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Kate McKenna can’t help the Rockies play like the Cubs, but the executive director of Denver’s Ballpark District General Improvement District (GID) can still bring a few lessons to the Coors Field area, thanks to so much time spent around Wrigley Field in her last gig.
“People like to ask if the team’s success in the league drives something one way or another,” she says. “Oftentimes, I don’t think it has an overall impact because you’re home to the stadium win or lose.”
McKenna has been in charge of the tax-funded Ballpark District GID since June. The GID is an organization funded by an added property tax for residents and business owners around Coors Field, mostly between 20th Street and Broadway; it was approved by voters within the district in 2024. The GID’s most visible arm is their maroon-shirted ambassadors, hired by a contractor to patrol the streets, pick up trash, answer questions and tell loiterers to move along.
McKenna’s job is to build out and manage the GID’s infrastructure with contracts and partnerships. She talks to businesses and residents in the area, organizes celebrations and mixers for business owners, sets up meetings with city councilmembers and attends community safety meetings held by the Denver Police Department. Because the GID is still in its first year, she’s working on a long-term strategy for making the area more attractive, which includes district branding, new street furniture and commissioning public art, according to McKenna.
She first started out in the niche field of managing urban culture districts in Houston, but says “I cut my teeth” managing an area anchored by the classic baseball stadium in Chicago. She first worked in the West Town neighborhood and then as a program manager in Wrigleyville, a hundred-year-old neighborhood around the Cubs’ home Wrigley Field.
In Chicago, property tax-funded improvement districts are called Special Service Areas. According to the City of Chicago, an SSA is supposed to keep an area safe and clean, provide “localized” decision making, leverage funding and try to boost property values, retail sales and occupancy.
Before arriving in Denver, McKenna managed the SSA around Wrigleyville. She describes her role there as a conduit and communicator between small business owners, residents, developers and local politicians around Wrigleyville.
“The neighborhood of Wrigleyville is iconic and has been around for so long,” McKenna says. “You can’t master-plan that sort of authenticity, and that’s what was really our north star in Wrigleyville. The reason Wrigley has been successful is because, win or lose, it was held up in partnership with the neighborhood.”
She started as the SSA manager in 2017, when the Cubs were fresh off a curse-breaking World Series win. She says at that time, the Wrigleyville community was fighting against redevelopment plans that included a sky bridge over Clark Street, the diagonal thoroughfare in front of Wrigley Field. It would have connected high-priced restaurants, hotels and bars in the outdoor space around Wrigley Field, known as Gallagher Way, with glitzy, hip eateries and hotels across the street.
Small business owners argued the sky bridge would funnel foot traffic into the establishments of wealthy developers, and McKenna says her job was to get those small-time proprietors a seat at the table. The sky bridge was never constructed, and the experience taught McKenna how a community can “run alongside” huge economic drivers without letting deep-pocketed developers swallow up all opportunity around it.
“Without an organization leading that charge and championing the hyperlocal economy, it very well could have morphed into a redevelopment of all of Clark Street, or all of Wrigleyville looking like these brand new developments, like Gallagher Way, McGregor Square,” she says. “How do we use this unique identity of community to drive that economic engine that is sports without being run over by it?”
Feeling like she needed a change, McKenna left Wrigleyville and Chicago in late 2019. She had family in Denver and decided to move in two blocks from Coors Field.
During her time living in the Ballpark District, small business owners in the area had tried twice to form a business improvement district plan. A collective with representatives from the Rockies and small businesses, like Mexico City Restaurant and Lounge and Asterisk, argued that the city didn’t offer enough services to manage mounting challenges with violent crime, homelessness, litter, graffiti and declining sales, calling it a “doughnut hole of services” within the greater downtown area.
Bennito L. Kelty
The Ballpark District is one street east of the service area for the Downtown Development Authority, which takes on hefty projects like buying the 16th Street Pavilions and revitalizing Union Station. The district is too far west or south to benefit from improvement districts serving Five Points and RiNO, also.
In 2023, the Ballpark District had the city’s largest homeless encampment. More than 200 people lived in tents that engulfed the U.S. Post Office at 951 20th Street. That December, Mayor Mike Johnston ordered police to sweep the encampment to make strides in his promise to house 1,000 people before 2024.
Only a couple of months after Johnston’s sweeps, a Ballpark GID committee formed among the collective pushing for the improvement district. The committee hired Jamie Giellis, a former mayoral candidate who was key in forming the RiNO district, to get through the city GID formation process, launch the ambassador program and hire an executive director.
After gaining approval from Denver City Council and Ballpark voters in 2024, Geillis served as an interim director for the GID for its first six months. McKenna, still living up the street from Coors Field, was hired in June, with the new GID citing her time as a Ballpark resident and experience around a Major League Baseball stadium in Chicago.
“I like to think it was meant to be,” McKenna says. “Place management is already such a niche area to be working in, and then to also have Major League stadium experience, and then to also live across the street. Having that trifecta positioned me in a really special way to meet the need and see the opportunity here.”
Coors Field isn’t as old as Wrigley, the second-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, but it draws an average of nearly 30,000 fans per game. Despite only opening a few months per year, the two-million-plus people it attracts outdraws the Colorado Convention Center, according to McKenna.
“The mission at hand is amplifying the area…we want to be able to have it be amplified, to have it continue to be unique and organically growing, but you have to take charge of that or else you can be left behind or run over,” she says. “I saw Ballpark as part of this final frontier of development in downtown.”
Although overwhelming encampments haven’t returned to Ballpark, homelessness remains visible in the neighborhood, which is home to three shelters like the Denver Rescue Mission, the Samaritan House and St. Francis Center.
According to McKenna, the Ballpark GID has more homelessness than Wrigleyville. Around Wrigley, “there was definitely an unhoused population,” McKenna remembers, particularly around sections of the city’s elevated train that ran through Wrigleyville.
“It was definitely present,” McKenna says. “In Chicago, it’s maybe a little more hidden. It’s playing bucket drums, not necessarily standing on the corner with the sign.”
The Ballpark GID mostly interacts with homeless residents through ambassadors, who move them away from business entrances or wake them up off the sidewalk. McKenna says the GID has homeless residents in mind with everything it does.
“There are people that live here that don’t live in a home here,” McKenna says. “They’re a consideration in everything we do, and they’re also a population involved in how we inform things. In Chicago, that got lost.”
More Denver neighborhoods have been seeking a GID. Residents in Cherry Creek, including City Councilmember Amanda Sawyer, were eyeing one, but announced last week that they were dropping the effort because of opposition to the added property tax. Business owners and stakeholders on central Broadway, where businesses are leaving Denver as rent and others costs rise, are currently seeking a GID that will go to the ballot for a small number of eligible voters in November.
