No turndown downtown: proposals abound for upscale hotels, mixed-use high rises.

• Author: Lewis, David

While forecasts across much of the nation call for a big real-estate downturn, especially in residential, downtown Denver is in the early stages of a building boom--including residential--that has been unseen here for a quarter century, or maybe ever.

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When it's all said and done, downtown is going to be less like Des Moines and a lot more like, say, San Francisco: upscale but unpretentious, sleek but not showy.

For the purposes of our discussion we're defining downtown the way the city does, along Broadway from Colfax Avenue to 20th Street, down 20th to Larimer Street, across to Speer Boulevard and back to Colfax. That means that we're foregoing by a block or two such blockbuster project possibilities as the Trump Tower Denver, Union Station and the proposed W hotel nearby.

But that means we are including actual or proposed hotel developments such as: the Hilton Garden Inn (under construction), across the street from the Hyatt Regency at the Colorado Convention Center; and the completed Residence Inn Denver City Center, at 1725 Champa St. (not to be confused with the Residence Inn Denver Downtown, at 2777 Zuni St.). On drawing boards are the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences; a new Embassy Suites Hotel, a new Homewood Suites hotel; a proposed Denver Athletic Club Hotel; and the new downtown Best Western.

Then there are the residential developments, lofts or condos, done or planned. To name a few: the Spire Residential Tower; the Great Gulf Building; and the 30-story St. Charles Convention Place, slated for 14th and Stout streets.

And after that, major remodels: the conversion of the old Embassy Suites hotel into the Ritz-Carlton; the conversion of 1600 Glenarm from the old Security Life Building, and the welcome redo of the Executive Tower Inn.

"It's amazing; it is historic," says "Dr. Colorado," aka historian Tom Noel. But ...

"It's comparable to what we have every 30 years, and of course Denver is a boom-and-bust city," Noel added. "The real question in my mind is, many predict we are on the edge of the bust right now, and will all of this really happen?"

Some of it will. How much we don't know. But it's important that a lot of big builders believe downtown Denver is ready.

Some of it won't.

"It's pretty likely that all of it will not happen," notes Ken Schroeppel, urban planner with Matrix Design Group and, as creator of www.DenverInfill.com, a...