Most days, I walk part of the way to the Denver Athletic Club at 14th and Welton up the Cherry Creek Trail, and home down the 16th Street Mall. Along the way, as a two-year resident of LoDo, but a native Coloradan, I find myself thinking about both the past and the future.
On Cherry Creek, the past is unavoidable. The creek was channelized, its banks fortified by concrete walls, as a necessary flood control measure. Floods are no longer a risk, thanks to flood control dams upstream. The future might be the implementation of a plan being developed by the city to return the streambed to something that looks and functions more like a natural stream; and to remove the walls to create more parkland, where native vegetation reigns to produce a habitat for wildlife.
I attended a workshop a few months back hosted by the Denver Planning Department and can only say I hope the projectmoves forward sooner rather than later. It would without question dramatically improve both the environment and the quality of life in LoDo.
Sixteenth Street is another story. Walking home I ponder the question: Will this work to help revive downtown?
The mall project is at the halfway point with the top block not yet touched and the first block to be completed in its finished form. Other blocks are fascinating in that they are in different phases of work. 16th Street today makes for a great stroll, full of reminders of the mall’s desolation in the wake of Covid, its glamorous past and its potentially bright future.
Even before Covid, the pedestrian mall at Denver’s heart was in sharp decline because it had aged into obsolescence. The city devoted a decade to planning a major revitalization, replacing crumbling pavers and, more urgently, underground sewer and water lines. The job commenced just two summers back, at the tail
end of the pandemic. I had recently moved to LoDo and was wondering if my choice of Denver’s most walkable neighborhood had been a mistake. What if downtown failed to bounce back from the epidemic? Would the problems of upper downtown spread down 16th Street? Or would the relative vitality of LoDo and Union Station continue to rebound and flow up?
From that perspective, the $173 million 16th Street Mall Project was necessary but risky surgery. Without it, the patient would surely die. But the surgery itself could be fatal. Today, the project’s chances for success look better to my eye – an assessment that could, admittedly, be clouded by wishful thinking.
I remember visiting 16th St. more than fifty years ago with my parents. We shopped at the big department stores, Denver Dry Goods and Neusteters. The handsome historic buildings they occupied still carry their names.
We also shopped at May D&F on Zeckendorf Plaza, designed by the famous modernist architect I.M. Pei, which opened in 1960 at the top of 16th St. It consisted of a Hilton Hotel, attached to the glamorous department store by a sky bridge. A striking parabolic building that was part of the department store, fronted 16th St. There was an ice rink on the plaza itself. My awed family visited more than a few times, as if to participate in the future.
On one of these visits a friend of my parents pointed out yet another example of Denver’s progressive city planning: downtown intersections where signals stopped car traffic in both directions, allowing pedestrians to cross in any direction at the same time, including diagonally. Pei returned downtown in the early 1980s to undertake yet another innovative piece of pedestrian friendly progress: the 16th St. Mall, which his firm designed down to the pavers and outdoor light fixtures.
Happily, Pei’s former Hilton, now the Denver Sheraton, has aged admirably, the former department store now incorporated into it. The rest of Zeckendorf Plaza was demolished in the 1990s. Now Pei’s mall has been demolished, out of necessity. Pei’s legacy will remain thanks to modern replicas of his celebrated light fixtures; and the new pavers that re-envision Pei’s Navajo rug-inspired rattlesnake skin pattern.
The first block to reach completion is between Larimer and Lawrence. With Writer Square linked to Larimer Square on one side of the street and Tabor Center on the other, economic revitalization might logically take root most readily here. Already, customers have returned to the restaurants on the block, much to the happiness of restaurant personnel I asked.
If the mall proves to be the spark downtown needs, it may well be thanks to another latter-day progressive idea, and one of the 16th Street Project’s boldest moves: including enough money in the budget for mature trees and the infrastructure they require to thrive.
On my many mall walks in the last two years, I’ve watched the installation of large vaults of soil underground to give over two hundred trees (ten species) plenty of root space to support a canopy far larger than the typical urban street tree.
This past winter I watched the first trees arrive, already quite large. They leafed out this spring, marking a dramatic, seemingly overnight change in the character of the mall. Although the new pavers are also beautiful, I find it easy to imagine that the tree canopy alone – like Pei’s pavers and light fixtures almost fifty years ago – may ultimately symbolize the mall’s revival. More people are already patronizing The Cheesecake Factory, Blue Agave and Smashburger under the shade of those magnificent trees. Might shopping return to Writer Square and the Tabor Center? Might office workers follow? Will tourists and even curious suburbanites once again venture downtown for a glimpse of the future?
Now is a great time for a mindful walk on the mall. The future is unpredictable, but you will likely find yourself feeling optimistic about the joy and beauty of city life.
