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The winner will be selected tomorrow. Here is an Opinion Editorial...

Editorial: An update, not a major makeover
Union Station is best served by embracing its core function rather than mixing in a 130-room hotel.
By The Denver Post -- Posted: 11/21/2011 01:00:00 AM MST

Denver's Union Station is due for a remarkable facelift that will help it serve the region as well — or better — in coming decades as during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After looking at competing plans that envision the station as the hub of the multibillion-dollar FasTracks regional transit system, the question for those deciding its fate is simple: Does it need a nip and a tuck or major surgery?

Our view is that the patient is not in need of an extreme makeover and that the $22 million plan to activate the building presented by the Union Station Neighborhood Co. is the most sensible moving forward.

The Union Station Alliance, led by Sage Hospitality, has developed a competing, $48 million plan that is centered around building a 130-room hotel within the existing building.

Regional Transportation District​ staffers on Tuesday are expected to select one of the proposals and then negotiate with the developer in order to bring a plan to the RTD board for final approval early next year.

Each of the teams drew some of the city's boldest thinkers. Both can point to numerous projects that are civic treasures here and elsewhere.

But the Union Station Neighborhood plan impresses us for its ability to improve the building for its primary use while keeping it nimble enough to change as circumstances warrant. It enlivens but does little to encroach upon the great train room, keeping it as the centerpiece of a building designed for transit riders. Among other improvements, the plan includes a market/food emporium in the south wing, a destination restaurant for the north wing and would turn the upper floors into offices billed as incubators for the creative class.

Having looked at the details, it's fair to say the plan understands the building's bone structure and promises little trauma.

Sage Hospitality and other players on the Alliance team have developed wonderful projects in Denver and elsewhere. Theirs would be a great plan if the building needed to be adapted for a new purpose. It doesn't.

Much like the other proposal, it envisions restaurant and retail space in the north and south wings. But construction of a mezzanine level stretching across the building's western wall and the addition of rooms to the current attic, we believe, are too drastic for a historic gem that needs to be polished, not chiseled.

It has financial advantages, but not enough to dissuade us from thinking that the most important issue is development of a station to best serve riders on the buses that currently use Market Street Station and passengers on commuter rail and Amtrak trains.

Union Station Neighborhood Co., which is the master developer for the entire area surrounding the station, understands the mass of travelers who will be moving through the area in coming years — as many as 103,000 travelers per day, or 200,000 trips, by 2030.

It will be a busy place.

Union Station can be a great train station or a great hotel.

It's difficult to see it being both.



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