More than a decade before the gates of Coors Field first opened to enthusiastic Rockies fans, the dark and dormant blocks of Denver’s old warehouse district already were preparing, slowly, for a rebirth.

In the 1980s, artists, gallery owners, graphic designers and startup entrepreneurs who were among Lower Downtown’s urban pioneers pried the boards off warehouse windows and doors. Long-surviving establishments, from El Chapultepec jazz club on 20th Street to the Wazee Supper Club on 15th — beneath a rickety overhead viaduct — gave the place a blinkering pulse.

That persistence dovetailed with a years-long preservation fight, risks taken by developers and forward-looking — sometimes controversial — decisions made by city leaders, including a young new mayor who had taken an interest in revitalizing that part of downtown.

By 1995, when Coors Field debuted as the permanent home of Colorado’s Major League Baseball expansion team in its third year, LoDo was primed for a resurgence that would bring exponential growth in population and property values.

The stadium provided the final spark.

“In many ways, I think (Coors Field’s) impact on Lower Downtown has exceeded a lot of people’s expectations” — especially in its residential growth, said former Mayor Federico Peña, who took office in 1983 at age 36. He quickly elevated long-simmering efforts to attract a baseball team and, later, lobbied for the LoDo stadium site.

Neighborhood lore portrays future mayor and governor John Hickenlooper and his fellow investors as pioneers for opening Wynkoop Brewing Co., the city’s first craft brewery, at 18th and Wynkoop streets in 1988. And they were.

But eight years earlier, Joanne and Manny Salzman bought the four-story building next door on the cheap.

The couple moved from their house on a quiet street off Colorado Boulevard after their youngest son went to college. They renovated the top floor as their home and rented out commercial spaces on the floors below. They became among LoDo’s first loft-dwellers.

“We moved here because we were looking for a community that could protect and encourage artistic endeavors in a city that, at that time, didn’t have a community as strong as we thought it could,” recalled Joanne Salzman. She later would spend nearly two decades helping to maintain LoDo’s historic character on a design review board, but she recognizes that baseball changed the onetime arts enclave’s feel, for better or worse.

The Rockies’ move to LoDo from their temporary home at Mile High Stadium — and the opening four years later of the Pepsi Center, across Speer Boulevard, for Denver’s professional basketball and hockey teams — did something important, neighborhood leaders and former city officials say: The sports venues brought throngs of people to a little-visited part of downtown that many suburbanites had perceived to be empty and unsafe.

LoDo’s trickle of new loft-dwellers became a flood. Technology startups came to LoDo in droves, the bar and dance club scene took off, and new shops and restaurants opened.

Look at LoDo now

LoDo’s success has been stark and has spilled far beyond the compact boundaries of the official historic district, perhaps contributing to an exaggerated perception of its size. But the population growth even within its confines — generally from Wynkoop southeast to Market Street and Speer Boulevard northeast to 20th Street — is telling.

A population of no more than 200 in the late 1980s ballooned to 2,410 by 2015, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership.

Add the large-scale new apartment and condo buildings to the northeast that coalesced into the Ballpark neighborhood, and the rise-from-the-dirt Central Platte Valley between Union Station and the South Platte River, and that number approaches 12,000, the partnership says.

Another measure of Coors Field’s impact: The value of all property in LoDo and near the stadium has grown three times faster since it opened than has the value of property in all of Denver, according to the city assessor’s records.

In 1994, the aggregate land value estimated by the assessor’s office for the area stretching from roughly Larimer Square to Park Avenue and Wazee was $305 million. As of last June, it had risen to nearly $3.8 billion — an elevenfold increase in raw dollars, or a sixfold surge after accounting for inflation.

That excludes the stadium itself, which cost $215 million to build. About three-quarters of the construction cost was provided by metro-area taxpayers, with project bonds repaid years ago using a voter-approved 0.1 percent sales tax for the Denver Metropolitan Major League Baseball Stadium District.

“This is what it takes — you’ve got to make long-term investments, and it often takes a long time” to bear fruit, Peña said. “But if you’re willing to make sacrifices, it pays off.”

To this day, large-scale redevelopment continues, most recently with the opening of a hotel and offices in the Dairy Block between Wazee, Blake, 18th and 19th streets. And three years ago, the reopening of the renovated and transformed Union Station transit hub gave a new shot in the arm to LoDo.

The successful transformation of LoDo and other areas near the stadium, however, also has been a story of rapid gentrification.

On the 1700 block of Wazee, long home to a cluster of galleries, one is moving out to make way for offices. Three galleries remain on the block. Jim Robischon, who moved his Robischon gallery to Wazee in 1989, says he’s holding on because he owns his first-floor space with his wife and partner, Jennifer Doran.

But it’s not easy — and he says the pressure is even higher on galleries and retail stores facing rising rents.

“My property tax this year will be almost as much as my mortgage, just under $60,000,” said Robischon, 64. “I mean, I have to charge my property tax on my credit card. … We’re not ready to give up yet.”

LoDo Then and Now

Use the slider to see how the area around Coors Field has changed since 1993. Click here to see a larger version of the graphic.

Source: Google Earth

Pivotal moment in 1988

But while some businesses struggle with rising costs, others connected to the restaurant and bar scene are thriving. And while baseball changed LoDo’s long-building trajectory, advocates say crucial decisions made in the 1980s were just as important to its success.

Peña’s administration began a drive to tear down several viaducts along 14th, 15th, 16th and 20th streets that had ferried downtown commuters through the nearby Central Platte Valley’s rail yards. City leaders also began work to consolidate those railroad tracks to free up land that would become highly valuable to apartment, hotel and office developers starting in the late 1990s through today.

While the viaducts were coming down, LoDo’s new residents and business owners worried about how to avert a similar fate for the city’s last major collection of historic facades, some dating to the 1870s.

Advocates hoped to avoid the mass demolitions that had leveled nearby parts of downtown in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of “urban renewal.” That movement prompted preservationist Dana Crawford’s successful fight to save Larimer Square.

In LoDo, a pivotal moment came in 1988, when a split City Council approved the creation of a 23-block historic district. Some property owners objected, concerned about their property rights, but the move enacted preservation rules covering 131 buildings seen as contributing to LoDo’s historic character.

Supporters of the decision argue that it removed the risk that a developer might invest in one old building only to see a neighboring historic structure torn down to be replaced by a modern monstrosity.

In LoDo’s pre-renaissance days, there was an attractive informality to the place. Salzman, now 88, recalls that her husband placed a bathtub atop an old chimney on the roof. On warm days, he enjoyed al fresco soaks.

“He had to climb with a ladder to get into the bathtub,” she said. These days, Manny Salzman, 98, is still a LoDo fixture who can be spotted on his daily bike rides.

Back in the mid-1980s, the neighborhood “still had all the bums and all the transients” when a 13-year-old Angela Guerrero began working in the kitchen at El Chapultepec, then owned by her father, the late Jerry Krantz. The bar has been open since 1933, and its nightly live music at times boasted performances by Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and, later on, Wynton Marsalis.

“We used to get great crowds back then — still do,” said Guerrero, who runs the bar now. “(But customers) weren’t walking around like they do now. Back then, they would come specifically just to come into the bar.”

20th and Blake

Downtown major-league ballparks are common now, from San Diego to Minneapolis to Houston. But at the time of Denver’s decision, the idea was just beginning to come back into vogue. Denver followed Baltimore, which opened a downtown ballpark for the Orioles in 1992. In the years after Coors Field opened, officials from other cities would visit LoDo, seeking inspiration.

In the 1980s, Peña and other city officials saw a baseball stadium as the potential anchor that city planners had said the neighborhood needed to thrive on a bigger scale.

While a group of metro-area government and civic leaders organized an expansion-team bid, they looked at several other sites — including the future Pepsi Center site; land at the city’s airport in Stapleton, which soon would be replaced by Denver International Airport; and a site near the former Mile High Stadium and McNichols Sports Arena complex, across Interstate 25 from downtown.

Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in a June 1993 satellite image.

Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in an October 1999 satellite image.

Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in a July 2005 satellite image.



Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in a May 2011 satellite image.

Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in an October 2015 satellite image.

Google Earth LoDo area of Denver in a January 2017 satellite image.



But Peña favored the dusty, naturally sloped plot of land that for years hosted Union Pacific’s passenger car yard at 20th and Blake streets. And the owner was willing to sell.

Denver’s economy was in deep recession in the 1980s, after an oil industry nose dive. To Peña, placing the new baseball stadium next to LoDo offered a big chance to stimulate urban growth.

“My expectations were that, No. 1, we were going to preserve a lot of beautiful, historic buildings,” Peña said. “No. 2, we were going to have a ballfield that was in the right part of the city and was going to serve as a catalyst. And No. 3, it was going to attract a lot of people throughout the metro area to come downtown.”

But Joanne Salzman was among the skeptics: “We were quite concerned with the excess of cars and things that go with ballparks,” she said, especially bars.

Suburban critics argued the plan wouldn’t provide enough parking, but stadium backers held firm that they wanted an urban ballpark rather than a field surrounded by asphalt. The throwback brick ballpark design by HOK Sport Venue Event, a sports architecture firm now known as Populous, helped convince some LoDo advocates that it would blend in with their neighborhood.

Part of the effort to nab the franchise that would become the Rockies included winning voter support for a conditional sales tax increase to pay for the stadium.

In March 1991, the league’s expansion team committee visited Denver, recalled Paul Jacobs, an attorney who played a primary role in Colorado’s bid. “We actually chalked out the field on the railroad yard,” Jacobs said, “and we flew (the scout team) over the site.”

As Peña left office in 1991, the league’s owners awarded Colorado one of two expansion teams.

After the Rockies played the team’s first two seasons at Mile High, the 50,200-capacity Coors Field opened in 1995 to raves from fans.

In the blocks around the stadium, more sports bars opened, along with dance clubs and restaurants that made LoDo a weekend destination.

And residential development — retrofitted warehouse lofts, lofts in new buildings and more modern housing — took off.

Crime ebbs and flows

The draw to LoDo was simple for Kelly Dick, 57, a medical technologist who moved five years ago from suburban southwest Denver to the 15-year-old Titanium Lofts.

“I was a recently divorced guy in my early 50s, and I wanted to move downtown to experience a different lifestyle,” he said. He walked to occasional games at Coors Field and the Pepsi Center, enjoyed the bars and restaurants and joined the Lower Downtown Neighborhood Association, becoming its president.

“The people downtown are just phenomenal,” he said, and he will miss that now that he recently rented out his loft and decamped to Arvada because of a relationship. “There is a sense of community in LoDo. It’s not overt. But once you live down there awhile, there’s a community feel as you get to know the business owners and other people.”

Crime ebbs and flows, with periodic flare-ups of assaults and worse — especially around bars’ 2 a.m. closing time. Bar owners, community leaders and police say safety issues come with the territory whenever large crowds and alcohol mix, but they meet regularly to minimize problems.

Another challenge for law enforcement is the large homeless population that congregates near the concentration of shelters and services just blocks from Coors Field.

Ron Saunier, who patrolled the LoDo area in the late 1980s, now is the commander for the Denver Police Department’s District 6, which covers downtown. He said he would prefer to see officers handling traffic-routing for games and monitoring sometimes-feisty crowds late at night than responding to the frequent stabbings and shootings at dive bars that populated certain corners back then.

“It’s been a very positive change for that area from when I first came on and started patrolling in the ’80s,” he said.

More changes to the urban environment are on tap in the area around Coors Field. Current long-term city plans call for walking and bicycling pathways on streets near the stadium.

The Rockies in late March struck a deal to keep Coors Field as their home for 30 more years, and the new lease also looks outward toward LoDo. Key to the $200 million agreement are development rights for the Rockies on an entire block across 20th Street to the southwest, now a parking lot between the Jackson’s sports bar and the Denver Chop House restaurant.

Rockies owner Dick Monfort envisions building “an extension of the stadium” there. With eight-story zoning, plenty of uses could come into play, much as stadiums across the country have fostered adjacent entertainment districts.

Frank Schultz, the owner of the Tavern bars, including one on Coors Field’s Rooftop deck, pointed to that plan and to recent interest he has been getting for a handful of buildings and lots he owns near the stadium. The bar scene and other entertainment in LoDo have been static lately, he said, but he predicts a new wave.

“I think the best reincarnation of LoDo,” Schultz said, “is ahead of us.”