New apartment tower is final big piece of Denver’s Central Platte Valley, a neighborhood that barely existed 30 years ago

It won’t be the last building erected in the essentially built-from-scratch Central Platte Valley neighborhood that has risen behind Denver Union Station over the past few decades, but it’s the last big delivery that is imminent.

The Pullman tower, 1959 Wewatta St., is a 13-story stack of 168 apartments that takes Denver’s luxury rental trend to another level. With stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops in every unit, the first crop of Pullman tenants will be paying a minimum of $2,785 per month when they start moving in Jan. 15, officials with the building’s developer Greystar say.

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“It’s the walkability,” Greystar senior managing director David Reid said of what attracted the Charleston, S.C.-based company to the area. Greystar previously built and sold the neighboring apartment building the sits on top of the King Soopers grocery store. “It doesn’t take much to realize that’s something people crave.”

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

The Pullman apartments near Union Station are pictured on Nov. 13, 2019.

The impending completion of the Pullman provides an opportunity for some that helped shape the Central Platte Valley to reflect on how far it has come. What was once a collection rail yards, industrial buildings and open fields is now a shimmering new wing of downtown.

East West Partners, a Colorado development company that made its bones developing the Beaver Creek Village ski resort, has been a driving force in the area. It led the development of Riverfront Park, a master-planned collection of buildings that now feature 2,324 apartments and homes. Amy Cara, the company managing partner, joined East West in September 1999, just months after it had closed the 23 acres of land that would eventually be home to that project.

By then the rail lines through Denver had been consolidated and city leaders had made the decision to “take back” the birthplace of the city at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, Cara recalled. That and the city’s commitment to building Commons Park as the central hub of green space along the river were compelling to the company, she said.

East West’s work on its first three buildings in the valley coincided with its development of the Millennium Bridge in conjunction with the city, a key feature of the neighborhood that connects it with Lower Downtown. The bridge opened in spring 2002. Seventeen years later, East West has done $329 million in development in Riverfront Park and was a co-developer on the Union Station project that involved $480 million worth of public infrastructure.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

Work continues on the 13th floor of The Pullman apartments on Nov. 13, 2019.

The company’s most recent project, the Coloradan condo tower just down Wewatta from the Pullman, was completed in February. Among its 334 condos are 33 income-restricted affordable units. Those units were among 308 affordable rentals and for-sale housing units East West either built or played a part in facilitating in the valley, Cara said.

“I sort of pinch myself every time I walk around the neighborhood,” Cara said Friday. “When we first moved our office into Riverfront Park we were in the middle of a field really.”

The Central Platte Valley occupied parts of three Denver neighborhoods: the southwest corner of Five Points behind Coors Field, the western half of Union Station and the portion of Auraria around Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park now primed for major redevelopment of its own in the form of the River Mile project.

In just the Union Station area bordered by the central rail line, Speer Boulevard, Wynkoop and 20th streets, the number of housing units has climbed over 2,700 this year up from just 19 in 2000, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership. More than 3,300 people live in the area today when just 23 did so at the dawn of the millennium. Both those numbers are expected to keep climbing in the next five years.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

Work continues on the 13th floor of The Pullman apartments on Nov. 13, 2019.

The boom in the area represents the power of planning, said Ken Schroeppel, a professor in the University of Colorado Denver’s master of urban and regional planning program. He points to the city’s 1991 Central Platte Valley Comprehensive Plan Amendment. The vision laid out in that plan, including Commons Park and pedestrians bridges connecting the valley to LoDo and Highland is largely what it looks like today. And it was all implemented in roughly 30 years.

“That sounds like a long time, but from a city-building perspective that’s really a pretty remarkably short amount of time for such as transformation,” he said.

City Councilwoman Debbie Ortega was part of the steering committee then-Mayor Frederico Peña appointed to work on that plan. Now an at-large member of the Council, Ortega was then representing District 9, which included the Central Platte Valley area.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

The kitchen area in a one-bedroom apartment at The Pullman apartments nears completion on Nov. 13, 2019.

All these years later, Ortega said the area has nowhere near enough affordable housing. Ortega also has concerns about the safety of building so much density near cargo rail lines than can sometimes carry dangerous materials, an issue she has been working to address with various groups.

With a number of major projects lining up in the city’s pipeline today — including the River Mile and Loretto Heights campus redevelopment — she is apprehensive about the future in an era when she says the city’s form-based zoning code adopted in 2010 means less detailed rezoning applications.

“We’re not doing any of the big-picture planning that looks at the cumulative impacts of development like gentrification and displacement,” she said.