It’s winter so that means it is time again to examine the state of our future skyline. As a reminder, the buildings have been color-coded to match our DenverInfill Project Map, where yellow is residential, orange is office, red is hotel, and blue is civic/other. Mixed-use is indicated by a combination of these colors. Completed buildings, for which Google has not yet added their own models, are colored gray.
Unfortunately, some projects featured in previous posts are no longer alive, most notably 650 17th Street, which would have been Denver’s new tallest. However, the projects proposed over the past six months more than make up for it. Let’s take a look at their impact on our city, starting first with some overviews of North Capitol Hill, Downtown, and Arapahoe Square.
Next up, let’s zoom in to one of the most exciting projects recently proposed; The 18th and Glenarm Condos. These twin 32 and 38 story towers will take a big chuck out of the most parking lot infested area of the central business district. Its impact on both street level and the skyline will be significant and will do a great deal to chip away at the black hole that is this part of downtown. Hopefully it inspires other proposals in the vicinity that will eventually fill in this emptiness between downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods.
Several new projects have been proposed for Civic Center, Speer, and Baker, as well as the River North and Sunnyside neighborhoods. Take a look in the two images below.
Now let’s head over to Highland and Jefferson Park. The largest proposal is at 26th and Alcott, whose 642 homes would rise fifteen stories and have a substantial visual impact on the skyline in this part of town, especially from where Speer crosses I-25. Given the abundance of surface lots in this area, it is possible we could see it turn into a substantial urban center.
To wrap things up here are the latest proposals for Cherry Creek as well as a close up of the Lakehouse Tower at Sloan’s Lake.
That’s it for this round folks. A lot of new projects have been proposed and many that have been featured here for quite some time have finally broken ground. This year, we have also seen the build out of the Union Station redevelopment near its end. In 2019, we will see other parts of downtown transform with projects like Market Station, Colorado Rockies Mixed Use, and Block 162. DenverInfill will continue covering this progress along with proposals and groundbreakings. Hopefully all this great infill activity will sustain its pace in the coming year. We will check in with our next update this summer!
I bet all those people who had every thing negative to say are really happy about the new tallest being scraped. SMDH
Great page, info, and graphics on the Denver skyline!
Question – wasn’t the project known as “650 17th Street”, not 16th Street?
It is 650 17th Street. All fixed!
Very cool – thanks!
So is 650 17th St officially a dead project? I didn’t see any announcements on that.
All the documents filed with the city related to that project are officially in a canceled / withdrawn status. It’s not moving forward.
This is what a boom looks like! So proud to see our city take so many leaps in such a short period. Thank you for putting this together, I’m sure a good deal of work goes into something like this.
Thanks for the great work and it’s definitely nice to be able to reference Denver’s infill activity! Wonderfully free accessible information about the city unlike a lot of cities. Please try to spoil my excitement again. Surprise me. I think its embarrassing to some degree that the 650 17th was cancelled or maybe it was actually turned down. The story became national news and put Denver in a mostly proud spotlight. Sorry I know it sounds rash but in my opinion that was a maneuver done in a planner/ clique kind of way. Denver getting too big is scary for a lot of these people. Gone are the days of random prize spirited idea for a bolder kind of dreaming i.e. I.M Pei and real civic vision. Oh that’s right most of our national banking assets are tuned to military endeavors unlike other advancing nations. When I look at this model I don’t find the close future to be all that stimulating when you compare the feats of the past in this Queen City of the plains when developers had more freedom, fortitude and substance especially in the early eighties. Now the school of thought is that the downtown will thrive better if we practice building smaller density, mid-rise blobs and what’s perceived as a pedestrian scale experience. In my opinion any downtown has a pedestrian experience and if more aggressive a scale primarily builds a space for ‘a crafty styled’ and alert pedestrian and I think that’s been the case for hundreds of years in cities all over the world. The whole point of urban is to be alert to the whole mix of movement. The urban pedestrian adjusts to the density with a more clever awareness of the environment. Today it seems it’s as if we are designing a kind of suburban atmosphere fit for a lawn and trees instead of streets. To be kind of prudish sounding it’s as if downtown Denver is soon to be suffering from hardening of the arteries and it will lose any ability to expand or densify much more than it is at this buildout. And exactly how would it densify more without a subway? It appears the DDP is more or less shooting from the hip. With ten million more square feet of office space maybe the Denver Tech Center should become the new downtown of the front range region. At least the lightrail passes over the intersections. It’s where the Hyperloop will fit, seems more functional for a ‘regional’ center of transportation for a front range population of 5 to 6 million or more. Here’s a question: how is our current downtown plan going to fit as the regional centerpiece? Only adding more bicycles as if we’re Asia that quick. That’s a country with 2 billion more people. I’m not hearing any realistic answers.
My head hurts reading this post..
Kudos on documenting a momentous change in our city.
Thanks for doing this again!