Seemingly endless construction. Crime. Empty offices. Shuttered businesses. Social media trash talk.
Denver’s 16th Street Mall’s reputation has suffered mightily in recent years.
The city's boosters — including past and present mayors, the owner of Ibotta, the Downtown Denver Partnership — and its residents have tried to fix it. They have launched pop-ups and new designs and said “vibrant” a lot — even in the wake of stabbings, as the mayor recently did.
Now, they’re talking about another big change: What if they rename the long-suffering street?
The city and the Partnership are wondering if it’s time to drop the “mall” from the “16th Street Mall” They're wondering: Is it really a mall? Or is the name just confusing?
For just under a year, the Partnership and the city have been working on a $100,000 dollar rebranding campaign.
Part of that is a big renaming project that might result in a brand new identity — or perhaps no change at all. That will also involve dreaming up a new color palette, logo design and an overall strategy for marketing the Mall. (Or whatever we're calling it.)
In total, 33 firms applied for the job. They came from all over the country, and five had an international presence.
The London-and-New York headquartered branding firm DNCO was picked to lead the project.
The work started in September, and the new branding (and potential name) will be rolled out when the Mall reopens on the last weekend in May.
“We have done a number of different exercises to look at different names,” Partnership spokesperson Britt Diehl said.
The hope is to land on a name that “does justice to the space and invites Denver and the world back to this really world-class public space that we have been working really hard to deliver over these past several years,” she said.
Some people find 'the mall' confusing.
Diehl said tourists call her office every day asking: When does the mall open? Where is it, anyhow?
They’re imagining a suburban-style shopping center, not a mile-some-long walkway.
And the boosters at the Partnership have to break it to these aspiring shoppers: The mall is not a shopping mall, although it does contain one actual shopping mall — the Pavilions — as well as businesses that line the street. (That wasn’t always the case. The Shops at Tabor Center once was a thriving shopping mall. Now, it is, in part, the home of the Cheesecake Factory)
In fact, it's the other kind of mall. As Merriam-Webster puts it: a “usually public area often set with shade trees and designed as a promenade or as a pedestrian walk.”
The 16th Street Mall was originally conceived as a pedestrian and transit connector, part of a wave of pedestrian malls that were meant to revive American downtowns in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Now, the city is considering whether “mall” means much of anything to anyone. It’s not like actual shopping malls are doing so hot, either.
As Axios recently pointed out in a story about the potential renaming, Mayor Mike Johnston, himself, dropped “mall” from 16th Street when he was talking about the city’s 2025 goals.
Was he signaling an inevitable renaming, a mallless future for 16th Street? Or was it just a slip of the tongue?
Denver’s no stranger to renamings.
The Stapleton neighborhood — named after the Stapleton International Airport, which was itself named after the former Ku Klux Klan mayor of Denver, Benjamin Stapleton — was rebranded “Central Park.”
Denver International Airport, commonly dubbed DIA, was branded as DEN in 2015, reflecting the city’s longstanding airport code— but that name hasn’t seemed to catch on for people who’ve lived here for more than a few years.
Meanwhile, the University of Colorado A Line dropped “the University of Colorado” after RTD failed to find a sponsor for the name.
And swaths of Curtis Park, Five Points and Globeville have been redubbed RiNo by some – a nickname embraced by some newer Denverites that still makes many oldtimers angry.
Of course, keeping up with whether the Nuggets’ home is Ball Arena or the Pepsi Center, or whether the Broncos’ home is Mile High Stadium, Invesco Field at Mile High, Empower Field or Sports Authority Stadium, still confuses many Denverites.
All of these shifts came with enormous controversy.
A renamed 16th Street Mall could suffer a similar public flap — or outright resistance. And the Partnership is aware of it, as it’s studied how other renamings have gone down.
“There is no denying that renaming a place, especially one that is so iconic and well known, is not an easy endeavor,” Diehl said.
So here’s our question.
Should the 16th Street Mall drop “Mall?” Maybe create an entirely new name?
We asked a bunch of prominent Denverites what they think.
Former Mayor Wellington Webb’s idea for a name: “16th Street Mall.” He’s troubled by yet another effort to change Denver's history.
Community organizer Jeff Fard, better known as Brother Jeff, would rename the strip after Barney Ford. Ford escaped slavery in the 1800s and became an entrepreneurial and political force in Colorado. He cut hair in his barber shop across the street from the Brown Palace, near the 16th Street Mall. He was instrumental in the founding of Colorado as a state, and argued that the state should not be ratified unless all men could vote.
Over the years, Ford’s been largely forgotten.
“Ford’s legacy was disrespected," Fard wrote.
Maybe a renamed 16th Street could repair some of that historical omission, he suggested.
State Sen. Julie Gonzales would call the street “The Mile High Mile.”
Kyle Clark, of 9News, has a similar idea: “How about The MILE high?” he wrote. “I know it’s actually 1.25 miles — but rebranding it as a mile’s worth of shopping, eats and entertainment could be cool.”
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, the former mayor, is mulling the question over.
“Easy to do,” he wrote. “Hard to do well.”
After mulling it over for three days, Hick came up with "Emily Griffith Mall. The Griff for short," named after the Denver adult public education pioneer.
Author Kali Fajardo-Anstine would call it “Diamondback Valley,” she said.
That’s because the historic granite tiles on the mall resemble a diamondback rattlesnake.
“I love the old tiles,” she said.
The new tiles also resemble a diamondback rattler. Maintaining that design was part of the historic preservation deal struck ahead of the Mall’s redesign.
Wheelchair Sports Camp MC and former mayoral candidate Kalyn Heffernan doesn’t hate the idea of renaming it.
“But I know damn well all of us old Denver heads who grew up tromping down there would still call it the 16th Street Mall,” she said.
What do think? If you could name it anything, what would it be? Let us know at [email protected].
