“You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.”
– William Shakespeare, from “The Tempest”
The curse of language was on vivid display a few weeks ago in a Denver Park Hill living room, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. In a reversal of Caliban’s bitter lament over the terrible burden of language – a burden that imposed self-consciousness and a deep understanding of his wretched station in life – an assembly of angry residents cursed a foregone conclusion born not of what was said, but of what could not be said.
At issue was something by now familiar in the venerable Park Hill neighborhood and others similar to it in this city and in others across the country. Home developers, men and women who traffic in square footage often at the expense of tradition and history, conduct reconnaissance in neighborhoods once defined by large lots of green expanse and prowl for the opportunity to level, or in the developers’ vernacular, “scrape” an existing home so as to squeeze two or more homes or gargantuan single homes onto space previously used for the single smaller one. Lost in this proposition is nothing short of what once defined the notion of a traditional neighborhood: well-proportioned homes embraced by generous portions of lawn where kids could play and adults recline in a reverie of urban open space.
Most of the Park Hill residents who gathered in one of those vintage, well-proportioned homes on a Sunday morning spoke the language of tradition and of the aesthetic of space derived from a long community history. They used that language initially to confront and ultimately to appeal to developer Steve Barrett, who sat in their midst having agreed to hear their concerns. Barrett and his investors were planning to scrape a large 1918 red brick Craftsman Bungalow right across the street from where we stood and sat, and in its place erect two larger homes that would gobble up the open space and eliminate the expanse of green that has long defined the experience and ambiance of Montview Boulevard.
Unlike Caliban, however, Barrett couldn’t understand or speak the language coming his way from the assembled residents and therefore had not the foggiest notion of tradition, history and the aesthetics of home and community. Time after time, when pressed by representatives from the Colorado Historical Society, Historic Denver and others to consider the importance of space in the Park Hill community’s defining history, he looked blankly back at his questioners before retreating to familiar ground and the only language he could speak: square feet and profit margins for investors.
One woman, a former neighbor of his, pleaded with him through her tears and raw naiveté: “For the sake of our kids who played together and our neighborhood please don’t do this.” She may as well have been asking for directions to the local laundromat in Swahili. And another, a man who had charted this developer’s activities in Park Hill, which included the buying, selling and scraping of multiple residential properties in 14 years, observed, “You might live here, but you’re not a neighbor.”
In the absence of shared language, Barrett couldn’t bring a shred of self-consciousness to the issue at hand or, happily for him, any real understanding of his Caliban-like position. A sense of remorse? Never. Sorrow? No chance. Reconsider, perhaps? Please. Instead I saw the contentment and an aggressive defensiveness that only the stripped-down language of dollars and cents and blind allegiance to invisible investor-masters could inspire. For lack of common understanding born of a common language, the meeting adjourned amid frustration anger and sorrow.
We worry much, it seems, about the incursion of Spanish speaking into our society. Of far greater concern to me is the failure of those people in the position to shape our communities and neighborhoods to speak the language of space in the broad context of neighborhood traditions and histories.
Instead we hear the ubiquitous language of consumerism, commerce, profit and investment – a far greater danger to our society than a Spanish version of the Pledge of Allegiance or “The Star Spangled Banner.”
A few days after the neighbors’ meeting with Barrett, in a quaint and utterly futile gesture, some of those who had attended the Sunday morning session gathered outside the doomed home to conduct an evening vigil.
They walked the perimeter of the property in silence, holding candles and flashlights in the gathering dusk. KDVR-Fox 31 covered the proceedings.
And somewhere at another location in Park Hill the developer who had attended the same meeting reviewed plans for the next several days’ activities, which were to include, as it turned out, the demolition of that stately home born of another era and spoken to life from a language far beyond his grasp.
Chuck Reyman (chreyman@mac.com) is a lifelong resident of Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood.
