As 16th Street Mall inches closer to finishing its lengthy and expensive renovation, Denver is rethinking every aspect around the identity of downtown’s famous attraction — including its name.

The Downtown Denver Partnership, under contract with the city, sent out a request in April asking marketing agencies to create a brand proposal for the pedestrian mall to roll out with the planned reopening in 2025.

And one clause in the request also mentioned looking into the name of the mall.

“There is a need for a fresh brand identity — including the exploration of name — that reflects the evolving character of the mile-long public space as we look toward the reconstruction’s completion, while preserving its rich heritage,” according to the request.

A City Cast Denver podcast episode released June 25 mentioned Downtown Denver Partnership officials were discussing deemphasizing, or dropping “mall,” from 16th Street Mall.

When asked by The Denver Gazette, Downtown Denver Partnership’s Director of Marketing and Communications Britt Diehl said the organization has made no official decisions on whether it will rename the 1.2 mile-long corridor.

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But as construction wraps up, and the first blocks begin to open, downtown leaders are considering it. 

“With this moment in time, and significant investment, we can’t leave any paper unturned,” Diehl said.

The street’s several names

The 16th Street Mall’s first name in Denver’s earliest days was “G Street” before the city switched to its numbered grid system still used today.

While Denver’s founder William Larimer planned for the road named after him to act as downtown’s main corridor, 16th Street became more popular during the department store boom of the 1900s. National chains came to the area as well as movie theaters — becoming the commercial and entertainment heart of the city. As cars grew to be a staple of daily life, traffic increasingly clogged downtown’s streets.

The Regional Transportation District enlisted the architect firm led by I.M. Pei, the designer of the glass Louvre Pyramid in Paris, to turn 16th Street into a pedestrian mall with a shuttle bus going across to transit hubs on both ends of the 13-block stretch to ease downtown congestion.

The transformation in 1982 originally debuted as the “16th Street Transitway Mall.”

That name never stuck.

“It was clunky. The word transitway, nobody’s gonna say transitway,” said Mark Barnhouse, historian and author of Images of America: Denver’s Sixteenth Street. ”But mall, everybody knows that word.”

The name “mall” first meant a walkway lined with trees long before it became synonymous with America’s golden era of shopping centers during the 1970s and 1980s, Barnhouse said.

The term started to fall out of fashion in the 1990s as consumer shopping habits changed and malls struggled to adapt to the rise of Walmart, Target and eventually Amazon.

“When they built the original 16th Street Mall, nobody ever envisioned that there wouldn’t be department stores on it,” Barnhouse said. “They just assumed that department stores, they’d been there for 100 years, they’d still be there.”

But even if times change, names stick around.

One nearby example is the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, Barnhouse explained. Locals still call it Cherry Creek Mall despite it not being its name.

“They can take it [mall] off if they want to, but nobody’s going to stop calling it that.” Barnhouse said. “This is human nature.”

Attention from global marketing agencies

The 16th Street Mall never really had any official branding or visual identity until signs to help navigate people around the construction popped up, Diehl said.

“The construction brand that you see out in the world right now on the construction fences,” she said. “That’s kind of the first time that we really had a brand for 16th Street.”

The mall began its $172.5 million construction project in spring 2022 and is set to fully reopen in 2025, a year later than planned and millions of dollars more expensive.

The reconstruction project aims to fix deteriorating infrastructure, expand pedestrian walkways, add more greenery and move RTD’s shuttle buses to the center of the road.

Businesses along 16th Street Mall struggled or closed due to the delayed construction as downtown is still recovering from the pandemic surge in office vacancies and a drop in foot traffic.

Now there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel. The first block between Larimer and Lawrence streets reopened last month — with some businesses already seeing a boost in foot traffic — and more blocks are set to have barricades come down leading up to the grand reopening.

As the renderings of the project are coming to life, so is the question of what will 16th Street Mall’s identity be after the arduous construction is finished?

The request asked marketing agencies to develop a logo, color palette and messaging around the newly-refreshed mall within a $100,000 budget.

The downtown organization received 31 proposals by the end of April from “best in class” agencies around the world, Diehl said, a signal for them that the 16th Street Mall is still attracting global attention.

The partnership narrowed it down to seven finalists and could select an agency by August.

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Many of the proposals recognize how Denver’s 16th Street Mall project and ambitions to turn the surrounding area into a “Central Neighborhood District” is a case study of a time when downtown’ identities are struggling, Diehl said.

Some of the finalists mention adjustments to the mall’s name, but none propose it as a certainty.

“All of our finalists very much understand what it means to think about the name of a place,” she said, “And it’s something that we certainly don’t take lightly.”