After what seems like an eternity, work is finally beginning on a major renovation project along downtown Denver’s 16th Street Mall — and the timing couldn’t be worse for local merchants, who saw their business crater during the pandemic and have been hoping for a stampede of returning customers.
But as much of a headache as the three-year, $149 million upgrade likely will be for retailers and restaurants lining the pedestrian-and-transit corridor, the project is crucial for the survival of the mall and its business community.
For the 16th Street Mall to survive, it needs tough love.
As The Denver Post’s Joe Rubino reports, fences are sprouting along sections of the mall and heavy equipment is being parked where the mall shuttles usually roam. Work is , starting near Market Street, then will extend south toward Civic Center.
And that has some merchants mad, fearful or both over what the next few years will bring.
“We’re not happy about it,” Gabriela Salazar of the Colorado Artisan Center in Writer Square tells Rubino, adding: “The fences make the area look like a third-world country.”
Salazar says her sales are half what they were before the advent of COVID-19 in early 2020. And she’s not alone. Mall merchants are after two years of scant foot traffic, the consequence of canceled downtown conventions, empty office suites, COVID restaurant cutbacks and a 56% decline in tourist business in Denver.
The renovation launch now certainly won’t help business in the short term, despite a city promise of $1 million in small grants to support impacted merchants. Fences undoubtedly will make access more complicated, and mall shuttles will be shifted onto adjacent streets for several blocks.
The mall repair initiative has been under discussion for more than a decade, and major funding was approved by voters five years ago. As recently as 2018, it looked like work might be wrapped up by this year. That timetable would have coincided nicely with (fingers crossed) Colorado’s gradual re-emergence from the pandemic’s bleakest period.
But Mayor Michael Hancock, at the ceremonial groundbreaking for the mall project April 14, insisted that it’s taken this long to secure all the needed funding.
As exasperating as the timing is, 16th Street is badly in need of a facelift. The alternative might well be the eventual death of the mall, with block after block of boarded-up storefronts and, ultimately, the return of cars for the first time in 40 years.
It’s happened plenty of times before, all over the nation. found that about 85% percent of the pedestrian malls that once were plentiful in America’s downtowns eventually were partially or fully reopened to traffic. That trend has held true in the years since. Often, the reason for downtown mall failure is the deterioration of amenities, making malls less attractive to pedestrians.
That would be a shame in Denver. Ever since I moved to Colorado in 1993, the mall has been one of my favorite places to go, whether to grab a bite for lunch or watch a busker perform or just enjoy the sea of humanity. Back in 2008, when I was a reporter covering the Democratic National Convention, visitors frequently told me the mall was the best thing about the city.
If 16th Street became just another river of cars, Denver would seem less like Denver.
As it is, the mall’s signature granite paving stones look pretty, but they can be dangerously slippery in wet weather, and they cost about $1 million a year to maintain. And on several blocks of the mall, the shuttles run on routes that are spaced apart, squeezing herds of pedestrians onto narrow walkways. (Between 2007 and 2017, by passing mall shuttles.)
Officials say the new walkway surface will afford greater traction, with better drainage. And bus lanes will be moved to the center of the mall, creating wider, safer, more inviting walkways with more room for what the city calls “amenity zones” with outdoor seating and kiosks.
To be sure, even after the makeover project is completed, stubborn problems that the city has been grappling with for years will remain — people sprawled in front of businesses, open drug use, random crime, aggressive panhandling. At times the mall shuttles are overflowing, and there’s an overabundance of T-shirt-and-trinket shops.
Those issues will still need attention after the last paver is replaced and the fences come down — by late 2024, we’re told. The 16th Street Mall needs to be at the top of mind for city leaders, the business community and the rest of us.
But for now, let’s swallow hard and fix it.
Mark Harden has been a Colorado journalist for three decades, serving as an editor and reporter at The Denver Post, the Denver Business Journal, Colorado Politics magazine, Colorado Community Media, The Colorado Sun and Rocky Mountain PBS.
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