Commentary: Neighborhood Builder
Developer Mickey Zeppelin brings a European reuse model to Taxi

Zeppelin’s Taxi II mixed-use development opened last year in an underused industrial area north of downtown.

By Linda Hardesty

Mickey Zeppelin is a Denver developer who has an eye for the next big thing.
He built lofts in LoDo when most people had no idea what a loft was. After Coors Field was completed and LoDo property values shot up, Zeppelin set his sights on the Golden Triangle neighborhood, which has since become a popular arts district.

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Now, his Zeppelin Development Co. is developing new phases of an 18-acre former Yellow Cab taxi headquarters in Denver’s River North or RiNo district an industrial tract northwest of downtown next to the Platte River. While it’s hard to imagine this grizzled strip of land becoming the city’s next hot mixed-use neighborhood, Zeppelin has a good track record of spotting an opportunity.

New Neighborhoods

“LoDo just had a character and a sense of history,” says Zeppelin, 70, a Denver native who graduated from the University of California Law School at Berkeley but found his true passion in real estate development. “At the time, I was looking at SoHo in New York. The Golden Triangle had proximity to downtown and cultural institutions. Also, prices were quite reasonable.”

In 2001 Zeppelin bought the River North property and renovated an old Yellow Cab taxi building into offices. That 29,000-sq-ft project, known as Taxi I, was completed in increments but is now fully leased and has been followed by Taxi II, a new $20-million, 106,000-sq-ft, mixed-use building that opened last year and now has 80% of its commercial spaces and 60% of its residences sold. High-profile industry tenants include BRS Architects, Alan Ford Architects, studioINSITE, Landworks Design, Demiurge Design and KL&A Engineers.

“The attraction was the river, which is really a major, overlooked amenity,” Zeppelin says. “Also, the location has the industrial grittiness that I saw originally in LoDo.”
Despite Taxi’s neighbors an RTD operations facility to the south, a ready-mix concrete plant to the north and train tracks to the west Zeppelin and his son Kyle compare the neighborhood’s character to successful projects in Europe.

“The Docklands in Amsterdam have influenced us the most,” says Kyle, 35, who, like his father, obtained a law degree and practiced real estate law for awhile, but then found the development business more alluring. Kyle has handled the construction project management and marketing of Taxi. “In Europe, out of necessity, they have to reuse neighborhoods,” he says. “The Docklands have emerged as a model for the whole world.”
The Zeppelins also adopted European-style, modernist architecture for Taxi.
“I think it’s different than anything else in the Denver market,” says architect Will Bruder of Will Bruder Architects, Phoenix. Bruder collaborated with several architects for the Taxi II project, including Aspen’s Harry Teague, David Baker of San Francisco and Alan Brown of Eldorado Springs-based Alan Brown Architects. It was constructed by Denver’s Mortenson on a design-build basis.

Nostalgic Infill

Taxi II won the 2007 Mayor’s Design Award in the category of Density by Design for being an infill project that advanced housing and employment density and was contextually sensitive to adjacent structures and landscape.

Taxi II is a long, narrow building in keeping with the linear feel of the Platte River and the train tracks. “Although the bright colors and bold shapes are certainly a departure from the drab, industrial structures in the vicinity, the neighborhood needs color and interesting architecture,” Kyle says.

Taxi combines modern style with nostalgia from the former Yellow Cab business. The old taxi car wash is still in place, as is a 350-ft-tall dispatcher’s radio tower. A new restaurant, Fuel Café, is located in the former taxicab repair shop. The Fuel Café bar is made from a plastic material the color of diesel fuel and lit from underneath by an LED light. The café has 18-ft ceilings and the original glass garage doors, which bring in lots of natural light and provide views of downtown.

The taxicab design elements are juxtaposed against the new Taxi II building, which uses a mishmash of materials and wild colors not often seen in Denver. The 550-ft-long structure has offices on the first two floors and residences on the third floor.

Of the 44 residential units, about half are 600-sq-ft, one-bedroom “crash pads” priced at $210,000. The other half are 1,200-sq-ft “double-wides” priced at $340,000. Kyle describes the residences as loft/condo hybrids. He says they have the high spaces and industrial chic of lofts but fulfill the kitchen and bath expectations of condos. The residences also offer some surprises such as built-in flat-screen TVs and soaking tubs.

“In a lot of other places, you see tract-home finishes in lofts, where buyers are having to come in and upgrade things,” Kyle says. “We’re kind of breaking the rules as to what the industry says you should or shouldn’t have at certain levels.”

The Zeppelins also strive to break the rules when it comes to construction practices. In keeping with the fun and functional aesthetic of the building, many of the finish materials are unique. The architects wanted to use “living materials” in and around the building, including unfinished materials such as steel panels that rust, plywood and dimensional lumber as finishes and exposed metal studs throughout. 

Rather than drywalling all of the walls, alternate materials such as wheatsheet a pressed board made of wheat stalls rather than wood acrylic and veralite clear plastic products were used.

“There are a lot of exposed finishes, which are challenging from a construction standpoint,” says Derek Cunz, with Mortenson. “You have to have more care and quality for your rough-in. What you see is what you get.”

Cunz says Mortenson used building information modeling for Taxi II and that the whole project was innovative in terms of new materials, construction methods and the collaboration among architects and the project team.

“It’s an incredible challenge any time you get so many new ideas in one place,” Cunz says. “I think everybody’s happy with the finished product, but it’s hard work to do new things.”

But Mickey Zeppelin says that the mixed-use Taxi development is just a further iteration of what he’s always done. “I’ve always started with a community as my basis and expanded from there, pulling people together to work and live. And I’ve always included art,” he says.

The Taxi project is also part of Zeppelin’s ongoing experiments in collaborative architecture and new construction techniques. As for Taxi II, he says, “It had its moments. But I think it was remarkably successful. The differences of opinion never became destructive.”

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