When Harold Hill opened his farm-machinery business at 3100 Brighton Blvd. in the late 1940s, the street was a dusty, industrial strip populated with warehouses, a foundry and little else.
For decades afterward, the road went largely unchanged. As recently as 2016, Brighton was a two-lane street with no curbs or drainage infrastructure and less than a mile of sidewalks, barely a step above a gravel road in places.
At 2:30 p.m. Thursday, a who’s who of Denver officials will gather on the boulevard to celebrate the near-completion of a total overhaul of the roadway that kicked off in October 2016. The two-phase, $41 million project, expected to be 100 percent done in the spring, is expanding Brighton by a lane in each direction between 29th and 44th streets. It has added traffic signals, connected sidewalks and built raised, protected bike lanes on both sides of the street.
There is still concrete to be poured to complete the sidewalk and bike connections, public works officials say, but the city will cut the ribbon for Phase 1 anyway. From 4 to 7 p.m., once-desolate Brighton will host DJs, street art, food trucks and a scavenger hunt. It has gone from ramshackle to rowdy, from dusty industrial roadway to lifeline of the city’s thriving River North district.
“It was the ugliest road in Denver and it wasn’t working for us,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said this week. His office set the project in motion in late 2014 when it committed $47 million in the city’s 2015 budget to improve north Denver’s fast-changing neighborhoods, including $25.8 million toward the roughly 1.5-mile stretch of Brighton through RiNo. The project is the first domino to fall on a laundry list of neighborhood projects that includes improvements at the National Western Center and in neighborhoods soon to be battered by the Interstate 70 widening project.
“We knew this would give the city a chance to deploy some of its values around multimodal transportation,” Hancock said. “This was going to be probably the first place where we could develop a multimodal road from start to finish.”
For Rick Hill, whose Do-It-Ur-Self Plumbing & Heating Supply business has now taken over for his grandfather’s machinery dealership at 3100 Brighton, the transformation has been something to behold.
“It hasn’t been easy, but if you look at the improvements, this has been worth the wait,” Hill said last week in the still-dirt parking lot of his showroom and supply warehouse. “A year from now, everybody should be happy.”
Hill marvels not only at the public improvements — underground utilities and state-of-the-art, eco-friendly storm drainage — but all the private investment that has come to Brighton in the past handful of years. His business sits across the street from the 274-unit, $17.5 million apartment building approved for construction in 2015.
“It’s incredible the money that has been laid down here,” he said. “This is one huge craps table.”
Since the middle of 2015, the city has permitted more than $55.8 million in commercial construction on Brighton between 30th and 38th streets alone, according to the planning department. The avalanche of private dollars fits nicely with the mayor’s hopes for the area.
“We kind of sensed that if we began to invest in the area, it would trigger a snowball effect of private investment,” Hancock said. “I could not be more pleased with what it has triggered in terms of commercial investment and interest in the area.”
Jamie Giellis, president of nonprofit neighborhood advocacy organization the RiNo Arts District, believes total investment along the roadway is much higher. She estimates that since funding was announced for the road project, at least $850 million in private projects have been built on Brighton. Giellis’ organization, through its tax-generating general improvement district, is committing more than $3 million to trees, natural grasses, lighting, benches and other street-scaping features that will be added to the Brighton corridor over the next 30 to 60 days, she said.
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Father and son developers Mickey and Kyle Zeppelin say the city didn’t turn its gaze toward the area now known as River North, until private-property owners started making a stink about the infrastructure there and RiNo Arts District formed and started attracting visitors in 2005. Mickey Zeppelin bought an eight-acre, former cab company hub just off Brighton on the west side of the South Platte River in 2000 and said he immediately began lobbying the city to do something about the state of the arterial street. In the years since, the Zeppelin family has been part of a grassroots neighborhood group they say pushed hard for bike and pedestrian features on the road.
The city created its River North Plan, its first neighborhood vision document in 2003. Top city planner Caryn Champine said that process was undertaken because the city “saw an opportunity for a new neighborhood right at the gateway to the city,” and wanted to “reinforce the idea of creating a unique identity” for the area.
In the years since the city plan was first drafted, Zeppelin Development company has turned its eight acres into the 28-acre mixed-use Taxi development and invested heavily along Brighton Boulevard. Opening in 2013, the Source market hall was the first business of its kind in Denver, and brought droves of new visitors to Brighton with its mix of dining, retail and services in one wide-open space. Next month, the Zeppelins expect to open the Source Hotel, an eight-story, 100-room boutique that will bring hospitality to the Brighton corridor for the first time and doubles down on the success of its connected predecessor, adding 13 new market hall stalls.
“It’s a real main street and not merely thoroughfare to get to downtown,” Mickey Zeppelin said. “The metamorphosis isn’t just curb and gutter and a nice street, but really a place where people can walk and is really about community.”
Comida, one of the Source’s first and best-loved tenants, saw its business fall by $800,000 from October 2016 to last October, according to owner Rayme Rossello. She said the decline has forced her to cut staff, burn through her savings and borrow money from friends. Patience from the Source’s ownership group may be the only thing that has kept her in business.
“We used to do 500 customers on Saturdays, and now we’re lucky to do 200 or 225,” she said.
Not every business could weather the bottlenecks and shifting traffic patterns. Rebel Restaurant, tucked in a low-slung building at 3763 Wynkoop St., a block from the intersection of Brighton and 38th Street, has announced it will close in the coming months.
Owner and chef Dan Lasiy doesn’t lay the blame entirely on the roadwork. His restaurant served unique fare like pig heads and chicken hearts, used recycled dishes, was housed in a former biker bar and lacked big-dollar backing. Still, when the water is abruptly shut off at 11 p.m. on a night you’re supposed to be open until 2 a.m. — as Lasiy said happened one evening during construction — it doesn’t help. The Brighton project was one challenge too many.
“They show you pictures, renderings of what they want it to be, but you don’t know until you’re in the thick of it what this entire redevelopment is going to entail,” Liasy said. “I think people started to get frustrated with the amount of traffic down there and kind avoided the neighborhood altogether.”
Of course, now that the work is done many feel the neighborhood’s door will be flung wide open. Rick Hill projects his property, “the best corner on Brighton,” will have a new owner in 10 years, part of his retirement plan.
Josh Peebles, president of the RiNo branch of Collegiate Peaks Bank, predicts that the influx of bigger name companies into the neighborhood, such as Boa Technology which recently moved into a building on the Taxi campus, will accelerate with Brighton now nearly done. Collegiate Peaks has financed more than $100 million in projects in RiNo, Peebles said. After previously keeping at office in the Source, it opened a standalone building at 3655 Brighton Blvd. last month.
“Without the public improvements, from my point of view, it kind of kept some of the larger people out of the neighborhood a little bit,” Peebles said. “People want amenities no matter where they are. That’s why you see people building in downtown Denver and Cherry Creek. And River North has those amenities. They were just kind of hard to get to before.”
