What’s up with the downtown Denver trees covered in crochet? | News | denvergazette.com

Denver developer Urban Villages commissioned a group of artists to “yarn bomb” trees with little crocheted sweaters along the Sugar Block to help activate the area in LoDo. (Stephen Swofford, Denver Gazette)

On a block in Lower Downtown Denver, developers are hoping passersby stop and smell the yarn roses.

The trees around 16th Street Mall, Market Street, and Wazee Street, also known as the Sugar Block, are wrapped with little crochet sweaters around their trunks.

The botanic outfits come in a variety of colors: mustard yellow, Barbie pink, royal purple, or sienna. And they're embellished with yarn flowers and vines wrapped around the trunks, extending out onto the gates around the tree.

Urban Villages — the Denver-based development firm behind the aspen tree-inspired Populus Hotel and Larimer Square’s former owners — commissioned a group of local “yarn bombing” artists to crochet outfits for the trees around the development on the Sugar Block.

In a recovering downtown struggling with high office vacancies, the development firm’s placemaking manager said it aims to stimulate LoDo with a splash of color and inspire other landlords nearby to do the same.

“Art is one of the best conduits for people to return to places and kind of rediscover them,” said Henry Watson, Urban Village’s placemaking and development manager.

The firm has leaned on the natural environment and art as a core part of its mission to reactivate parts of downtown. Its most famous example is the carbon-positive Populus Hotel near Civic Center Park set to open this summer.

Urban Villages acquired the former headquarters of the Great Western Sugar Company in LoDo in 2004 and the two parking lots next to it. It renovated the historic site and built a mixed-use tower called the SugarCube and a glass-steel office building known as the SugarSquare, which was the final phase of the development completed in 2019.

Now, Watson said, the firm is working on turning the Sugar Block into a sweet spot for people to visit for happy hours or game nights at Coors Field.

The sweaters were created by the Ladies Fancywork Society, a group of four friends working together for more than 17 years. The friends have had their yarn work featured in Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver and on top of various buildings across Colorado.

Each member of the Ladies Fancywork Society — Lauren Seip, Tymla Welch, Jesse Dawson, and Jess Eaton — designed and crocheted their own tree sweaters.

They measured the trees, calculated the square footage, and picked out the colors from their vast collection of yarn.

“We really like colors that when you look away, you kind of still see them in your eyeballs, like they're imprinted in there,” Siep told The Denver Gazette.

A Ladies Fancywork Society member assembles a crochet sweater over one of the trees in Lower Downtown for a spring art installation meant to help boost vibrancy on the Sugar Block.

Then the group mixed and matched so there was little evidence each sweater was done by a different person, making it look more cohesive, she explained,

The display was originally meant for the holiday season, Siep said, but that didn’t pan out and downtown is already ”saturated” in decorations and Christmas lights.

The group then shifted toward featuring the display in the springtime and bringing color in, as the city transitions out of winter and the trees haven’t fully bloomed.

It’s a “little surprise” amidst the concrete, Siep said.

“You just need some sort of color in your visual field when everything starts to feel really gray,” she said, adding, “So, sometimes we have to bring that color ourselves.”

The tree sweaters will be an annual part of the Sugar Block for the spring season. But they may only be around for a few years unless more are made.

The yarn typically has a shelf life of one year before the color starts to fade from sun bleaching, Siep said. And it’s also in a heavy-traffic area, easy for people to touch the work and potentially damage it.

The crochet trees are a foretaste of how Urban Village plans to "activate" the area this year, though the firm would not say what else it has in store next for the development.

The tree decorations were meant for the spring season but may last longer until more activations are in place, Watson said. Regardless, it’s a sign of activity blooming, hopefully, for an area awaiting the 16th Street Mall reconstruction to wrap up.

Urban Villages is working with its tenants to create a dynamic food and beverage scene — such as The Kitchen American Bistro, Asian fusion restaurant ChoLon, Bistro LeRoux cocktail bar, YumCha Dumpling & Noodle Bar, and EatYa Pizza — to attract visitors.

The company also aims to activate the alleyways between the buildings and pay tribute to what once was home to Denver’s Chinatown in some format, Watson said.

And maybe the artwork like the crochet trees and different projects may spark inspiration to other parts of downtown still recovering, he added.

“It'd be really cool to see this grow into something that spills out beyond our block,” Watson said.

The Populus Hotel by Civic Center Park will include two new dining concepts when it opens this summer, the hotel’s hospitality group announced…