For more on Riverfront Park’s growth, check out this post from 2010. With the Parkside Apartments and Riverfront Green projects wrapping up construction—the last remaining major parcels of the Riverfront Park neighborhood—the second wave of the Central Platte Valley’s development is almost complete.

The Third Wave – Union Station District

Several planning documents in the early 2000s continued to refine the layout for future development of the area behind Union Station. The 2004 Union Station Master Plan (PDF) had a big impact on establishing the future vision for the area, but in the years that followed, the layout for the transit infrastructure was in a state of flux. Ultimately, it was the 2008 Denver Union Station Master Plan Update (PDF) that finalized the configuration of the transit and street infrastructure for the area.

The first new building in the area behind Denver Union Station was the Gates Headquarters building at 15th and Wewatta. Originally known as Legacy Plaza, the 10-story office building was completed in 2002 and is visible in the 2004 bird’s-eye photo above. The next project, the 18-story 1900 16th Street building, was announced in late 2006 and was completed in September 2009. DenverInfill was around by then, so you can follow that building’s progress here. These were the only buildings developed in the area behind Union Station before construction started on the Denver Union Station Transit Center.

With construction starting on the Transit Center in 2010 (which DenverInfill covered thoroughly in 145 posts) and with the local economy quickly recovering from the recession, development in the Union Station district really started taking off. First up was the DaVita Headquarters, announced in July 2010 and completed in late 2012. That was followed by a tsunami of 18 project announcements and groundbreakings in the Union Station district in the last five years that will result in essentially the full buildout of the district—the completion of the Central Platte Valley’s third wave of development.

To visually convey the great change that has occurred in the Union Station area during the past decade, here are two aerial images, one from 2008 and the other from 2017: