Rockies co-owner Monfort’s McGregor Square is on trend — and at the center of a trend — in LoDo

Denver is a trendy place to be these days. Ask all the millennials.

It could be argued that fellow-urban-district-going-by-an-abbreviated-nickname, RiNo, has taken the trendiness crown in recent years, but there are few areas of Denver as concerned with what’s cool as LoDo. After all, it was renewed interest in Lower Downtown’s old commercial buildings and warehouses in the late 1980s and early 1990s that unofficially kicked off the development tsunami that continues to wash over the center of the city today.

More than three decades into its hipness renaissance, LoDo may have its trendiness crown jewel. McGregor Square, the three-building, condo-hotel-office-retail project rising just south of Coors Field at the corner of 20th and Wazee streets, represents a distillation of several of the biggest trends playing out across Denver today. The project was named in honor of Keli McGregor, the Rockies team president who died unexpectedly in 2010 from complications from a rare virus at age 47.

Even its developer, Colorado Rockies co-owner Dick Monfort, is representative of a trend. Sports franchises and their owners are getting involved in developing entertainment districts and projects around stadiums across the country. Revesco Properties, a developer backed by Stan Kroenke, owner of the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, is planning to develop surface parking lots around Kroenke’s Pepsi Center in the not-to-distant future.

In an interview with The Denver Post last week, Monfort discussed the demands of his new job as a developer.

“It takes a lot of planning, a hell of a lot of planning,” he said. “Here we are, the condos and the hotel and the office don’t open for 14 months yet, and there are deadlines for all sorts of stuff. You have to have your game face on every day, and you have to be ready to make decisions.”

As McGregor Square races toward a planned New Year’s Day 2021 grand opening, here is a look of some of the trends shaping the project:

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

McGregor Square is under construction across from Coors Field on Nov. 13, 2019.

From surface parking to vertical development

Surface parking lots around Denver are dwindling as property owners eye more profitable and taller uses. That’s a good thing argues Ken Schroeppel, a University of Colorado Denver urban and regional planning professor and a close observer of Denver development trends through the blog, Denverinfill.com. On the Denver Infill site, parking lots are known as “soul-sucking black holes in the urban fabric.”

“Land in downtown is really expensive and storing cars horizontally on one level on the ground is not even close to being the highest and best use of expensive land,” Schroeppel argues.

McGregor Square used to be known as the Coors Field West Lot. It had room for roughly 300 cars. Its trio of towers are now being built on top of a subterranean parking structure with room for more than 400 cars. How many of those will be available to game day visitors to Coors Field?

“Probably none,” Monfort said last week.

With 103 condo units, a more than 200,000-square-foot office building and around 70,000 square feet of retail going into the project, most if not all of those future spots are spoken for. A deal may be struck with the office tenants to free up some parking after business hours for fans headed to Coors Field, Monfort said, but he is expecting ride-sharing services and mass transit to offset the loss of the West Lot.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

McGregor Square is under construction across on Nov. 13, 2019.

Food hall city

It wasn’t that long ago Denver’s food and market hall options were limited to The Source on Brighton Boulevard and Avanti Food and Beverage in Highland. Now versions of that concept, in which a variety of restaurants or businesses shack up in a shared building with common spaces, are being developed all over town and even in neighboring cities like Golden.

McWhinney’s Dairy Block — another block-spanning redevelopment in LoDo — welcomed its food hall, Milk Market, to the corner of 18th and Wazee streets on June 1, 2018.

That abundance in the market isn’t stopping Monfort from embracing the trendy idea. McGregor Square will feature a 16,000-square-foot food hall curated internally by Monfort’s team, he said. It will be part of a carefully crafted approach to filling the retail spaces in the square. Ultimately, there will be a mix of food and beverage options and retailers there.

“We’re not just out there seeing who can pay us the most. We don’t want to just have five sports bars,” Monfort said. “We’re going to have a nice restaurant. We’re going to have a very functional sports bar type place. All the food hall components will be chefs that you’ve heard of.”

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

McGregor Square is undergoing construction on Nov. 13, 2019.

WeWork as an anchor

Coworking and flexible office space has been all the rage for office building leasing agents and commercial developers over the past half decade, both in Denver and in cities across the country. The company riding that wave most visibly has been WeWork, the New York-based shared office provider that has taken Denver by storm since opening its first locations in the city in 2016.

The company had some very public setbacks in 2019. Its plans for an initial public stock offering were delayed indefinitely, leading to the departure of CEO Adam Neumann. Last month, WeWork announced that it received $1.5 billion in funding from Softbank Group Corp., money that will keep it going amid the turmoil.

All that drama hasn’t dampened Monfort’s interest in working with the company. He said that his team first reached out to WeWork more than a year ago about occupying all 200,000-plus feet of the McGregor Sqaure office building.

“It was a really a good fit because of the timing and they were willing to go in on our schedule,” Monfort said.

Now that commitment has been scaled back some but Monfort is still optimistic there will be WeWork space in his project.

“They’re still are very committed,” he said. “We sort of talked them into half the building.”

A WeWork representative declined to comment on McGregor Square when reached by email this week.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

McGregor Square is under construction on Nov. 13, 2019.

A boutique hotel and wellness-based living

The building that stands to most set McGregor Square apart from similar projects downtown is the hotel building opposite Coors Field across 20th Street. That’s largely because it will house the Rockies team hall of fame, a project 26 years in the making, not because downtown is hurting for new hotel projects.

The 176-room property will be an independent concept run by Sage Hospitality. Sage also manages the Maven Hotel in nearby Dairy Block and the Crawford Hotel in Union Station, according to its website.

When it comes to the condo building, dubbed the McGregor Square Residences, the development team is pursuing a WELL building certification. The independent accreditation program measures building features that are focused on the wellbeing of the people that live there. The Lakehouse condo project near Sloan’s Lake was the first major Denver project to pursue it.

“I think everybody, the real estate, the marking people, everybody just sort of felt that is the trend,” Monfort said of pursuing the certification. “With Colorado and the way we feel about the resources and the environment, we just thought it was the right thing.”

Monfort isn’t just a developer, he’s a client. He will be moving into a unit on “the upper floor” of the residences when they’re done, though he’s reluctant to call his place a penthouse. About 35 condos have sold so far, he said, and that’s before the sales office has officially opened. That office is slated to take over the former Fadó Irish Pub space that fronts onto Wynkoop Plaza in the coming months, he said. Units which range from 450-square-foot studios to 6,000-square-foot penthouses, start at $500,000.

Andy Cross, The Denver Post

Another view of McGregor Square construction on Nov. 13, 2019.

A new age in LoDo

For Schroeppel, McGregor Square is part of a trend unto itself in LoDo.

The professor looks at development through the lens of history. He’s broken LoDo’s history down into a series of eras. Recently, there was the post World War II era of under-utilization and decline.

Then, in 1988, the Denver City Council created the Lower Downtown Historic District, an effort to protect the neighborhood’s historic character and encourage revitalization. Then came the loft living movement, followed shortly by the construction of Coors Field, a facility that brings millions of people through downtown every year. That was the revitalization era.

Since the redevelopment of Union Station was completed in 2014, Schroeppel said LoDo has moved into yet another era, one where Larimer Square isn’t the only year-round destination.

With Union Station, LoDo got a new activity hub, what Schroeppel calls “a node.” It’s not just a place where people catch trains and buses, it’s a destination where they want to congregate and spend time like Larimer Square has been for more than 150 years. The Dairy Block became another such node last year. The Market Station project, another city block-consuming mixed-use development being built where the Market Street bus terminal used to be at the corner of 16th and Market streets, is on pace for delivery in the second quarter of 2020, developers say. After that will come McGregor Square.

“In a year or two when those are open, rather than one destination node in LoDo in Larimer Square, we will have five,” Schroeppel said.

That’s a big deal in city building, according to the professor. He’s particularly excited about McGregor Square’s large public plaza, a place where fans can watch Rockies games on a giant video screen during the season, ice skate in the winter and potentially do much more. The connection to baseball will give McGregor Square its own unique identity.

“To me, that’s exciting because cities and downtowns are about people going out onto the sidewalk and engaging with their fellow citizens in the public square,” Schroeppel said.