DEMOLITION OF MARKET STREET STATION KICKS OFF
The old bus terminal is being demolished to make way for an urban infill project of office, retail and apartment space around RTD headquarters.
For once, the Regional Transportation District is the one being inconvenienced by someone else’s construction project. Rubble piles are reaching new heights this week as crews continue demolishing the former Market Street Station bus terminal to make way for an urban infill project of office, retail and apartment space that will rise on three sides of RTD’s headquarters building at 1660 Blake St.
Property owner/developer Continuum Partners is accommodating its neighbor as best it can, project director Doug Alexander said. It has rented parking spots across the street to make up for a razed parking lot at 17th and Blake and is keeping an eye on vibration monitors attached to RTD’s 110year-old HQ , just to ensure it’s not rocking the boat too much. But, as RTD can attest, there is just not much to do about construction noise.
Wielding a tool that looks like a T-Rex’s jaws got crossed with technology for “The Terminator,” an excavator driver tore into one of the glass pavilions on the station property Tuesday morning, peeling off sheets of laminated glass and crumpling metal support beams. The pavilion stood just a few feet from RTD’s offices.
The impressive display of destruction marked the beginning of the end for the most visible, above-ground portions of the former station. The entire structure, including the underground bus barn that for years was the pickup and drop-off point for many RTD bus lines, will be gone come spring. Market Street Station opened in
1982, according to RTD, part of the 16th Street Mall project that also built Civic Center Station, a structure undergoing a face-lift of its own at the moment.
“We’ll be done with demolition by the end of January and start our foundation work after that,” Mike Bowman, project manager for general contractor Kiewit Building Group, said. “It’ll be next summer before you start seeing it really go vertical.”
Eventually, the corner will be home to 375,000 square feet of new office, retail and apartment space, as well as a 100,000-squarefoot, underground garage where valets will be able to stack 320 cars. Housed in one 10-story building facing 16th Street and an L-shaped, five-story building along Market and 17th, the project will bring 54 luxury apartments and 178 market-rate apartments to an area that can’t stop gobbling up housing.
Sixty-four of the units will be micro apartments of 450 square feet or less, Continuum’s Alexander said.
Alexander said the buildings will have retail space on all four sides, utilizing a “paseo” or walkable space similar to what can be found at nearby Writer Square, to create a central retail plaza with pop-up food vendors as well as permanent space for nationally known retailers and restaurants. He’s not naming names, but said Continuum has already inked two leases for the project expected to open in summer 2019.
“One is a large seafood restaurant that started in California and isn’t in Colorado yet,” Alexander said of the eatery expected to take up 9,400 square feet, rough- ly 10 percent of the project’s retail space. “Every other seafood restaurant in Denver pales in comparison.”
Before the building comes more un-building. The same, toothy excavator tool used to tear down a glass pavilion Tuesday will soon be called upon to remove the escalators that lead down to the bus terminal and chew up the deck separating the terminal from open air above.
RTD is familiar with Continuum. The company was the co-developer on Union Station. RTD spokesman Scott Reed said the incoming project will be a “huge improvement” to a block that has needed an overhaul since buses stopped using it three years ago. Still, it’s been bittersweet to watch.
“I caught my bus in Market Street Station for 23 years,” Reed said. “My office overlooks the Market Street Station plaza area, and it is quite interesting but a bit sad to see the demolition workers strip back the layers of the old station and plaza area.”