On a recent spring evening after the workday’s final task, Chris Frampton walked home to his loft, leashed up his dog and took a half-hour ramble through the riverfront park that anchors his neighbourhood. The night was just beginning.
Next, Frampton and his wife, Yvette, welcomed the babysitter, kissed their two kids and left for a short stroll to the Pepsi Center, a sports arena at the south end of the Central Platte Valley – a swath of fresh residential energy where old-and-gritty meets new-and-shiny in the shadow of Denver’s tallest buildings. The Framptons cheered for the local National Basketball Association team, the Denver Nuggets, and for star guard Allen Iverson – who just happens to be their neighbour.
After the game, as Yvette cuddled with the children, Chris walked into Denver’s hottest nightlife district, LoDo (Lower Downtown), where he grabbed a beer at McLoughlin’s Bar. He instantly recognised the crowd.
“It was everybody from the neighbourhood,” Frampton says. “I knew everyone. That night...well, that’s the way to think about this place.”
That lifestyle – a blend of outdoor delights and indoor entertainment – has in one decade helped lure 3,000 people to a new clump of brick towers, upscale brownstones and refurbished warehouses in the 120-acre Central Platte Valley. On the fringe of Denver’s urban core, near the sandy banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, developers have concocted a thriving neighbourhood from a rusty snarl of railroad tracks, tramps’ hideaways and graffiti-slathered shacks. Throughout this revived section of town, residents say they love living close to the action but not smack in the middle of the downtown buzz.
But, depending on where you live in the Platte Valley, there is something else. On opposite sides of 20th Avenue – a street that serves as an unofficial north-south dividing line for the area – there are subtle shades of difference, both in dollars and ambience. It is history to the north versus hip to the south. It is a bohemian sensibility versus a ready-made neighbourhood packed with well-heeled people. And, lately, it is a renter’s market versus a good buy.
“There are two different worlds here,” says Denver architect Jim Johnson. “North of 20th is a reincarnation of an industrial area whereas south of 20th is a whole new invention. In the north there was leftover urban fabric. In the south it was a clean slate. I don’t mean to be critical but south of 20th Avenue is more of a staged environment.”
“The north is the urban equivalent of a natural landscape. I mean, if you walk up a beautiful mountain valley in the fall and the aspen leaves are turning, it makes you feel really good as a human being,” Johnson says. “This may just be the urban equivalent of that. It’s not staged. It seems to have evolved naturally.”
The north side of the valley is rooted by the Prospect neighbourhood, a collection of brick lofts and rejuvenated warehouses near the South Platte River and the Union Pacific Railroad. One of the newer projects, the Kerouac Lofts, was designed by Johnson but inspired by a famous American writer who stumbled through these once-bedraggled parts.
“This area was known as ‘The Bottoms’ for years,” Johnson says. “Really it was the Italian ghetto, if you will. And Jack Kerouac hung out there. He was attracted to The Bottoms because of its rawness and industrial grit. We tried to pick up on that.”
Kerouac, author of On The Road and a leading figure of the scruffy band of American counterculture writers and thinkers called the Beat Generation, was known to wander the thicket of train rails near the river. By the end of the second world war, The Bottoms had regressed from its quaint 1880s form – a shanty town filled with Italian immigrants who tended vegetable patches and then hawked their produce in downtown Denver from carts and stands. In the late 1940s the flood plain was home to train-riding vagrants who drank and slept in the abandoned warehouses that dotted the area. Kerouac soaked in that scene.
In the early 1990s, the area was still the place where Denver's homeless people found refuge. The catalyst for rebirth was the nearby Coors Field, a Major League Baseball stadium for the city’s fledgling team, the Colorado Rockies. It was completed in 1995 in a funky stretch of lower downtown filled then with warehouses, a few art galleries and a smattering of restaurants. The team drew 3.39m people in its first summer and the blocks around the ballpark were transformed into a high-energy maze of pricey lofts, beer halls and swanky cocktail joints. LoDo became Denver’s “party central”.
At the same time, developer Dana Crawford scanned the empty river valley just a few hundred yards from Coors Field and saw promise in a decrepit, former grain-processing plant. It had been an eyesore to city residents for generations. “She bought a building that everyone thought should be torn down,” says her son and business partner Jack Crawford. “It was the rich history that drew her. It was the prospect of developing a little city within the city.”
Dana Crawford gutted the plant and turned it into 47 high-end lofts, priced at about $250 per square foot, featuring 16ft-high ceilings and chrome fixtures. The Flour Mill Lofts opened in 1998 and became the first residential foothold in the awakening Platte Valley. Today some of those condominiums are valued at more than $1m ($350 per square foot).
Crawford soon turned her attention a block or two to the north – an area now called the Prospect neighbourhood – where old smelters and warehouses rusted away. At the end of a dead-end street there was a small shed on a dusty lot that backed up to the railroad tracks. Crawford bought the land and asked Johnson to design a 60-unit building on the property. In searching for a creative spark, Johnson wandered the streets – much like Kerouac had. Soon, Kerouac became his inspiration.
“I kicked around there with Dana and Jack. I listened to the train engines whistle through. We went into the old smelter building across the street,” Johnson says. “There’s a pungent odour of pigeons in there. It gives you the flavour of the raw, industrial feel of the neighbourhood. It doesn’t take long to get that in your blood
“Then we said ‘Well, Jack Kerouac used to hang out down here. Let’s evolve this building with that in mind.’”
The Kerouac Lofts were built with high ceilings and equally high windows to capture the free spirit that flowed through Kerouac’s tales. The metal siding and brick walls are common to historic buildings in the area. Even the accent colour, yellow, is borrowed from an image of a black-and-yellow locomotive thundering through the valley.
“I looked at 30 different places before I bought in Kerouac,” says Jerry Southard, an interior designer who splits his time between Aspen and Denver. “I liked the location, near the Platte River. I liked the size (his place is 1,824 sq ft). And I liked the name.”
Prices for Kerouac lofts run at about $334 per square foot. Nearby, at the Ajax Lofts, the prices are roughly the same. But on the south side the Platte Valley – where the Riverfront Park complex dominates the landscape – the market is searing hot, with condos fetching up to $600 and $700 per square foot. Riverfront, which includes tall residential buildings, a restaurant, a wine shop and a gourmet dog-food store, is a master-planned community. The look is far more modern and streamlined than the Prospect neighbourhood. Glass accentuates the red brick. There are few echoes of the old neighbourhood here.
“There’s a percentage of humans that like true grit (such as the Kerouac Lofts) but there’s a larger percentage – just based on the real estate success south of 20th – for whom the staged stuff is more attractive,” admits Johnson.
Frampton – who not only lives in Riverfront but serves as head of sales and marketing for the development – argues, however, that it’s not the instant neighbourhood or “staged” feel that is the primary draw. It’s Riverfront’s close proximity to LoDo and Denver’s 16th Street pedestrian mall. Both can be reached via a short walk across a pedestrian bridge.
“The idea here was to do something derived from LoDo,” Frampton said. “We have never wanted to create fake history. We didn’t want to build fake warehouses. We have a philosophy that we like to build of our time.”
For Riverfront Park resident Amy Fuller, however, there is nothing artificial about place. Her condominium is about a five-minute walk from the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte, the very spot where Denver was born in the 1800s. But what drew her to this spot four years ago was the greenery of the nearby Commons Park and the ability to walk or ride her pearl white Vespa to LoDo restaurants.
“History?” Fuller asks with a laugh. “I’m not a history buff. I do love some of the old architecture but as for the history of the area being the original downtown, that’s not why I’m here.”
