As Westword reported, designs will alter the direction that the theater's audience faces from south to north, and the stage’s opening from northward, as it is now, to south. Designs show the task will be accomplished by adding a new stage toward the center of the park so the amphitheater bowl functions in the reverse of the way it currently works.
The Greek Theater isn’t the only item changing; there will also be new garden spaces, a dedicated food truck promenade and a memorial to the disability activists of the Gang of 19 installed at Civic Center.
“We're thrilled that the design responds to the community feedback that they want to see more events, more programs and more daily activation in the future Civic Center Park,” Gordon Robertson, director of park planning, design and construction for Denver Parks & Recreation, said at an October 29 event unveiling the plans. “We have worked closely with event organizers and performers to create a design that reflects the diversity of community programming that we plan to host on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.”
City officials and the Civic Center Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to programming activities in the park, have been developing the Civic Center Next 100 plan since 2021, but October 29 was the first time official designs were made public.
The updated park designs came from Studio Gang architects and local expert Studiotrope, which designed Levitt Pavilion and many of the new Central Library upgrades. On the landscaping side, OLIN from Philadelphia and Mundus Bishop, a local firm helmed by Tina Bishop, who wrote the Civic Center design guidelines, weighed in.
According to the planning group, the next version of the park is designed for more individual, daily use rather than the current status of the park, which is best known for hosting large events like Denver PrideFest, the annual 4/20 celebration, sports championship parades and Denver’s Cinco de Mayo Festival. To accomplish this, the design team is spreading park features across a broader area.
As Studio Gang’s Juliane Wolf described at the meeting, when Civic Center was first conceived in the early 1900s, the east-west pathway was a focus, as the park flowed from the State Capitol toward where the City and County Building sits. But now the north-south path needs more attention, as the park serves as a gateway from the Golden Triangle neighborhood and cultural districts to the city center, with the Central Library and Denver Art Museum to the south and downtown Denver to the north.
Many of the improvements will make the north-south path more welcoming for park users, starting with updates to the Greek Theater.
Designs to Reorient Civic Center's Greek Theater
Wolf said the design team wanted to make the space more useable for events that serve 1,000 people or fewer and more cost-effective for community groups using the space by placing dedicated audiovisual infrastructure in the park. But because the current orientation of the amphitheater requires the audience to face south, the sun is often in people’s eyes, when a typical theater situation would have lights shining at the performers instead of the audience. “All of these things led us to maybe think a little bit outside of the box,” Wolf said. “We had this amazing 'eureka' moment, which was that if we just take the stage and put it on the other side of the bowl, there are so many amazing things that happen, and these challenges that I was speaking of can be solved.”
Plans call for a new stage to be constructed opposite the current theater stage, with an arched cover over the new stage. Wolf described the new archway as a “sibling” to the amphitheater. (Although the structure around the amphitheater bowl is a historic landmark, the bowl of the theater was rebuilt in 2004 and is no longer considered historic, so adding seats and altering its orientation is allowed.)
The arch over the new stage will be made mostly of steel, but Studio Gang is still working out what material could be used between the steel beams to allow some light to pass through the structure.
New seats are also part of the design, which will be built out in a radial pattern with natural seating sections that can be opened or closed depending on the size of an event. Visitors will also be able to sit inside the historic colonnade walls of the amphitheater.
“It was also important to us to really find good use for that space, because right now it is really not fully utilized,” Wolf said.
During events like Civic Center EATS, the seating can be used by those who have grabbed lunch. Additionally, the new stage area can be used for yoga classes or activations other than just musical performances.
Every seat in the amphitheater bowl will be wheelchair-accessible, with appropriately sloped pathways around the outer edge of the amphitheater and the main seating bowl. Those paths will connect through to the southern plaza, something that currently is not possible for those who use wheelchairs.
The southern plaza of the amphitheater near East 14th Avenue will get a facelift, too. A memorial will be created in honor of the Gang of 19, disability activists led by Reverend William Blake who ditched their wheelchairs and crawled onto then-inaccessible RTD buses at the Colfax and Broadway bus stop to show the inequity of Denver’s public transit system in 1978. Their demonstration caused RTD to become the first mass transit system in the nation to be fully wheelchair-accessible and helped spur the Americans With Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990.
The memorial will include a large central feature bearing the words “we will ride,” as well as seating, trees and other information about the Gang of 19.
Denver City Councilman Chris Hinds, a member of the disability community who represents the Civic Center area, said the current plaque honoring the Gang of 19 at the Colfax and Broadway intersection is easy to miss, so he’s excited for “a better way, and a more obvious way, to celebrate Denver's prominence on the national stage of the disability rights movement.”
During the question-and-answer portion of the evening, a Denver tour guide asked city officials why they decided to put the memorial away from the part of the park closest to the actual events of the Gang of 19. Trevor Lee of OLIN said the design team looked at several locations, but the most visible is the southern plaza because it is a gateway to the park.
The city received a $1.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to help create the memorial, according to Parks & Rec downtown parks program manager Jenna Harris, who said the protest was momentous enough to merit a “constellation of places” to honor its history.
New Gardens, Food Truck Parkway Coming to Civic Center
Aside from the amphitheater and the space directly around it, the north-south promenade across the park will be revamped, as will several other park amenities. As Lee pointed out, the promenade is currently one of the only activated spaces in the park, and that causes crowding in one area while much of Civic Center’s square footage is underutilized.“Garden rooms” on the east and west sides of the promenade will reorient current planting plots, which are now only on the west side of the promenade. Additionally, a new public garden walk will be placed on the southwest side of the park between the Greek Theater and the City and County Building. Both spaces will be planted with year-round or perennial foliage.
“The gardens today are really successful, but they're not accessible,” Lee said. “You can't walk around them. You can't walk through them. You can only see them from the promenade.”
The city will also build a new food truck strip, coming off the southeast corner of the McNichols Building and extending south with electrical and water hookups so the main pedestrian promenade won’t be interrupted when food trucks descend on the park. As a result, the main walkway will get new paving and more furniture and plants along the route to break up the expanse of concrete that exists now.
“This is a smaller, more intimate width of the promenade, but it connects all these key features together,” Lee said. “It's a very different walking experience. … It's a very improved experience on the promenade than what it is today.”
Construction was originally slated to begin this year but was postponed until 2025 because design and construction details weren’t fully worked out. At the meeting, Harris said construction is now projected to start in September 2025 and last through early 2027, with a budget of $15 million. Several community members, including a founder of the Center on Colfax, which runs Denver’s PrideFest, asked what will happen to park access during construction. Harris said the park will not be completely closed and that the parks department plans to work with those who typically have large events to figure out possible relocations if space isn’t available.
“I will just be honest that there are trade-offs,” Harris said. “Keeping more pieces open and accessible could potentially delay the construction schedule or increase costs, so those are the kinds of decisions that we're working through with the contractor right now. But we are very sensitive to the subject of construction downtown and are looking at it quite closely.”
The city also teased a playground space in collaboration with the library on library property across from the park as part of a separate project.
Because Civic Center Park is a landmark, plans must be approved by the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission this fall. So although the designs are mostly finished, some aspects could still change, according to Wolf.
“We have been working closely with Landmark, with Historic Denver, to make sure that any design that we are adding to the space is really working well together with the historic architecture that's there,” Wolf said. “That process is still ongoing, so today we are giving you an in-progress update, but it's not the final design yet.”
