The once-bustling Market Street Station will come rolling back to life with Continuum Partners beginning a $200 million redevelopment of the site at 16th and Market streets.
The new Market Station, to be completed in summer 2019, will turn the former Regional Transportation District bus terminal on the 16th Street Mall into a mixed-use hub of activity. It’s an opportunity that, particularly from a retail viewpoint, doesn’t exist anywhere else in Denver.
Roger Pecsok
“There are still going to be locations where people can build office product and residential product, but really nothing offers the retail opportunity that this site does,” said Roger Pecsok, Continuum Partners development director.
“It’s on 16th Street, which speaks for itself, but it’s also being located between Market and Blake, which are the one-way arterials taking traffic in and out of LoDo from Interstate 25. And then being located between Coors Field and the Pepsi Center, we’re just right in the middle of all that activity from every direction,” he said, adding the site’s footprint allows for a large scale of retail amenities. “When you put all those ingredients together, we have a retail site that really doesn’t exist anywhere else right now.”
Along with abundant surrounding bars, restaurants and shops, Market Station’s 85,000 square feet of retail will offer plentiful amenities for the neighborhood, as well as for tenants of the development’s 95,000 sf of creative office space, and 245 apartments and micro-units. The first round of retailers, including national brands, emerging concepts and a small number of restaurants, will be announced in the coming months.
“This isn’t an office building that happens to have some ancillary ground-floor retail or a residential building that has some ancillary retail product. It’s got a full retail program. All of these are of a scale that could be a product in themselves. You put them all together in one location, and it’s going to have great, great energy,” Pecsok said.
About a quarter of Market Station’s residential units will be high-end apartments on the upper floors of a 10-story mixed-use building fronting the mall. The building will be connected with the rest of the development, comprising five stories wrapping around Market and 17th streets. The micro-units will be on the upper four floors, with retail at street level.
Pecsok said Continuum Partners considered including condominiums, but that the apartments, especially the way in which they are positioned, “make more sense for the market and what we’re seeing in demand right now.”
“A lot of buildings are single-use apartment projects between 200 and 500 units. This is segmented into smaller components where people can feel they’re living in a building that’s a little smaller-scale. We like the way this positions it in the market very well. We still see very strong fundamentals on the rental market. We’re very bullish about how this will perform,” he said.
The micro-units will start at approximately 400 sf. “By getting into that 400-square-foot range, we’ll be able to offer smaller units that are well under $2,000 a month, and that hits a price point of affordability when you look at what new product costs and rents for,” said Pecsok.
The former below-grade bus terminal will become a valet-operated parking garage with monthly parking for office tenants and residents, as well as shorter-term parking for visitors and the neighborhood. Each of its 160 stalls will have a mechanical lift, which will boost parking capacity to 320 vehicles.
Kiewit is the general contractor for Market Station. Kansas City-based El Dorado Inc. is the lead design architect, and BOKA Powell of Dallas is the architect of record. Todd Wheeler of Cushman & Wakefield is leading office leasing, and Continuum is providing retail leasing in-house.
Continuum Partners purchased the Market Street Station site, which excludes the RTD headquarters building at 1600 Blake St., from the city of Denver as part of its agreement as co-master developer of the Union Station Transit Hub and neighborhood.
“We are thrilled to be starting construction on Market Station, which will be the next great development, similar in scale and significance to Larimer Square and Union Station,” Pecsok said.
“While Denver has seen some extraordinary developments in the last few years, we believe Market Station is a unique project in an important location. Our goal is that Market Station will boost the retail vitality of this part of LoDo and 16th Street much in the same way Union Station has for the Wynkoop corridor.”
