4995 N Washington Street
Construction on Globeville’s first permanent public library has cleared the ground floor and moved into vertical framing. New aerial photos show a poured concrete podium along Washington Street with mass timber already stacked above it, a tower crane staged at the center of the site for the remaining lifts.
Denver’s Department of Housing Stability assembled the 2.7-acre parcel, most recently a used-car lot, from three separate properties at a combined cost of $8.2 million, funded through development fees rather than general tax revenue. The library’s 2017 Facilities Master Plan had flagged Globeville as a priority neighborhood lacking a permanent branch, and the site sat vacant for years before the city moved to acquire it.
The project marks the first time the Globeville Elyria-Swansea Coalition has served as a co-developer rather than an advocacy voice on a Denver project, a shift tied directly to preventing displacement in a neighborhood shaped by decades of industrial land use. That framing extends to the ground-floor commercial space, which will be occupied by Tierra Colectiva, a café owned and operated by the GES Community Land Trust rather than leased to an outside operator.
The surrounding blocks still read as industrial: truck trailer yards and warehouse operations ring the site on multiple sides, the same land use pattern that has defined this stretch of Washington Street for decades. The library draws on the same $12 million RISE Bond allocation that funded the 2022 ArtPark branch a few miles south in RiNo.
Milender White and Gilmore Construction are leading the build, with Evergreen Real Estate Group and Rocky Mountain Communities as co-developers alongside GES Coalition. Completion is expected fall 2027.