One Tabor’s sister tower back in planning pipeline
Amid a period of rapid, vertical growth in Denver, a long-talked-about second Tabor Center tower has found new life in the form of a design concept submitted to the city this month.
A representative from Denver’s Davis Partnership Architects on March 5 submitted a concept review application to the city for Two Tabor, a 33-story, 800,000-square-foot office building proposed for the Tabor Center block, community planning and development spokeswoman Laura Swartz said.
The plan calls for ground-floor retail space in the nearly 500-foot-tall building but would not add new parking to the block located northeast of the 16th Street Mall between Larimer and Lawrence streets. When One Tabor Center was built, in the early 1980s, the developer planned a second tower, but the project was never completed.
“The existing parking and loading is proposed to be shared by the two towers as originally planned in the towers’ original 1980s master plan,” Swartz said in an email Thursday.
One Tabor Center, 1200 17th St., opened in 1984. It is owned and managed by Callahan Capital Partners, a Chicago-based real estate investment firm. The company recently remodeled the lobby and outdoor plaza at that 30-story office sky-
scraper. It is 408 feet high, according to emporis.com. Callahan officials were not available Thursday afternoon to answer questions about the proposed second building, but a companyproduced website, twotabor.com, provides insight.
The site described Two Tabor as a “future-forward building” that features “high ceilings, light-filled floor plates, and the latest in technology, infrastructure, and flexible workspaces that allow for a new work experience every day.”
The concept plan shows a sleek, glass tower with metal accents at one corner. It juts out toward the corner of 17th and Larimer streets with flat faces running along both streets but features a curved face oriented toward the interior of the block, mirroring the rounded side of One Tabor Center.
A concept plan is the earliest step in the city planning process and does not mean a project is imminent. In February, a development team submitted a plan for an 81-story tower at 17th and California streets that appears to have gone dormant because the land deal fell through,
The blog DenverInfill this week broke the news of Two Tabor again entering the city’s planning pipeline. As documented by DenverInfill, the would-be tower, which was in the early phases of construction before the oil crash derailed it in 1985, has been through at least five design iterations over the years, but none has come to fruition.