by Tim Falconer
AFTER MY MEETING with van Hemert, I moved downtown. Although the Mile High City is polycentric, it has one of the stronger cores in the West. Established by gold prospectors in 1858, the place grew chaotically and not too beautifully. By 1890, Denver was the second-largest city in the West after San Francisco, with more than 106,000 people, but the downtown did not include a single park or public square. That changed dramatically once Robert W. Speer became mayor in 1904. “Denver can be made one of the ordinary cities of the country,” he proclaimed, “or she can be made the Paris of America.” He planted trees; built parks, playgrounds and parkways; preserved Cherry Creek; and erected statues. Heavily influenced by the then-popular City Beautiful movement, Speer also pushed for more attractive public buildings and created the Civic Center, a plaza just south of the central business district. Along with statues, fountains and formal gardens, the Civic Center is home to several public buildings, including the Denver Art Museum with its new addition designed by architect Daniel Libeskind; the central branch of the Denver Public Library, built by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation; and the Colorado State Capitol.
The first thing I did was walk down the pedestrian mall on 16th Street. A lot of cities have experimented with car-free zones, with mixed results. People with money to spend soon tire of the clots of teenagers, the panhandlers and the ne’er-do-wells. Though the 16th Street Mall, which opened in 1982 along one of the city’s major spines, had some of those less-desirables, it seemed reasonably healthy and I wondered if it helped that a free shuttle bus ran up and down the street.
Given that pedestrian malls are for tourists and shoppers, I wouldn’t want to live on one. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of other places in central Denver that would be appealing. On Thursday, I woke up to the aftermath of the predicted blizzard and stayed put for a while. By the afternoon, though, I was keen for a walkabout. There was slush on the sidewalks and snow on awnings and cars, but while as much as a foot of snow had fallen in some nearby towns, downtown got a mix of rain and snow, and much of the snow was already beginning to melt. Still, it was cold and windy and, at first, a light rain fell. I headed over to the Civic Center and an up-and-coming neighbourhood known as the Golden Triangle. Then I walked down to LoDo. Denver’s historic Lower Downtown is a gentrified neighbourhood that includes nightclubs, bars, restaurants, shops and galleries in the area between Coors Field, where the Rockies play baseball, and the Pepsi Center, where the Avalanche play hockey. Denver’s Union Station is also here; like so many old train stations, it’s grown tired—and, when I visited, was all but deserted. Not surprisingly, most people think the Beaux Arts–style building could be so much more, and the RTD, which owns it, has plans to turn the station into a transportation hub for the FasTracks expansion and make it the heart of a redevelopment project that will include residential, office and retail space.
As I walked around, Denver’s potential was obvious. It has many good buildings with plenty of character—and a good number of cabs. All the downtown needed was more people. They are coming, though. Four residential buildings of forty storeys or more were going up while I was there, and the developers weren’t investing in these condo projects as an altruistic experiment. They were doing it because they’re convinced that, as in many cities across America, Denverites—especially empty-nester baby boomers and young first-time homebuyers—want to live downtown.
THAT NIGHT, I returned to LoDo to see Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Ford read at the Tattered Cover Book Store. Tucked away at the back of the second floor was a room full of people sitting on folding chairs. Ford is a guy about whom his friend Raymond Carver, the late, great American short story writer, once wrote, “There was an elegance about his bearing, his clothes, even his speech—which was poised and courtly and southern.” The book he was promoting was The Lay of the Land, the third of a trilogy of novels about Frank Bascombe (who, while in his Chevy Suburban, thinks, “Why do so many things happen in cars? Are they the only interior life left?”).
Someone from the audience asked why he’d made the Bascombe character a real estate agent. All Americans, Ford figured, were experts in real estate. It’s true, home ownership is an obsession—and not a bad one—and where we live remains crucial to us. For decades, the settlement pattern of immigrants to North America followed a path from inner-city ethnic ghettos to better neighbourhoods often filled with the same people (in fact, that was part of the attraction). Moving meant a bigger house on a bigger lot on a more prestigious street. And for both immigrants and people who have been here for generations, the dream of a big yard and a white picket fence in the suburbs was a powerful motivator. In the last few decades, some people have even hankered for homes in gated communities.
Something different may be happening, if Rich McClintock is right. An advocate for smart growth in the Denver region for fifteen years, he believes a desirable location now has more to do with being close to our frequent destinations—where we work, shop and play—than the size of our yard or the reputation of the community. For young people, that means living close to bars and restaurants and galleries; for older people, it’s being able to walk to a movie or the doctor’s office or a quiet place to have coffee with friends. Even parents want to live where commute times are shorter and every member of the family has the option of walking or biking. “Change the place, change the land uses, change the destinations and you’ll see changes in how people get around,” said the native of Boston who moved out West twenty years ago. “Denver is a place where that is playing out. It has grown up around the car, but it’s still growing quite significantly and there’s much more of a sense now of it being a balanced place.”
I met McClintock just a few hours before I left town. A consultant who does most of his work with public interest groups, he was also the founding program director of the Livable Communities Support Center, an organization dedicated to smart growth and policies that promote healthy living, and someone who worked on both campaigns to fund transit expansion through a sales tax increase. We sat in the Corner Bakery café at the south end of the 16th Street Mall. A chain operation, it had none of the charm of Kaladi Brothers Coffee, but then I wasn’t there for the ambience.
As someone with kids, McClintock does have to drive every day but rarely spends more than fifteen minutes going anywhere. And a number of his trips are on foot or bike. “There are car worshippers and car haters, and for a whole bunch of us in the middle, it’s a tool. I don’t hate the car, I just don’t want to spend time in it,” he said, adding that he owns a 1992 Honda Accord and his wife drives a Toyota Highlander that seats seven so she can drive the couple’s daughters and their friends to soccer. “I live in Congress Park, where I can walk to coffee, pizza, pharmacy, grocery store, yarn shop, hardware store, twelve restaurants—all within a fifteen-minute walk.”
Convinced there’s a backlash brewing against spending too much time in the car, he believes denser development offers the solution. “Time is the currency of families and people all over the world,” said McClintock, who is greying and balding with a bushy moustache and glasses. “And there are benefits to arranging your life so you can spend more time with your family—playing a game in the living room or going for a bike ride or a walk because you have the time now given the way you’ve chosen to place where you work and live.”
Like van Hemert, McClintock ranks his city in the middle of the pack as far as livable, walkable and bikable communities go. But, as a third-wave American city, Denver has an opportunity to not just get things right for its own citizens but be a model for others. First-wave cities, such as Boston, Chicago and New York were important centres long before the automobile. Though inner-city expressways and the flight to the suburbs did do some damage, these places generally had enough history and infrastructure to withstand the car. Second-wave cities, such as Detroit and St. Louis, weren’t so lucky. Their metropolitan areas boomed in the years following the Second World War, when car culture dominated land
use development, but the core wasn’t strong enough to survive. The third wave, including Albuquerque and Denver, are booming now and developing as clusters of communities rather than as regions where the downtown struggles to hold its own against the sprawling suburbs. Planners, architects and politicians who once thought only of the car now increasingly add transit users, cyclists and pedestrians to the mix. “We’re entering a third phase where the car is certainly a major part of the overall culture,” argued McClintock, “but there are now many other factors influencing land use patterns.”
Our health may depend on it. Too many people live in places where they have no choice but to drive. And since one of McClintock’s daughters was born in 2000, estimates from the Centers for Disease Control that one child in three born that year will develop type 2 diabetes in his or her lifetime have special meaning for him. Obesity and inactivity are two of the greatest risk factors for the disease. As for Colorado being the thinnest state, he’s unimpressed. “We’re the best of a bad lot,” he said. Worse, with the increasing dependence on the car, second-generation Coloradoans will be more sedentary. A teenager in Highlands Ranch with few options but to get around by car is more likely to be overweight than a teenager from the same socioeconomic background living in a walkable community: “Cultures that don’t completely rely on cars are healthier.”
Planners once used zoning regulations to separate homes from industrial areas because living close to slaughterhouses and factories was not just unpleasant but also unhealthy. Today, so many jobs are in clean settings such as offices, restaurants and stores that living close to work is no longer dangerous—in fact, separating those activities by long car commutes is what’s damaging. “Now what we’re starting to see is that for health reasons we need to bring those uses closer together again,” McClintock pointed out. “So, ironically, public health has played a role both times.”
The civic health of our society may also be at stake. In his influential 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam makes the link between sprawl and the decline in social connectedness and engagement. Developers have long promoted the suburbs as offering the benefits of small-town living, including being a place where people know their neighbours. If that was ever true, it certainly isn’t anymore. “Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept to themselves, asking little of their neighbors and expecting little in return,” according to Putnam. He goes on to quote writer and urban thinker Lewis Mumford, who called the suburbs “a collective effort to lead a private life.” Worse, the longer we spend alone in the car driving between home, work and the large, impersonal malls we shop in, the less likely we are to do volunteer work, chair a committee, attend a public meeting, sign a petition or even attend church. Putnam’s research shows that “each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by ten per cent.” And as the commuters drop out, participation by stay-at-home spouses also slips.
Just because McClintock and van Hemert agree on the need for denser, mixed-use walkable communities doesn’t mean that they agree on what they should look like. McClintock is a fan of Stapleton: the largest infill project inside an American city is transforming the old airport five miles east of downtown into homes for 30,000 residents and office space for 35,000 workers on 4,700 acres. It’s an example of New Urbanism, a planning movement based on traditional urban design, that features compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods allowing residents to live within walking distance of many daily activities; a variety of housing, both in terms of cost and style (a mix of single-family homes, townhouses and apartments, for example) to welcome a range of people, regardless of age, ethnicity or income; good access to public transit; parking at the rear of buildings, accessible by alleys; narrow streets designed to slow and disperse traffic and be inviting to pedestrians and cyclists; schools within walking or biking distance for children; parks, playgrounds and public squares; a variety of shops; and offices to provide jobs. The celebrated first example of the trend is the community of Seaside in Florida, designed by Miami architects Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Since 1982, the eighty-acre town has been praised and imitated; it’s also been mocked as inauthentic and conformist. When director Peter Weir needed a place that looked fake to play the ersatz town of Seahaven in his 1998 film The Truman Show, he used the real town of Seaside instead of building his own set.
It all sounds wonderful, but don’t tell that to van Hemert. “What is New Urbanism really achieving? Is it helping us reduce sprawl? No, it’s not,” he contended. “Maybe, at a micro level, you see more people walking in these neighbourhoods, but the whole New Urbanist movement is still almost completely car oriented.” He gives the crusaders behind the trend credit for helping to popularize the idea of people living within walking distance of a mix of land uses, but lamented that planners were actually part of the problem. “We over-regulate stuff and we need to step back a little bit,” he said. It doesn’t help that the Congress for the New Urbanism, a San Francisco–based organization that promotes the theories, has turned them into their own orthodoxy. “They have become so doctrinaire about what New Urbanism should look like,” complained van Hemert, who finds it bitterly ironic that the movement draws considerable inspiration from Jane Jacobs, particularly her ideas about mixed-use neighbourhoods. “I think she would be aghast at a lot of what the New Urbanists have done because it is very sanitized, homogenized, pasteurized and boring. They try to make it mixed use and exciting, but they over-plan every single detail. And that’s not what Jane Jacobs wanted. It’s the opposite.”
Given those views, it’s no surprise that he’s not a Stapleton supporter. He’s been disappointed with the number of pedestrians he’s seen there and noted that though there are sidewalks around the big-box stores, they don’t make for pleasant walking because the parking lots are so big. And the people who move there want to live in the city but still demand all the creature comforts— including big closets and three-car garages—they left behind in Highlands Ranch. So not only is Stapleton boring and predictable, it’s not that dense despite all the press it has received. Worse, some of the residents complain when they see a bus standing on the street. “This is car culture all over again—it just looks nicer,” he said. “Stapleton doesn’t really take us where we need to go.”
A much more successful model, to his way of thinking, can be found in Belmar, ten minutes west of downtown Denver. The project, which replaces an old mall in the city of Lakewood, features condos, lofts and rental apartments in low- to mid-rise buildings as well as row houses, plus office space, shops, restaurants and a theatre. “It’s a dynamite neighbourhood,” said van Hemert. He also points to Boulder, thirty-five miles northwest of Denver, as a model. Sometimes known as the People’s Republic of Boulder because of its progressive politics, it created a green belt around the city to control growth. The downside is that the cost of housing has gone up so much that many people who work there have no choice but to live outside the greenbelt, which really just exports the sprawl. Less controversially, Boulder has an innovative bus system, 362 miles of bike lanes, routes and paths, and aggressively promotes walking.
Denver also has a bicycle commission and tries to make life easier for cyclists. Like walking, biking is healthy, efficient and environmentally benign, but is often a more practical option. Walking is great for Manhattan, but the Denver region isn’t that compact. “We ought to really celebrate the bicycle,” said McClintock, “because one of the battles we’re facing is the collision between the car culture and the bike culture on the roads. Too many people are being killed.”
A powerful weapon in that battle is the complete street—one designed for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users as well as drivers. By adding bike lanes, wider sidewalks and improved pedestrian crossings, streets become safer, more efficient and more inviting. Commerce City, a growing suburb north of Denver, planned for traditional six-lane arterial roads until some cons
ultants suggested the town could manage all of its traffic for the next twenty or thirty years with four-lane roads that included parking and bike lanes as long as there was a good secondary collector-street system in place so all the traffic doesn’t funnel onto the arterials. It’s an approach more cities need to take, according to van Hemert: “All streets should be complete streets, except for freeways.”
McClintock is also excited about some of the small changes Denver has made with foot traffic in mind. One example is the installation of countdown timers for pedestrians at intersections, as well as more all-way stops that give walkers the opportunity to cross in every direction, including diagonally. These pedestrian scrambles are sometimes called “Barnes Dances” (although he copied the idea from other cities in the 1940s, Henry Barnes, Denver’s first professional traffic engineer, gets credit for promoting them). After finishing his latte and sticking his gum on the plastic lid of his takeout cup, McClintock offered to show me what he meant. We left the café, walked around the corner and down the block to 15th and Glenarm. Each direction of Glenarm has one car lane, a bike lane, parking and a fifteen-foot-wide sidewalk. On the other hand, 15th Street has five car lanes. At the intersection, McClintock used his watch to time the Barnes Dance at twenty-five seconds on every second red light. “Because it’s a car-oriented street, we’ve made the changes to say to pedestrians, ‘Okay, you’re going to have your moment in the sun,’” he boasted, adding that if the all-stops are short enough, drivers don’t even really notice them. “The biggest thing that’s changing right now is that we’re trying to make our streets complete to work for everybody.”