After more than two years of construction, downtown businesses and residents are celebrating the reopening of the 16th Street Mall — one block at a time.
On Thursday, boosters opened up the mall between Wazee and Larimer streets, a four-block stretch through Lower Downtown, where the fences are gone and construction noise has finally ended.
The majority of Lower Downtown now has its stretch of the 16th Street Mall back.
But the $175 million dollar project has been a slog. It began when the city center was already suffering from pandemic woes.
Downtown restaurants and shops have struggled to stay open. Residents are frustrated. And tourists have been scratching their chins about why the city center is such a construction zone.
The last block won’t be finished until fall of 2025.
'Denver gets its wings back again with each little block,' said Mayor Mike Johnston.
He was attending a celebration on Thursday of the latest section to be completed.
Businesses on the reopened blocks have seen a 30 to 50 percent increase in revenue, compared to the closure years, according to Johnston. The city has seen more vendors interested in opening shop on the mall in the past few months.
“We have had thousands of people come to the Skyline Beer Garden, our movie nights, Taste of India, Taste of Japan,” said Kourtny Garrett, head of the Downtown Denver Partnership. “So many events are bringing people back to the center of our city, and there is so much more to come.”
Mary Nguyen, the executive chef and owner of the restaurant group Olive & Finch, recalled riding the shuttle up and down 16th Street Mall as a kid. She described the strip as “the lifeblood of Downtown.”
But that lifeblood drained out during construction. And businesses like hers lost revenue.
“The journey over the last two years, it's been challenging, no doubt about it,” she said. “But it's also been incredibly rewarding. And despite these difficulties, I've remained deeply committed to our city and to the street, because it's iconic.”
She’s so bullish about the future of the city center that she plans to open two more Olive and Finch restaurants downtown.
Jesus Barcenas, who moved from San Diego to Denver around 2016, leaned against a fence watching the 16th Street Mall festivities.
Before the construction started, he would come down to the mall and play the pianos that once lined the street.
“It was nice with those pianos,” he said. “I wish we could have taken more care of those. A lot of people use them to practice, to get better.”
He wants the pianos to return, along with more free instruments for the public.
“Having free instruments gives them a chance to see if they have a relationship with it,” he said. “They could actually be musicians instead of accountants.”
The Downtown Denver Partnership still doesn’t know if the pianos will return.
“Hopefully,” spokesperson Britt Diehl wrote to Denverite.
'I'm writing poems on my typewriter for anyone who wants a poem,' Bella O’Brien said.
In the early 2010s, when she was a student at Denver School of the Arts, she’d take the bus to the 16th Street Mall. Her dad worked as a programmer in a nearby office building.
“I remember coming here, especially as a teenager, and just loving that there was a place to kill time and just witness the world,” she said.
As an adult, O’Brien has worked a corporate job. She wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, so a few months back she started setting up a typewriter on a little table and writing poems for strangers.
“People can be very vulnerable with what they tell me about what they want a poem to be about,” she said. “So it's just been like this really delightful way of connecting.”
In recent years, she has spent less time on the mall.
“It just felt less warm and friendly down here,” she said. “And there's just a lot of construction and loud noises… You didn't get that same concentration of energy.”
But the reopening has her excited about being there again. She even applied to get her busker permit so she could set up her table and write poems.
“I'm definitely planning on being here more now that it's open,” she said, “and just seeing what's new and what's changed.”
Mary Gordon, a grandmother who lives downtown, is cautiously optimistic about the 16th Street Mall reopening.
“It's just a beautiful redo,” she said. “We're hoping that it reinvigorates the area.”
Gordon has been coming to the 16th Street Mall for twenty years. When she first visited it, she loved the quirky culture, what she called “a comfortable weird.”
When she eventually moved downtown in 2021, she said, it was a different place. The streets were dirty. Homeless encampments dominated entire blocks of the city center. The pandemic halted the tourism and restaurant industries, and office workers weren’t coming downtown.
“It became a less-comfortable weird,” she said. “It should never have reached the point that it reached.”
But she’s optimistic things are changing for the better — and hopefully for good.
“I just hope they maintain it,” she said. “And they certainly should have the incentive to do so, having spent this kind of money on the project.”
