Wanting to build on a horn of plenty
A pair of street sweepers cruise up and down the vacant lot at 3715 Chestnut Place, pushing chunks of rock along as they go. Loose sediment hits the wind like a small dust storm, but few of the on-site AEG employees huddled at the entrance seem to mind.
Aside from two brightly grinning cartoon rhinoceroeses spray-painted on a Jersey barrier, the lot resembles a demolition site more than a concert ground. Despite that, in just 72 hours, it will host the first RiNo Music Festival, a joint venture between AEG Live and Bernard Hurley, owner of the surrounding 6-acre lot.
The aim of the festival, which takes place on August 26, is twofold: first, to give fans a place to sway to alt-rockers Silversun Pickups and New York synthpop group St. Lucia among others; second, for Denver to glimpse what Hurley hopes will be the city’s next great cultural commons.
Hurley, 60, has spent the past 20 years purchasing the land that encompasses most of the space from the new Blue Moon Brewery, at 38th and Delgany streets, to Arkins Court, a little-traveled road that runs along the South Platte River.
“Where do you take your parents when they’re visiting Denver right now?” Hurley asked. “I’d take mine to Boulder.”
His development, which he calls Hurley Place, would change that.
“Five years from now, this is going to be the best part of Denver,” Hurley said, gesturing to the area from the bank of the South Platte.
As it looked Tuesday — chain-link
fences and an industrial-gray color palette, both on the buildings and swathed across the overcast sky — it’s hard to imagine. Hurley’s vision for the land is roundly ambitious. Though “everyone and their brother” has contacted him about buying the land for housing, Hurley envisions a “legacy project” that RiNo visitors and residents alike can enjoy.
Among the amenities of Hurley Place would be an outdoor bike-in movie theater, an art canopy, a beer garden and, most critically in his opinion, several live-music venues. An outdoor amphitheater is slated to spring from the empty plot where the RiNo music festival will be held. Eventually, that would be joined by “three or four” small music venues in the surrounding area.
Hurley is confident Denver’s music scene is strong enough to support these new venues, proposing they each feature different genres to cater to different ages.
“Music,” he said, “is the common denominator for all generations.”
Scott Campbell, the AEG promoter for the RiNo Music Festival, agreed. Campbell owns Lost Lake Lounge and Larimer Lounge, most notably ushering the latter from its seedy past into a trendy live-music outpost.
“This is an incredible site to do outdoor events with,” Campbell said, pointing out that the vacant lot could fill Denver’s untapped niche of a 5,000-person venue. Campbell has already begun suggesting the space to Red Rocks-headlining acts looking to play an appropriately sized show in Denver around their date at the amphitheater.
Hurley Place would dovetail into Denver’s plan to develop a mixed-use pedestrian park that would extend from just behind Great Divide’s Barrel Bar on Brighton Boulevard between 33rd and 35th streets to the South Platte riverfront. The park is slated to begin construction in the spring with a projected finish date of summer of 2018. It’s being developed by Denver landscape architectural firm Wenk Associates, which is responsible for the TAXI development across the South Platte River and LoDo’s REI flagship store.
The city owns two buildings in the space that will be used to host creative endeavors like galleries, studios and, yes, a music venue.
“It’s our top priority for the space to be a creative hub, and music is a critically important part of the mix for us,” said RiNo Art District executive director Jamie Licko. Licko supported that reasoning with data from ArtSpace, an affordable residency program that aims to house 80-100 artists in RiNo’s Westfield development along Brighton Boulevard. Musicians accounted for roughly half of all Denver applicants to the program, up from 23 percent in 2008.
“We’ve been taking musicians’ needs very seriously,” Licko said.
The long road to RiNo’s creative hub begins Friday at the RiNo Music Festival, where representatives of the RiNo Art District will be on hand to discuss the project. So far, the 6,000-person capacity festival has sold about two-third of its tickets.
“We’re hoping to get people excited,” Licko said. “It’s not a place people would have otherwise gone to on their own.”