The market may have cooled down, but the changes have been immense in some parts of town.
As you drive along Brighton Boulevard, it's almost impossible to believe that Denver entered this millennium without RiNo. The area heading out of LoDo past Coors Field to Interstate 70 was generally referred to as the old warehouse district or the train yards or sometimes Upper Larimer — though technically, city maps labeled everything to the Platte River as simply an extension of the official Five Points neighborhood.
Then in 2003, the city issued its River North Plan, covering the area "northeast of downtown Denver between Park Avenue West and Interstate 70 and its interchange with Brighton Boulevard," an area "with enormous potential to create a unique community that will take its position among Denver’s great places." The boundaries included the old Denargo Market, empty lots and industrial warehouses, as well as some art spaces claimed by savvy creatives who'd already established studios in storefronts and other old buildings.
Chief among them were artists Tracy Weil and Jill Hadley Hooper, who took note of the River North plan. "It helped put us on the map," Weil remembers, but there was a River North in Chicago, and they thought the neighborhood could use a better nickname. RiNo, maybe. "We went with a standard acronym," he recalls. "There wasn't any brain damage."
But there was a real opportunity to brand the area with an animal. The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District had found great success with a polar bear, so why not a rhino? "How cool would that be?" Weil remembers thinking. After all, a rhino was kind of like the area itself back then: gritty, rough around the edges.
RiNo Art District
The district planned the first studio tour of artists working in RiNo in January 2006, "and all of a sudden, traffic on the website was going crazy," Weil says. That wasn't because Denver's RiNo had suddenly become as popular as it is today, though. No, a prominent writer on the East Coast had done a story on Republicans in Name Only, and linked to the RiNo Art District site. The writer fixed the link...and started promoting actual RiNo events.
And there were plenty of them, because over the years, RiNo leaders have just gotten more savvy. Even as the RiNo Art District celebrated its tenth anniversary, the founders were already setting up a Business Improvement District to continue improving the area while still "keeping RiNo wild." With well-heeled developers now laying claim to so much of the land that was once occupied by on-the-cheap entrepreneurs, and businesses blurring boundaries by using the RiNo name on places far from the original area, that was not an easy task.
The monolithic apartment complexes going up along Brighton Boulevard and other parts of the neighborhood soon overshadowed its artistic origins, even with all those murals.
As the area grew, so did its organizational challenges. For a decade, the RiNo Art District (RAD) and the BID shared leadership. But when the BID came up for renewal last November, the fight got ugly. Finally, the board voted to renew the BID for the next ten years, maintaining a maximum allowed mill levy rate of 4 mills, to be evaluated for potential adjustment annually. That proposal will go before Denver City Council tonight, May 19, for approval.
In the meantime, the co-executive directors of the RiNo BID and RAD both left; the BID board evaluated its operations and decided to hire its own leadership and keep management separate from that of the RiNo Art District, while still supporting its creative endeavors. A search is currently underway for a new BID director; Jamie Giellis, who was head of the RiNo Art District when it first pushed for a BID, is leading that search.
And Weil, who sold his RiNo property and is currently growing tomatoes and making art up near Pine, is back helping the RiNo Art District charge ahead through a very changing landscape. Still, as he said more than a decade ago, "Who doesn't love a rhino?"
This story has been updated from a 2017 column.
