some measure of progress, but given the growth of the population here it’s easily nowhere near enough for these services to be feasible for a majority of locals. Compound this with the effects of the pandemic and staffing shortages: what good is all this additional infrastructure if the people required to operate it are at a shortage?
I’m probably making too simplistic of an argument here, but TLDR I don’t think it’s as simple as just not building parking infrastructure and effectively forcing people to not use a car … that makes no sense and would be a terrible thing for any well functioning city. It’s about finding the appropriate balance, and I just don’t see personal vehicles going away any time soon even if they shift largely towards EV and autonomous.
So basically, ugly concrete for those that live in the city and spots for the suburban parachuters, entitled much? Surface lots are ugly and impair the feeling of community. I think the new units etc will make the businesses at ground level successful with or without suburb guys coming into town for a wee lil adventure. If you have to get to an office in the downtown area and expect parking – pay up – Capitalism giveth and taketh.
The art museum addition turned out to be beautiful!
And it’s really nice to see 30 story proposals in the works.
It’s always seemed a strange thing that the Golden Triangle has been so slow to fill with residential. Now that’s it’s happening, it’s clear to see this is going to be an amazing urban neighborhood. Even with the poor poor dear Evans school having an actual building next to it. Gasp.
I hope no one bet their life savings on the two 16 story point towers! It’s a shame we just can’t get nice things. Also don’t get too excited about two 30 story towers. By next year one is cancelled and the other is now an 8 story land barge. 🙂
Haha you’re so right. I was looking forward to that massive 80 story building they planned at 17th and California soooo much and of course there was a land squabble and now? Nothing…. 🙁
With all this upscale residential hirise development in the Golden Triangle, where are the supporting urban amenities – restaurants, groceries, clothing stores, dry cleaners, hairdressers, etc, etc? Denver’s urban planning people are romanced by hirise development, but so far the neighborhood has gained little culture beyond tenant dogwalkers. We’re grateful for residents out on the streets with their dogs, but where is the real neighborhood culture?