Another significant project in Central Downtown Denver is now out of the ground and going vertical! The Le Meridien/AC Hotel eradicates part of a half-block-long surface lot fronting 15th Street and will make a great presence in this area.
The concrete build is going up quickly and is already up to the second floor. Now that it is out of the ground, we should see the structure rise a floor around every week to week and a half.
Here are two photos from the ground level. The Le Meridien/AC Hotel will rise a total of 21 stories, slightly taller than its direct neighbor, the Embassy Suites, but shorter than the Hyatt Regency across the street.
This 480-room project has made some great progress over the past couple of months. We are excited to see it rise!
I wonder what will happen to the Bubba Gump shrimp restaurant in the future. I don’t believe that building is marked as historic? Eventually, the lot fronting 14th could see a high rise reckon and although it’s not unusual for a low rise to be stuck between two high rises, I wonder if Bubba Gump is just leasing or if they own the property. I might wander over to the assessors website to figure that out. Maybe in time Bubba might move and that building could be taken down to accommodate a building with a larger footprint.
I sure hope it stays, It breaks up the block nice. Then two high rises will have a little breathing room.
Finally I was able to get to the real property record for 1437 California St. Doesn’t look historic at all. According to the assessor the current building was built in 1970.
While I don’t think this building (Bubba Gump) necessarily qualifies for historic designation, it’s clear that the assessor’s date is incorrect. The architecture, yellow brick with terra cotta ornamentation, looks to me like something from the 1910s or the 1920s; no one in 1970 was putting up buildings that looked like this. A very detailed 1939 map I own shows this as the Wynne Hotel. It doesn’t look like a hotel now, but the brick on the sides makes me think that the building may have at one time had light wells on either side, to allow for guest room windows facing the (now-gone) buildings on either side. My guess is that the 1970 date may be when the light wells were filled in by bringing their walls out to the property line; perhaps the assessor treated these modifications as a “new” building at that time.
Personally, I like the idea of leaving this short building in place, as a “spacer” between two larger ones. Small buildings, especially ones made of brick and with some amount of ornamentation (however modest), give interesting texture to what will otherwise be a block filled with with post-2000 slickness and bottom-line mediocrity (I like the Hyatt, with its thoughtful design and details, but not the stucco garbage across the alley from this property). Of course, “texture” doesn’t mean much to most developers. If it stays, ideally, they could find a better tenant than Bubba Gump, something that would appeal to Denver people, not just tourists.
FYI, the parking lot next to it, facing the convention center, was once home to Denver’s main Elks Lodge, most famous for being the site of the funeral of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The former parking lot facing 15th, soon to be the Meridien, had been parking since (probably) the 1940s or early 1950s. The Denver Dry Goods, just across the street, bought up a bunch of properties there to tear down, to create parking for their customers. I am glad that a 60-plus-year old parking lot is going away.
Mark B, always great to get your depth of historical perspective. Totally agree, walking around these surface parking lots and big, hard-edged new buildings reveals nothing of the Denver so many of us have grown up with. Nothing like walking through LoDo or Capitol Hill. Thanks!