When the 1910 McNichols Building reopens next week week, it’ll be ready for just about anything 2016 might throw its way. It’s part formal meeting space, part party palace. It’s an art gallery and a performing arts theater; a banquet hall that can host weddings and elegant galas, but also a lecture hall where politicians could debate issues or community groups could assemble for rallies.
It is, as guests at the public celebration Thursday night will see, massive at 33,000 square feet, nearly all of it wide open and unprogrammed. The city’s Art & Venues department, which operates the place, is leaving it up to the folks who will use it — curators and choreographers, event planners, conventioneers and social activists — to figure out its full potential. The building rents out its spaces for below-market rates.
That’s a loose approach for Arts & Venues, which carefully controls activities at its other facilities, such as Red Rocks Amphitheater and the Colorado Convention Center, honing them into busy profit centers for the city. Those buildings are “revenue makers,” according to Cultural Affairs Director Tariana Navas-Nieves, and, in a sense, subsidize McNichols. “This building allows us to give back,” she said.
That’s an appropriate turn for McNichol’s, the neo-classical wonder in Denver’s Civic Center, which started out as a Carnegie Library. Legendary philanthropist and literacy advocate Andrew Carnegie, funded thousands of libraries across the U.S. in the early 20th century, enabling the construction of public amenities meant to encourage learning and bring people together.
Denver’s library, designed by Albert Randolph Ross, was perhaps the most fanciful in the nation, a stately, symmetrical edifice with a row of imposing Corinthian columns along its exterior and a massive atrium on the inside, and with stacks of books set on glass floors. The ceiling was glass,too, and there was a graceful and refined grand stair that invited visitors to veer off Colfax Avenue and up to its second-floor main entrance.
Its architectural opulence nearly came to ruin in the 1950s when the library, needing more space and a modern conveniences, moved down the street and the city converted it into an office building for the water department, knocking off the famous stair, filling in windows with concrete blocks, covering over tile floors and adding clunky bathrooms and fire exits. The place was named after former Mayor William McNichols, Jr., which probably seemed like a compliment at the time.
“It went from being a temple of books to being a warehouse of people,” said architect Dennis Humphries, who oversaw the recent renovation.
The city moved most of its business elsewhere in the 1990s as it developed updated properties to house office functions. The McNichols Building sat largely neglected for a decade-plus. “The place was dormant for so long, it became invisible,” said Naves-Nieves.
The city has used the space in informal ways in the past few years, but the job of resurrecting it fully fell to Humphries Poli Architects, a landmark Denver design firm experienced in the civic realm and known for its sensitive touch with historic structures.
The firm determined the possibilities for a McNichols rebirth but also some limitations. Among them was the fact that recreating the sweeping, signature exterior staircase to the second floor — originally a centerpiece of the renovation plan and a goal of local preservationists for decades — couldn’t happen.
The problem, if you can call it that, was handicapped accessibility. Today’s buildings need to be open to all and that would have required adding wheelchair ramps that would interfere with the aesthetics while being so long and unwieldy that people needing special access wouldn’t use them anyway.
That knocked the designers down but not out. They looked around — at the rest of manicured Civic Center, at the street, at the groups who would use the building — and came up with a new solution: A rounded, sunken entrance way that has six shorts steps down to the first-floor door set just below ground level. That is surrounded by two, graceful, curved ramps that reach up, like open arms, toward the street.
Humphries calls it “the gesture” and its a meaningful one. The ramps are inviting and functional for both the able-bodied and the physically challenged — no separate entrances for this public building. Plus, the new entrance doubles as an outdoor amphitheater that can seat hundreds for whatever — dance concerts, free Shakespeare in the park, a pre-event welcoming space for dress-up fundraisers, all of that could work.
The entrance’s shape reflects the curves of the adjacent and handsome Voorhies Memorial gate, added to the park in1922 (by architects Fisher and Fisher) and incorporates the McNichols Building more organically into Civic Center as a whole.
As for the old front doors one story up, they were replaced, in detail in their original wood, and they open to a small balcony with a glass railing that is a perfect forum for a party host to hover above the crowd offering a toast, or for a mayor to address the assembled throngs.
Humphries Poli took that strategy of honoring the building’s past while making it useable for today into the interior. They removed bathrooms that had been lodged under interior staircases during the 1950s renovation and exposed the ornate steps and wrought iron handrails of the original structure. They refurbished the coffered, plaster ceiling above the third floor.
The building is a mix of modern and traditional. There’s a new freight elevator that will allow large-scale pieces of art to be installed and there are sleek glass walls separating the exposed stairs from the exhibition halls; a move that makes the stairs effective fire escapes while giving the place an contemporary edge.
But Humphries Poli kept a balance. Ducts and pipes and brick walls remain exposed in much of the structure. Visitors can see its engineering as well as its history by looking at the raw steel columns in the middle of rooms, or places along the exterior walls where some the original windows were filled in.
There are plans, in some future phase of renovation, to open those windows up and, perhaps, even to uncover the great glass ceiling that made the building such a marvel in when it opened a century ago.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of space for civic enjoyment. Arts & Venues makes the building widely available for public events of all sizes and it is large enough that several can go on simultaneously. While anyone can rent it for private functions, the department makes sure that 50 percent of its renters are local cultural groups and it subsidizes their efforts with things like security and in-house equipment.
How McNichols shapes up in Denver’s cultural scene remains to be seen. Naves-Nieves isn’t painting too clear of a picture. She wants the creative community to come in, take a look around and imagine what might happen there. The city’s other venues, like the Buell Theater and the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, can be predictable places, but McNichols, she hopes, “will a place like no other.”
The Party
The McNichols Building will host a public grand opening celebration on Thursday, Sept. 15, starting at 5:30 p.m. The event features food, drink, surprise entertainment offerings and prize giveaways. Tickets are $10 and available through AXS.com.