"We have a joke," says Gougeon of the teams that withdrew: "We aren't sure if they were all smarter than us or we were smarter than them. I think the jury is still out."
Both teams faced a daunting task. The redevelopment would be one of the largest publicly supported construction projects in the city since DIA, one that involved cramming two types of railroad lines, a bus terminal, shuttle stops and significant commercial development into a 19.5-acre swath of land saturated with underground utility lines, low-level railroad contamination and stormwater drainage from much of downtown, all without interfering too much with the historic structure, the busy roadways around it or the handful of trains that currently use the site (not to mention the beloved model railroad in the basement, which officials promise will be saved; for more on this, visit the Latest Word blog at westword.com).
Courtesy of the Union Station Neighborhood Company
An artist's rendering of what Union Station will look like in 2012.
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Peter Park (left), Cole Finegan and Tom Gougeon help keep the project on track.
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As Jerry Nery, RTD engineering manager for Union Station, puts it, "It's kind of like adding ten pounds of potatoes to a five-pound bag."
Union Station Partners stuck with the master plan's suggestion to place all transit underground. They proposed to pay for it by leveraging the tax revenue generated by high-density development that they envisioned around the station, including controversial yet striking 46-story and 36-story towers that would require a zoning variance. "Our view was, this is a project that's really a legacy project for the city of Denver," says Walter Isenberg, president of Sage Hospitality Resources, part of the Union Station Partners team. "It has the potential of impacting the quality of life and the quality of downtown for the next hundred years.... Cost should have been a secondary consideration to design."
Continuum/East West took another approach. "We sat down and said, 'What are we trying to do, and what are the problems with doing it?'" says Gougeon. "To get all of this in one place, you have to cross all these roads, and you can't do that. So you have to put it all underground, and then you hit all these utilities, and it becomes so expensive that you have a problem."
So they came up with the idea for a transit district. "It's not just a station; it's something bigger," Gougeon says. Instead of trying to fit everything onto the Union Station site, the team proposed building the light-rail terminal, where FasTracks' streetcar lines would stop, by the freight railroad tracks that run through the Central Platte Valley, two blocks southwest of the station down 17th Street. The 16th Street Mall shuttle and downtown circulator bus lines would then be extended to the new terminal. That way, there would be more room to build bus and commuter rail stations under Union Station. Furthermore, everything could be built at once, and, most important, the cost was $420 million, considerably less than what Union Station Partners had proposed.
The two plans mirrored the longstanding division in Denver's development circles between those favoring emblematic new skyscrapers and those preferring to focus on lively new urban streetscapes — and in this case, the latter got their way. In November 2006, Continuum/East West, which had assumed the Union Station Neighborhood Company name, won the bidding.
But problems soon developed. The Union Station Neighborhood Company decided to dead-end the underground commuter rail lines at the station instead of a more convenient, yet more expensive, "through-station" rail loop as originally planned. But in October 2007, the Federal Railroad Administration warned that placing the "stub end" terminal underground wouldn't work because of the risk that the trains, running downhill, could lose control and overrun the tracks.
So the commuter rail terminal, which was to accommodate Amtrak trains, the Ski Train and the new FasTracks commuter trains, had to be moved aboveground as well, to a train shed directly behind the station. Now the street-level commuter rails would block 18th Street between Wynkoop and Wewatta streets, a long-severed stretch of road whose unification many saw as important to connecting LoDo and the Central Platte Valley. Not only that, but the commuter rail terminal platforms would be less than optimal lengths for the Ski Train and the Amtrak trains that would also be likely to use them. The revised proposal for Union Station, in other words, looked very different from the starting point that public representatives had spent so long developing in their master plan.
The most controversial change was placing the light-rail terminal two blocks from the historic station. The Colorado Rail Passenger Association "felt that it didn't represent the best interest of people who were making transfers to the light rail from the commuter rail trains and so forth," says Jon Esty, former association president and a Union Station Advisory Committee member. "We really felt that if you are going to have a transit center, you should really bring all the modes together as closely as possible." Continuum and East West also own much of the now-vacant land on either side of this two-block stretch of 17th Street; they plan development there that should benefit from a captive audience streaming by. "If you choose to walk, you will be walking by their commercial establishments," notes Esty. "That's a nice bonus for them."
