Evan Almighty

In the meantime, inner-city flight had hurt other institutions as well, like the Orpheum Theater. The venue, which had dropped vaudeville acts to focus on film and been renamed RKO International 70, was remodeled in 1955 and again in 1963 — but it still couldn't keep pace with the times. "All the movie theaters moved to the shopping centers and the suburbs, and nobody came downtown to go to the movies anymore," remembers Gene Rock, head of the Bank of Denver, which had purchased the theater and the Standish Hotel across the block from it on California Street, renaming the hotel structure the Bank of Denver Building. In 1967, RKO was torn down and replaced with a half-acre parking lot.

That temporary use became permanent.

As the 1970s energy boom, which had driven up downtown real-estate prices, bottomed out in the debilitating oil bust of the mid-1980s, parking-lot owners who'd cleared away deteriorating, unoccupied historic downtown buildings waited in vain for great developments that never appeared. The Downtown Denver Partnership estimates that between 20 and 22 percent of all properties in the 120-block Downtown Denver Business Improvement District are parking lots — including much of Block 162.

Even the 1982 opening of the 16th Street Mall pedestrian corridor did little to stop the block's slide. The refurbishment of the McClintock building at 16th and California was a small upswing in an otherwise downward spiral. The backside of the block became home to what the Denver Post referred to as "15th Streeters," a subculture living in the "permanent-transient" hotels on and around Block 162 and congregating at the street's many watering holes. "It's a step below respectability and a step above skid row," explained one bar owner. Some of the locales became local legends, like the 15th St. Tavern, which took over for the old Sportsman bar in the Colonial Hotel building in 1995.

The bar's grungy atmosphere and seedy clientele, shunned by civic boosters, was celebrated by others as the ultimate downtown dive. "It was known for good times and great bands," says co-owner Mykel Martinez, who, along with his two partners, bought the tavern from original owner Andy Artzer three years ago.

In 1991, there was a ray of light when Gene Rock managed to unite neighboring property owners behind a proposal to build a 1,074-room Hilton on the block. But existing hoteliers, who believed their businesses would suffer, protested, and Mayor Wellington Webb torpedoed the plan.

It was a puzzle, one nearly 100,000 square feet in size. That's how Makovsky approached Block 162 in the fall of 2005 when he began planning his attack.

"I looked at the ownership on the block and designed a step-by-step acquisition plan that basically said, if I buy property number one and I cannot buy anything else, what can I do with property number one, and if I can only buy property number one and number two, what can I do with that?" he says. "I made a decision to go forward and close on each of these individual pieces knowing what I could do with it or knowing that I could resell the ground to someone else and they could do something with it."

It was an unorthodox strategy. Most financiers refuse to back a development deal piece by piece; they'll provide the money only after every property owner has agreed to sell. But Makovsky's investors, whom he declines to name, were willing to take a risk, confident that he knew what he was doing.

Still, Makovsky says, they had an informal bet going as to whether he'd actually pull it off.

The first piece was easy. The Bank of Denver was already trying to sell its property along Welton Street, where much of the Orpheum Theater once stood. If he couldn't get anything else, Makovsky had a plan for the land. "That parcel was the same square footage as what I had acquired at the corner of 18th and Champa, where I built a parking lot and hotel, the Marriott Residence Inn," he says. "So I knew if I didn't buy anything else, I could at least duplicate a garage and hotel on it."

And dealing with the Bank of Denver's Rock turned out to be refreshingly straightforward. "He was very clear on what he wanted, and it wasn't going to be any different than that. He stuck absolutely to his word on everything he said," Makovsky says.

The admiration was mutual, says Rock: "Evan was fairly straightforward and didn't try to pull all the development tricks that most people try to pull."

"I wish every deal I made was like that," says Makovsky. In the case of Block 162, it wouldn't be.