Measured in human years, the Denver Pavilions on 16th Street is still young at 28.
But in building years, it is a washed-up retail concept in failing health that needs radical action to survive.
Left on its current course, the Pavilions could suffer a slow death, hindering the recovery of the rest of Upper Downtown, according to a panel of experts with the Urban Land Institute who were brought in to offer a diagnosis.
“It has had its place. It has had its moment in the sun, and we believe that it is now time to move on, to close this chapter and start the next one,” Kristen Morris, president of Morris & Fellows, a mixed-use development firm based in Atlanta, told downtown leaders at a presentation earlier this month.
After gathering opinions and touring the Pavilions and the surrounding neighborhood, the ULI panel offered a plan of care more akin to amputating both legs and less like a prescription for statins and exercise.
Tinkering with the tenant mix or giving the three-story development more time to find itself won’t resolve the fundamental issue — stacked outdoor retail hidden away from the street is a concept that stopped working a long time ago, Morris said.
The move away from mall culture to online purchases, generational shifts in shopping preferences, the unexpected loss of downtown office workers — those accelerated the downward spiral, but didn’t cause it.
The development’s decline was underway before the pandemic, and it has failed to recover long after it ended.
The city, which finalized its purchase of the outdoor mall late last year, should demolish the western half of the Pavilions and a good portion of the eastern side to make room for a “culturally significant open urban space,” according to the ULI panel’s recommendations.
In their initial concept, the panel favors an active urban park, finding inspiration from places like in Manhattan and in Cincinnati.
The United Artists theaters should be preserved to provide an indoor gathering space, useful during the colder months. What’s left of the retail space should focus on community-oriented programming with small-scale, local tenants who rotate through, creating a “kaleidoscope” of experiences.
The 800-parking spaces underneath the Pavilions are a valuable, income-generating asset that will be hard to replicate and should be preserved.
Two residential towers with 1,200 units between them should go up on the two empty lots, but in different phases. Those residents are key to turning a one-time tourist retail destination into a neighborhood amenity. Their energy is required to breathe new life into the area.
If Union Station became Denver’s “living room” after its redevelopment, the ULI argues the Pavilions could become Denver’s “front porch.”
“There’s like, really, no end in sight,” Morris warned of the current trajectory. “You can leave it there, and you can continue to let it deteriorate, both economically and performance-wise, as well as the building.”
A convention hotel won’t work
The Denver Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which voters granted $570 million in future tax dollars for revitalization efforts, has made the Pavilions a focal point of its attention.
The DDA spent $37 million of its limited funds to purchase the struggling open-air mall, as well as $23 million for 1505 and 1518 Glenarm Place, two adjacent parking lots along 15th Street that had different owners.
Another $8 million was set aside for renovation costs and lease incentives, not enough to foot the bill for a major demolition and new park.
That the authority has dedicated more than a tenth of its spending capacity to buy up the two blocks and then sought a ULI advisory panel for advice highlights how important it considers the area to Upper Downtown’s revival.
But the panelists wasted no time in quashing two of the ideas floated early on. One involves freshening up the retail and restaurant mix and bringing in more local concepts. As more office workers return and more residents move in, a recovery could eventually take hold.
Another proposal suggests the two lots be used for a large-scale convention hotel that could host gatherings too small to fill up the Colorado Convention Center but too big to fit in area hotels.
Denver eventually will need another convention hotel, which could help it win over meeting planners who don’t like putting attendees in a variety of smaller properties, said Suzanne Mellen, a senior managing director with HVS, a global hospitality consulting and valuation firm headquartered in New York City.
But at best, a hotel on the two undeveloped Pavilion lots could provide about 65,000 square feet of meeting space, which is less than the 100,000 square feet meeting planners would be looking for, she said.
And convention hotels aren’t cheap to build. Construction costs run at $800,000 to $1 million per room, meaning a 1,000-room property could top $1 billion, Mellen said.
The high costs mean substantial public subsidies would be required, requiring a long and drawn-out approval and planning process. The Pavilions needs a more immediate intervention, Mellen said.
“The panel concludes that hotel use is not recommended for the vacant parcels,” she said.
Who makes the call?
Behind the facade of fun destinations like Coyote Ugly and Lucky Strike, behind the memories of family meals at Maggiano’s Little Italy or lunch gatherings at 5280 Burger Bar, hides an uncertain future, one that the panelists warn won’t be resolved by waiting around.
The ULI has guided Denver leaders at critical moments in the past, including where to locate Denver International Airport and the Colorado Convention Center, and how to integrate Coors Field into the LoDo neighborhood.
In July 2022, the for the Speer Boulevard/Cherry Creek corridor. That greenway was actually a redevelopment in the early 1900s of a bunch of shanties and businesses that were using Cherry Creek for waste dumping.
The recent recommendations are tamer and include taking steps to more closely integrate the Auraria campus and Downtown, and bringing more residential and retail onto the campus.
And while the ULI recommendations carry weight and will receive careful consideration, the advisory panel is urging a more extreme and faster course of action, which could generate pushback.
A more detailed report is expected in the next three to six months, and the final call will likely come down to Mayor Mike Johnston and his point person on redevelopment, Bill Mosher, as well as the DDA board, which must approve any spending.
If the amount crosses $500,000, then the Denver City Council gets a say. At the crossroads of those two groups is DDA board member and City Council President Amanda Sandoval.
One of the nation’s leading downtown redevelopment consultants, Brad Segal, president and a founding partner of Progressive Urban Management Associates, is also based in Denver.
He helped get the original Pavilions off the ground in the 1990s, when he headed up the Downtown Denver Partnership.
And if any group were likely to speak up if it saw value in preserving the retail development as it is, that would be Historic Denver. Spoiler alert, it isn’t opposed to tearing down a large part of the Pavilions.
The Denver Post talked to Mosher, Sandoval, Segal and Historic Denver to get their take on what the ULI recommended.
The start of a conversation
“It was well done, really thoughtful and big picture,” said Bill Mosher, Denver’s Chief Projects Officer, of the ULI plan, stopping short of endorsing it as the final word.
“I view it as the start of a conversation,” he added politely.
]Mosher has proven himself a master of turning the city’s losses into wins. He has become Denver’s patron saint of impossible development causes.
His signature victory in a long list involved turning Union Station, a neglected Amtrak stop, into “Denver’s living room” complete with an active transit hub, high-end hotel and restaurants.
His messiest save was the Asarco Smelter, a once-vital industrial site that helped make Denver prosperous in the mining days. But the land paid a heavy price. After decades of remediation, Mosher helped it find a new life as the Crossroads Commerce Park.
Mosher said he was joking with the ULI panel that reactions they could expect would range from nostalgia to good riddance, from “we celebrated our prom there, please keep it,” to “it has had its day and needs to be demolished.”
“There is something between in my view,” he said. “We need to be thoughtful.”
Although it is struggling, the Pavilions is still 60% occupied with some loyal tenants, which is more than can be said of many of the surrounding office towers. It contains 350,000 square feet of space, which would be hard and costly to replicate.
Mosher said he was surprised that the two lots along 15th Street were never developed, and that the DDA was able to put all the parcels under one umbrella. If residential towers are the way to go, he sees 800 units as a more manageable number than the 1,200 the ULI has proposed.
The calls for 2,000 new housing units in Upper Downtown, but that represents more of a starting point than a final destination.
L.A. developer Asher Luzzatto has purchased four distressed office , pennies on the dollar, and plans to convert them, with the help of DDA support, into 1,200 housing units.
Mosher may need more convincing that a hotel won’t work. He is the CEO of the Denver Convention Center Hotel Authority and the lead developer on the 1,100-room Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center, which was also considered a long-shot project at the time.
“We will look at what they say. I don’t know if it will be our roadmap,” Mosher said. “It provides some food for thought and a vision that makes us think in a larger context.”
Denver City Council President Amanda Sandoval said she appreciates the work that the ULI panel put into its recommendations, and agrees with most, but not all of them.
“I loved the idea of preserving the theater and connecting that to the Sundance Film Festival,” she said. She also “loved” the idea of adding two residential towers instead of a convention center hotel.
“I am not so sure about their recommendation of a park,” Sandoval said.
Rather than another green space, she envisions something more akin to a community gathering space surrounded by street-level retail, like a mercato or plaza that could hosts farmers markets in the summer and the Christkindlmarkt in December.
The DDA is investing heavily to revive two downtown parks, including one that is only a few blocks away from the Pavilions.
“I want to see those investments come forward,” Sandoval said.
The DDA is pouring $30 million into the redevelopment of Civic Center park, with another $7 million to overhaul the McNichols Building, which will add a garden dining area and an arts marketplace. The first phase is expected to cost $50 million.
The “, which rebuilds the stretch west of Arapahoe Street between 16th and 17th streets.
The DDA has approved $5 million in support, with $2.5 million coming from the Elevate Denver Bond Program, $1 million from Great Outdoors Colorado, and $19.5 million from Denver Parks & Recreation.
What will take the stage?
The land that now hosts the Denver Pavilions was part of a larger theater district that served as a draw for city residents looking for entertainment. Only the Paramount Theatre remains of that era.
In the push for urban renewal, the city tore down several beautiful buildings on the land, said Brad Segal, the urban consultant.
For more than two decades, the land sat fallow, hosting parking lots until Gart Properties, led by Ken Gart, developed the Pavilions as a “retailaiment” anchor to fortify the Upper Downtown area.
Mosher was also active in trying to fill in the gaps along 16th Street. Segal, as director of the Downtown Denver Partnership at the time, was involved in the early stages.
Segal said a key takeaway out of the session for him was that the Denver Pavilions is an outdated retail format and most likely won’t be retail again. He agrees that a convention center hotel is a nonstarter, and he wishes the panel had gone beyond a single recommendation of an urban park.
The word carries different connotations for different people, and he envisions more of a town square, a point of comparison being the space in front of Union Station.
“When you characterize something as a park, that might have been a fumble,” he said.
Although compelling, the ULI recommendations are more important in terms of what they said not to do than what to do.
Reactions are mixed on tearing down the lion’s share of 350,000 square feet of retail space.
Sandoval, who has warm memories of time spent there with her children, questioned if a way could be found to create active gathering spaces without demolishing so much of the complex.
After three difficult years of construction along the full length of the former 16th Street Mall, she questions whether the area could survive another disruptive project.
Not communicated by anyone was a sense that the Denver Pavilions represents an architectural gem worthy of historic preservation, or that it should be preserved as a time capsule to late 1990s retailtainment.
Denver’s ordinance on historic designation requires a minimum of 30 years, more generous than most jurisdictions, which require 50 years.
That may reflect a realization that buildings are most vulnerable to demolition at that age, said Jay Homstad, senior director of preservation advocacy with Historic Denver, in an email.
Historic Denver, in an official statement, said the group was among the many stakeholders that the ULI team consulted during its weeklong study process in Denver.
“We’re supportive of the proposals, particularly the approach that retains a significant portion of the building, including the movie theater, while opening up space along 16th Street for the kind of street-facing retail that reflects how people actually use urban spaces today,” the group said in its statement.
Historic Denver also said it welcomed the addition of housing, which should “bring much-needed life to a part of downtown that has been struggling for activation.”
