Keli McGregor’s initials, KSM, have been emblazoned on a marker hanging at Coors Field since September 2010, a few months after the Colorado Rockies team president’s untimely death from complications from a rare virus.
On Thursday, Rockies principal owner and CEO Dick Monfort announced that isn’t the only monument to McGregor in LoDo anymore. Now, he has an entire city block named for him.
McGregor Square is now the name of the mammoth mixed-use development the Rockies are building across the street from Coors Field on the site of the former “West Lot” parking area. Monfort, at a naming ceremony held on the club level of the stadium, said that he had wrestled with a proper name for the project for more than a year, bringing in professional consultants and speaking with close friends.
“We wanted it to be something with character. We wanted it to be fun. It needed to have style and class. Needed to be a strong presence. And it needed to be one of a kind,” Monfort said, thinking back to the night he chose the name. “So I wrote ‘one of a kind’ about 100 times and it came to me.”
The executive choked up when he invited McGregor’s wife and four children onto the stage to reveal a McGregor Square sign.
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“I’ve been very close with his family, and it’s special to them. It’s special that it’s called McGregor Square,” he said later. “It’s a rightful tribute to a really great guy, a guy I learned a lot from.”
Many members of the McGregor family attended Thursday, including his father. One of his daughters, Taylor, is now the sideline reporter for the team’s AT&T SportsNet TV affiliate. She spoke about how people dealing with the death of a loved one look for things that bring them closer to the person they lost. For her family, it’s the Colorado Rockies organization. McGregor Square will now be a lasting imprint reminding his family of his strong moral character and the emphasis he put on making people feel important and valued, she said.
“It’s a place for us to come remember who he was,” she said.
The naming event had moments of levity, too. Monfort, while thanking the many investors in the three-building project that is expected to bring a 176-room hotel, 112 condos, an office tower and 75,000 square feet of bars to LoDo by Jan. 1, 2021, cracked that he was sorry if he left anyone out, but he’d still like their check.
Aside from the new commercial and residential real estate, McGregor Square will be home to a 29,000-square-foot public plaza and a team hall of fame expected to be loaded with video screens, virtual-reality platforms and other technology. Monfort is excited about what McGregor Square can bring to the neighborhood year ’round.
“The trick is, ‘OK, what do we do in the offseason?'” he said, tossing out ideas like turning the hall of fame video exhibits into features about the National Western Stock Show when it’s going on in January or doing special features about the history of the LoDo district.
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Officials with the project’s architecture and design team from Stantec were on hand Thursday. They said the hotel will be an independent concept operated by Denver company Sage Hospitality, which runs distinctive Denver hotels such as the Crawford and the Oxford. A leasing team with the Laramie Company, also based in Denver, is at work looking for retail tenants for McGregor Square.
The Rockies’ first home night game of the 2019 season is scheduled for Saturday. Fans in the right seats will be able to see the purple-lit cranes helping to build the project rising above the upper decks.
