DENVER | A stroll around the Lowry neighborhood on a typical Saturday night will offer any culture seeker plenty of options.
Off Quebec Street, the Lowry Town Center features a mix of independent restaurants, fast food joints and medical offices. Nearby, the Soiled Dove Underground music club hosts a regular mix of local and national acts; the stage at the John Hand Theatre on the Colorado Free University campus features productions 10 months out of the year. The summer months bring a host of outdoor events that include farmer’s markets, wine festivals and live bands.
Off Rampart Way, the raised B-52B Stratofortress in front of the Wings Over the Rockies museum stands as a symbol of the neighborhood’s past and future. Next door to the museum, the historic Hangar 2 hosts a yoga and spin studio, as well as an independent coffee shop. Construction has started on a rooftop solar garden on the former airplane hangar. Since it opened in 2012, the nearby Lowry Beer Garden has turned into a constantly crowded meeting spot for a neighborhood that includes modest apartment buildings, upscale condos and homes worth millions of dollars.
That’s quite a different scene from what the neighborhood looked like 15 years ago.
The Lowry Air Force Base had officially shut down in 1994, and Jim Hartman was part of the crew assigned to formalize plans for its redevelopment in the years following the closure. Housing, office space, restaurants — all of these were cornerstones in the plans for Lowry’s reinvention. But thoughts of chic eateries, sleek condos and hip offices took a backseat to worries about basic safety during those early tours around abandoned airplane hangars and empty administration buildings.
“You had to look over your shoulder to make sure you weren’t going to get mugged,” said Hartman, a manager with the Hartman Ely Investments company. “It was bad, pretty dismal.”
Fast forward to 2013. A modest cultural scene is taking root in this former military outpost that now hosts a population of more than 25,000, and it’s only set to grow in the coming year. Groups like the Lowry Foundation, the Lowry Redevelopment Authority and community associations have worked to build a viable cultural scene in the neighborhood, and developers have been happy to oblige.
Immediate plans for the area around Hangar 2 – the 11,000-square-foot building that went up on the Air Force base in the 1930s – include a new dining district. According to development officials, a number of high-profile restaurants are set to open by next year. A pair of brand new buildings in front of the hangar will host up to four restaurants, eateries designed to complement existing businesses like the nearby Beer Garden and Serioz Pizza in the Lowry Town Center.
“At this point, it looks like we will have a casual sit-down Italian restaurant with wood-fired pizzas,” said Pat McHenry, a partner with the investment company Larimer Associates. “We’re also hoping to offer a fine dining component.”
McHenry said the leases haven’t been finalized, but she said the restaurants are slated to open in late 2014. They’ll follow the success of the Lowry Beer Garden, a business that’s drawn customers with its open-air structure and friendly, casual ambience.
“The community support for that business has been tremendous. It really is operating the way that we hoped in that it’s really drawn people from the neighborhood,” McHenry said. “We want to bring in people from surrounding neighborhoods, from Hilltop and Park Hill and Aurora as well.”
Along with the new parks, shops and other cultural facilities that are set to arrive with the development of the 70-acre Buckley annex off Quebec Street, developers and residents alike are hoping to make Lowry more than livable. Underlying all of these ambitious plans is a push to make the former military base a place with enough culture and refinement to pull in visitors from surrounding neighborhoods.
“I always look personally at Denver and Aurora being sister cities,” Hartman said. “I don’t really draw a line between the two. It’s really just one urban area. This is for citizens of both cities.”
The neighborhood’s position on the border between two major metro area population centers has worked to its advantage. In less than 20 years, the neighborhood has pulled in visitors and residents from both the east and the west.
“I think it’s become a really big destination,” said Chuck Woodward, a Lowry resident who first moved to the area in the late 1990s. “People find out about it because they work here. It seems like they go out on weekends and bring friends back here.”
That’s quite the contrast to the early days of the neighborhood, when the only cultural offerings were the Wings Over the Rockies Museum and a newly constructed library. While the museum (with attractions that include an X-Wing ship from the “Star Wars” film franchise as well as dozens of military planes) and the library remain important parts of the neighborhood, the past decade has seen the addition of sorely needed businesses and attractions.
“They had to start from scratch. There weren’t any restaurants,” said Woodward, who now sits on the Lowry Foundation Board. “It was hard to get out and walk back then. There wasn’t anything to go to.”
There’s been a more subtle transformation as well. Now, residents like Woodward no longer have to worry about looking over their shoulder when they walk to a nearby restaurant, theater or rock club.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com