Byline: Tom Noel
These warm days are prime time to inspect Denver's crown jewels - her necklace of urban and mountain parks. The family jewels have been growing, thanks to Mayor Wellington Webb, who has just broken Mayor Robert W. Speer's old record for park acres acquired.
Denver's greatest asset is not rising real estate values or sports teams or even having two daily newspapers. It is easy escape from the city into parks. Not only mountain parks, but also urban parks offer refuge from asphalt and automobiles, from billboards and high-rises blocking the mountain view.
How many other cities offers every neighborhood a public island of greenspace with a view of the snow-capped Rockies? No matter how poor or depressed, anyone can walk to a nearby city park and recharge his psychic batteries with that uplifting mountain view from a grassy, flower-lined, tree-shaded setting.
Two new parks are opening this summer in the once dumpy South Platte Valley. Commons Park opens next month at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. Gold strikes there in 1858 gave birth to Denver City on Nov. 22, 1858. This cradle of the city became River Front in 1887, a private park that John Brisbane Walker built between 16th and 19th streets along the southeast bank of the Platte. Walker used this park for baseball games between Denver's best teams and visitors such as the Chicago White Stockings. Walker encouraged Denver teams by putting a keg of beer at each base. Each base hit, advance or steal earned you a drink. Might that work for the Rockies?
Back in the 1880s, the Platte was dammed at 19th Street so Walker could operate steamboats. His showboat, the HMS Pintafore, treated Denverites to Gilbert and Sullivan's nautical opera. Band performances at the park were heralded by the Rocky Mountain News as ``the greatest musical event in the history of Colorado.'' They certainly may have been among the loudest, with some 500 local singers, a brass band, cannon and - on July 4th - the town's biggest barrage of fireworks.
Walker's River Front Park closed with the 1893 Silver Crash. Afterwards, Walker let the city use this park as a camp for the homeless and the unemployed thrown out of work by the close of silver mines and smelters. Denver welcomed poor and unemployed from all over Colorado and tried to get them on their feet again. Afterwards, this site housed various circuses and a summer camp for Denver's urchins, operated by the Denver Womens Club. For most of the past century, however, River Front / Commons Park was a vacant no man's land between the railroad tracks and the river.
Now reborn as the 26-acre, $20 million Commons Park, it isthe latest of many gems that Mayor Webb has added to Denver's crowning glory - her necklace of public parks. Mayor Robert W. Speer, of course, first transformed Denver from an ordinary, dusty, drab Midwestern city into what he called ``Paris on the Platte.'' Speer doubled the city's park space from about 500 acres to 1074.82 acres.
Mayor Webb has broken the old Speer record, adding 2,350.71 new park acres. These include the acquisition of 193 additional acres at Red Rocks, 800 acres at Lowry and 1,116 acres at Stapleton. Even the long neglected Globeville neighborhood has a spectacular new park. The old Northside Sewage Treatment Plant has been recycled as Northside Park, complete with a heron pond and bird viewing blind. Intriguing relics of the old treatment plant have been incorporated as sculptural pieces in this 13-acre park opening this month.
A challenge, of course, will be to maintain all the old parks as well as improve the new ones. Skyline Park, downtown on Arapahoe Street, opened in 1969 as one of America's finest urban meccas. Lawrence Halperin, a leading U.S. park designer, hid this sunken park behind berms and landscaping that help park users escape downtown traffic. Three sculptural waterfalls erased traffic sounds and cooled off pedestrians and street urchins. Those waterfalls were designed to be walked through. Now those fountains are not operating and there are rumors that Skyline Park will be leveled rather than be restored. That would be a tragedy. Skyline Park, like Red Rocks Park, needs to be maintained as designed, with a minimum of so-called ``improvements.''
In an age focused on private luxuries, private cars and private places, the Webb administration should be complimented for its interest in public places. Restored, maintained and enlarged parks, parkways and waterways are the surest way to endow Denver's future. Not even Cherry Hills, Greenwood Village and the richest suburbs give their citizen these kind of public amenities.
