Downtown Denver’s Petroleum building, briefly the city’s tallest and once a hub for the oil and gas industry, is poised to enter a new age.

On Wednesday, the board of the city’s Downtown Development Authority voted unanimously to lend $14 million to help convert the 200,000-square-foot office building at 110 16th St. into 178 market-rate apartments.

“It’s actually the perfect building for a conversion,” said Tim Borst of Borst & Co., the project’s developer. “It has the right floorplate. It has the right bay depth. It has operable windows. It’s not too large and not too small. It’s absolutely perfect.”

The DDA, a quasi-governmental agency created in 2008 by voters to redevelop Union Station, was expanded last year to the whole of downtown. It is tasked with issuing $570 million in bond

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