Article By David Lewis. Published in CoBizMag.com on May 31, 2010
Anybody who has lived around the Denver area has “Cherry Creek” coming out of their ears.
Hereabouts we boast a Cherry Creek school district, state park, arts
festival, marina, hotel, newspaper, florist and biking and hiking path,
not to mention an actual creek.
This is only appropriate because Cherry Creek was where our
forebears first struck gold and first went broke, thus establishing the
pattern for Colorado business from then on.
Yet we must admit that amid all these historical associations the
word that most readily springs to mind when one thinks “Cherry Creek” is “shopping,” as in “shopping center” and “shopping district.”
This association has been Denver history, too, ever since Temple
Hoyne Buell after World War II designed and developed the earlier
incarnation of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. Buell thereby is said
to have invented the modern shopping center, that is, a connected
series of shops featuring a walkway, surrounded by acres of parking.
This invention in the view of some puts Buell high among the ranks
of great American inventors. America without the shopping mall:
imaginable?
Last year, the Cherry Creek North Business Improvement District completed its sale of $18.5 million in district bonds for the
neighborhood’s first big makeover in two decades. This spring, workers
for contractor Weitz & Co. have begun the first phase of the
project’s new and attractive signs, upgraded pedestrian lighting and
improved intersections. Later the project will add high-tech,
pay-by-phone parking meters. And the city plans to repave the streets.
Maybe it’s just spring, but Cherry Creek people seem … optimistic.
Based on the plans he’s seen, “Oh, it should be spectacular,” says
Wayne New, Cherry Creek North Neighborhood Association president. “It’s
a very impressive project and well overdue. All our residents are
excited about it.”
“All the residents” means about 1,900 households, which jibes with
the latest U.S. Census data, which unfortunately dates from 2000.
Nevertheless, back then the Census counted 5,028 people living in 3,198
households in Cherry Creek, including the Cherry Creek East
neighborhood; its households’ mean household income came to $95,236.93,
or about $121,000 in 2010 dollars, and the average home price was
$692,764.00, or about $883,700 in 2010 dollars.
On both the residential and commercial sides, Cherry Creek benefits
even in bad times from its relative wealth, but of course the
neighborhood has seen some turmoil, too.
Over on the development side, Roy Kline and his Western Development
Group partners Christian Anschutz and David Steel have transformed a
prime block of Cherry Creek North into NorthCreek, an ambitious
mixed-use development that features ultra-chic retail and tower
penthouses. NorthCreek also fronts the daunting Fillmore Plaza, one of
the most over-planned and under-used blocks in Colorado.
How are the residences selling in this climate?
“Slower than we would like, but I think everybody including us has
seen a real uptick in traffic this year, so we are cautiously
optimistic. Really, business is a trickle, and that’s a good thing,”
Kline says.
For residential, “Even with the economy being what it is – and we’ve
had a lot of houses for sale here like everywhere else – we’ve see a
lot of sales occurring now, a lot of new people coming into the
neighborhood and a lot of improvement,” New says.
New can’t help but enthuse: “I’ve had calls from people from out of
the country who have researched Denver and think that Cherry Creek is
the place to live. It has that wonderful balance between in-town living
and having the adjacency to a wonderful business district that has
restaurants and unique boutique shops, small businesses as well as
access to one of the top shopping centers in the country – Cherry Creek
Shopping Center is ranked No. 3 in the whole country – so our residents
just love the quality of life.”
Scott Franklund, Realtor with Fuller Sothebys International Realty,
says New has hit on a major force driving the upscale residential real
estate market now: downsizing.
Yes, the new up is down.
Pre-recession, “You would want to have one to two acres and build a
big 10,000-square-foot home on a pond and an estate lawn. Now, the big,
grand estate homes have become the white elephants. New buyers now want
the new urbanism: They want close-in lot lines; they want to be close
to all the amenities, food, coffee shops, shopping, and have everything
very close to them and still have their own lot, their own garage,
their own entry, and their own deeded piece of land, so Cherry Creek is
very, very appropriate in America right now.”
Franklund represents the 7,066-square-foot Marquis Estate of Cherry Creek, as of this writing for sale for $4,695,000, and on the market
since January. As of mid-May he said he had four serious prospective
buyers. But each had the same problem lots of less well-fixed
homeowners have: They’re all still trying to sell their existing houses.
Mickey Zeppelin, meanwhile, revitalized LoDo, and he would like to
do something similar with Cherry Creek East and his greenHOUSE
apartments’ second phase. The greenHOUSE saga stands out even in the
pages of Zeppelin’s storied swathe through Denver development.
In 1983, Zeppelin began assembling the square block bounded by South
Harrison Street and South Jackson Street, and East Alameda Avenue and
East Cedar Avenue. The neighborhood then was occupied by greenhouses
and post-World War II Burns Better-Built Bungalows, named for their
developer, Franklin Burns, the namesake of the University of Denver’s
Franklin L. Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management.
(Examples of both greenhouses and bungalows abound in today’s Cherry
Creek East, too.)
Zeppelin bought the property and had it rezoned as a 300-unit
planned unit development with the help of Robert Stern of New
York-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects.
Then, “as you will recall, sometime in the mid-‘80s the world came apart,” Zeppelin recalls.
Ready to close on some of the block, and with the rest under
contract, “the bank that was carrying the land went broke, we were not
able to make our payments,” and the land fell into receivership and the
hands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Co.
“When we were all finished, then actually in addition to everything else Franklin Burns sued us,” Zeppelin recalls.
Then another couple of Denver business legends, Quark Inc. founder Tim Gill and CEO Fred Ebrahimi, bought most of the greenHOUSE block from the FDIC.
Zeppelin reacquired much of the block from Gill and Ebrahimi, and slowly reassembled all of it but for a couple of lots.
Now, he’s planning the greenHOUSE phase No. 2 of perhaps 160 units.
The new greenHOUSE is to integrate with the existing greenHOUSE
apartments, and Zeppelin says it will incorporate two of his favorite
community-oriented amenities, a café and an early childhood center.
Including a childcare center meant changing the project’s status from an old-style PUD
to conform to Denver’s new zoning code. That meant more trademark
Zeppelin drama, in this case a 47 to 45 vote in February in favor of
the change by the Cherry Creek East Association.
Part of Zeppelin’s fondness for the inclusion of a child center and
such stems from a true insight: that, just as it did in the day of
Franklin Burns and Temple Hoyne Buell, Cherry Creek East remains the
‘burbs.
“Even though you’re in the midst of Cherry Creek the tendency is not
to feel very urban and part of the bigger
whole,” Zeppelin says. “This
is an incredibly urban area that in my opinion still is a little too
suburban.”