Lingering doubts.

AuthorRundles, Jeff
PositionDowntown Denver is the main Central business districts in Denver, Colorado

WHEN I FIRST CAME TO DENVER, IN 1973, I OFTEN WENT DOWNTOWN BECAUSE OF THE DRAW OF CITY CENTERS, AND IT was, like many downtowns in the early 1970s, in decline. I'm old enough to remember when downtowns were draws, when Petula Clark's "Downtown" was a national No. 1 song, when downtown was the home of the flagship department stores, when downtown was where you went for a doctor's appointment or a special night on the town, when downtown was where "the lights are much brighter there."

Downtown Denver was seedy back then, and city, civic and private industry leaders responded, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with such amenities as the Tabor Center, Writer's Square and the 16th Street transit mall. Many other attractions have been added in the ensuing years, of course, most notably Coors Field, a redeveloped Union Station and rail yards, Elitch's, the Colorado Convention Center, a revamped Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Pepsi Center, and a plethora of new office buildings and hotels. Not to mention Larimer Square, just celebrated its 50th anniversary, which stood for years as the only bright spot in an otherwise dim locale and remains to this day the brightest light downtown.

And while Denver seems to be thriving--in downtown and apparently everywhere else--the 33-year-old 16th Street Mall appears to be the lone exception. Oh, as a transit hub, the nexus of downtown light rail service and jam-packed mall buses shuttling thousands of people from everywhere to and from the many attractions and work nearby, the mall is exceedingly successful. But people, at least the kind of people who would be the most desirous, find "lingering" on the mall an anathema.

So the Downtown Denver Partnership and the Denver planning office have launched a $650,000 initiative called "The Mall Experience: The Future of Denver's 16th Street Mall" to figure out what's wrong and, presumably, find solutions.

A consultant DDP has hired--from Denmark of all places--has studied the "lingering" times (reporting that only 1 percent of visitors "linger"), and there is another consultant hired for a plan "to more efficiently address security issues on the mall and enhance consumer confidence in the space." It would seem that the two main identified problems that inhibit are "lingering."

  1. Security issues, by which I take to mean the riffraff that do seem to like "lingering" on the mall (are they "mall-lingerers?"), much to the dismay of the non- riff- raff.

  2. The...

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