Steeling History

Historic building on city’s 16th Street Mall is being carefully restored

By Chryss Cada

Those involved in the resurrection of downtown Denver’s historic Steel Building, also known as the Fontius Building, remember the day it came back to life.

Photo by John Forney

“Once the terra cotta had been restored on the upper floors and they started putting in the new windows, you could see what the building had once been,” says Todd Piccone, project manager of the restoration for Milender White Construction Co. of Golden. Before the $13-million restoration, the dilapidated building on the 16th Street Mall at Welton Street with windows that dominate the facade and the east side of the building had been boarded up for decades. Its delicate terra cotta, now restored to its original white with gentle red and blue accents, had been blackened after years of absorbing carbon monoxide from downtown traffic. “It’s an exciting project to work on because it had been Denver’s biggest eyesore,” Piccone says. “It’s rewarding to bring it back to its original beauty.”

The four-story building opened in 1923 as a department store, but it survived only a couple of years. Among the many tenants through the years was Dupler Furs, which left its mark with a sign painted at the back of the building. The sign will remain on the renovated building. The Fontius shoe store, which occupied a corner of the bottom floor beginning in 1966, closed in 1989. The building has sat empty and deteriorating ever since.

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“I thought it was a shame that a building as important as this one is to Denver had received no attention for so long,” says Evan Makovsky, principal of Shames-Makovsky, the developer that bought the building and the other properties on Block 162, which is located along California and Welton Streets between the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center and the 16th Street Mall.

The architect on the Steel Building restoration, Denver’s klipp, is working with Makovsky on a master plan for the area, which is considered a key pedestrian link between the Colorado Convention Center and the 16th Street Mall.

“It’s important we do a quality job on this project because of its visibility on the mall,” Makovsky said. “It should set the tone for what the balance of the block could or should be.”

Keeping the Memory

The completed building will feature a facade that is 55% windows. The remainder will be covered by intricate terra-cotta panels, pillars and decorative elements. With help from drawings and blueprints from the archives of the Denver Public Library, the top three floors are being restored to match the original.

Photo by John Forney

One change is a 25- by 25-ft skylight that is being cut into the top two floors to “open it up and make it like the U-shaped buildings that were popular in the ‘20s,” says klipp project architect Maria Cole. “It’s an example of keeping the memory of the original building while interpreting it for today.”

The entire first floor will be klipp’s interpretation.

“The concrete frame skeleton of the building does all the work,” adds Brian Klipp, the project’s principal-in-charge. “Because the façade isn’t a load-bearing wall it can be decorative, determined by preference.

“It’s a great building that will strike people by how decorative, light and weightless it will appear,” he says.

Window Wizards

Much of the building’s ethereal quality comes from the windows on the façade and east wall of the building.

The ground-level windows are 15 ft tall by 20 ft wide. The 136 windows on the top three floors are 10 ft tall by 10 ft wide and pivot from the center.

“These windows were innovative for their time and now are truly unique,” Piccone says.

Golden general contractor Milender White hired Grabill Inc. of Almont, Mich., to re-create the original windows and make them energy efficient.

“We had drawings and the original hardware to work with, so we didn’t have to entirely reinvent the wheel,” says Greg Grabill. “At the same time we had to create a modern way of doing things.”

Because the windows lift up .75 in. in order to pivot open, Grabill had to devise a way to add weather stripping that would move as well.

“Between the transom and the window, we created a little teeter-totter to lift up the weather-strip bar independently,” Grabill says. “I think that idea is probably what helped us get the job.”

Grabill also had to figure out how to fit and lift double-paned windows with equipment designed to work with single panes.

“We came up with using ball bearings to help with the weight,” Grabill adds.

The windows are a point of pride for Makovsky.

“We were able to build windows that worked exactly the way they did in 1923 and meet all the current energy issues,” he says. “When everyone says it can’t be done, it makes me feel good when we do it.”

Builders also had to go back in time to replicate the building’s terra-cotta work. The upper floors were restored by Premier Specialty Contractors of Denver. The firm applied 4,000 patches on the facade alone.

Denver’s Barry Rose is molding 13 tons of clay the way craftsmen of the time period did to restore the terra-cotta exterior of the bottom floors of the Renaissance revival-style building.

“It’s an arcane, lost art,” says Rose, who is one of only a handful of artisans in the country who still works terra cotta by hand. “We don’t have a lot of history in Denver, so it’s gratifying to be a part of preserving a piece of it.”

Rose estimates that each piece of clay is handled 20 times during the process. First, he makes a mold slightly larger than the finished product will be (the clay shrinks about 8% during firing). Clay is then hand pressed into the mold “like toothpaste into a tube.” He takes it out of the mold, smoothes it, glazes it and then fires it at 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit.

In mid-May, Rose was celebrating his first delivery of about 60 of the 800 total pieces that will be used in the project.

“I laid out all the pieces the way they should be assembled,” he says. “It’s easier to take the time doing that than try to number them or draw it out-and it takes the guesswork out of what is basically a giant puzzle.”

Rather than the floral panels that originally adorned the top of the pillars on the bottom floor, klipp has designed panels depicting the solar system.

“Looking at the building as a whole, it will appear complete to the viewer,” Klipp says. “But when people take a closer look, they will be able to see the new. The new will have empathy to the old without replicating it.”

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