Nathan Simmons and Rico Nelson schmooze during happy hour at The Elephant Bar, a popular restaurant near the heart of the Tech Center. Proprietors of Wealth Solutions and Wealth Strategies Group, respectively, they practice the science of money and the logistics of its flow.
The arrival of light rail in southeast metro Denver triggers conversation about cash flow between downtown and the neighborhoods that skirt the Denver Tech Center office park.
“There’s Cool River and the Purple Martini,” says Simmons of the slice of suburbia that spans Interstate 25 from I-225 to Lincoln Avenue. “If developers develop more places like this, that could facilitate things.”
“People will be able to get to jazz cafes and eateries,” Nelson offers. “Desirable spots.”
He leans back, casts a discerning eye around the bustling after-work crowd. “Probably a lot of people here look at the Tech Center as downtown.”
Fusion is the new cool. Downtown and suburban. LoDo does Greenwood Village. Urban chic without the urban grit.
A decade ago, the DTC was a sprawl of suburban office towers with a few condo complexes thrown in. Now it’s evolving into a hip community, blending the comforts of suburbia – ample parking, wide-open spaces – with downtown living, from loft-style condos to luxurious high-rise penthouses.
This is the new American dream, a frontier unrolling, almost invisibly, out in the suburbs on land formerly home to ranches and the undulating prairie.
Starting Friday, RTD’s E and F lines will provide direct light-rail service between downtown Denver and Lincoln Avenue, perhaps turning up the flow of hip to the hinterlands.
Carlos Martinez, who works for a mortgage lender in the Tech Center, is bullish on the prospects.
“A lot of high-rises, that style of living, are in development around the light-rail stations,” he says. “Restaurants like the Purple Martini are already in, a lot of people hang out there. It started downtown, like another downtown restaurant that moved out there for the same reason, the Rio Grande. The Lodo Bar and Grill (in Highlands Ranch) has the same feeling.”
Savvy entrepreneurs, he believes, have hit on a potential bonanza. “They found out a lot of younger folk live out there, and they like downtown, but want it to move this way,” Martinez says.
Andy Fishering, however, is a DTC worker who’s not buying this vision.
“I think people are going to use light rail to get out of the Tech Center faster,” he says. “I can’t imagine hopping on light rail and heading to the Tech Center at 8 at night. It’s never had that type of allure for me.”
Skepticism about the night life not withstanding, street buzz is swirling around The Landmark, a luxury high-rise development on East Berry Avenue in Greenwood Village set to open in 2007.
Swank living spaces, with gourmet kitchens and floor-to-ceiling windows, offer the amenity of being smack next to the Tech Center, right above shops and boutiques with the upscale cachet of LoDo, Riverfront Plaza or Cherry Creek.
The list reads like a litany of luxury: HW Home, urban eateries such as Lime and Sparrow, Euro-style clothing stores, and such downtown-style entertainment as Comedy Works and the art-house Landmark Theater.
“It’s the urban-chic tastes of Park Avenue here in Colorado,” says HW Home co-founder Ron Werner.
“It will be more like Platte River, boutique-y and neighborhood-y,” says Nancy Sparrow, owner of Sparrow restaurant in Denver’s Governor’s Park neighborhood. Sparrow and her partners also plan to open a European gourmet market next door to their restaurant at The Landmark.
“People move down there for Cherry Creek schools, and they want locally what they used to get (downtown,)” Sparrow says. “They want a lot of choices for more independent, unique type services and restaurants.”
The future of this neo-urbanity, boosters say, is rooted in an underground hub of cultural trends: smart-
growth sustainability, green living, and smaller residences tricked out with the hippest must-have amenities, like $1,800 Viking wine cellars.
“It’s mass customization, like ‘I want my half-caff Americano with soy,’ which is saying ‘I want my choices, and I want them now,”‘ says Marilee Utter, president of Citiventure Associates, a Denver real estate company specializing in transit-oriented developments.
This trend is percolating out from new southeast light-rail stations and into the future. Brochures for upscale neighborhoods southwest of Park Meadows mall tease – “Where does a hip urban lifestyle meet the suburbs?” – and tout that the train will arrive there in 2016.
Denver mayor John Hickenlooper envisions a future where a necklace of urban villages near stations will be linked by silver rails. “Each little village will replicate the evolution of LoDo with a lot of locally owned and entrepreneurial businesses springing up.”
Jeff Yucha, a waiter at The Elephant Bar on East Arapahoe Road in Greenwood Village, says there is big potential in the new crew of suburban hipsters.
“The night crowd is moving south,” he says. “If the light rail ran later than 1:45 a.m., you’d see a larger night crowd. Plenty of business.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-954-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
Door scratch started DTC
The enormous office park that lends its name to the span of development cascading south from the crossroads of Interstates 25 and 225 was born from a fit of rage over a scraped car door.
Denver Technological Center lore has it that in 1962, founder George M. Wallace parked his new Lincoln in a downtown lot and returned to find the door badly scratched. He vowed to move his company to the land of plentiful parking.
The smallest tract Wallace could get was 40 acres. He built a building for his company on five, and from the remaining 35 acres grew the Denver Tech Center, which now spans more than 900 acres and includes about 1,000 companies that employ about 35,000 people.
