Ice slicked the morning streets, snow fell, rush-hour traffic clumped and limped, but 13 people made it to a coffee shop to sit around a big table, nurse hot beverages and talk about something important.
A bridge.
Over a highway.
The prospect of jawing about a new urban bridge might not compel many to brave winter treachery. But to these folks, the soon-to-be-complete Highland Bridge is much more than just an arc of concrete and steel.
It marks a reunion.
When the long-awaited bridge finally opens on Saturday, two of the city’s hottest neighborhoods will, for the first time in more than a decade, enjoy a bike- and pedestrian-friendly path between them. The 16th Street viaduct fused together the far northwest fringe of lower downtown and the southeast edge of Highland until the 1990s, when it was torn down.
Not too long after that link came down, developers began erecting lofts and condos on both sides of the highway. A decade later, the area is dense with new residential development and tall cranes portending more of the same. Rookie residents are walking their dogs and pushing strollers.
But the only way to get across the interstate for these neighbors has been on a skinny, perilous sidewalk along 15th Street.
The new bridge, a white, three- ribbed footpath that looks something like a brontosaurus spine, connects Platte Street on the east side of the highway with Central Street on the west.
“Our neighborhood is amazing, in terms of the history and the diversity,” says Erin Wochos, owner of Plum Sage Flowers on West 30th Avenue in Highland, after the coffee shop meeting. “The bridge gives people reason to explore.”
As honky-tonk music played in Paris on the Platte, and patrons read newspapers and sipped, merchants from both sides of the highway planned the ceremony marking the bridge’s new ribbon-cutting.
The cafe is at the heart of a vibrant commercial stretch of city, with REI anchoring one end of the strip, a new Vitamin Cottage grocery store on a busy corner, and boutiques, restaurants, a skateboard store and more lining the street.
The section of Highland on the other side of the bridge, sometimes called the Upper 15th Street District, sits on a bluff looking down on the Denver skyline. It doesn’t quite match its sister neighborhood’s density of commerce. Yet. But the section of historic houses is changing fast.
“It’s a buzz,” says Suzanne Blaylock, owner of the Red Door Swingin’ boutique on 15th Street. “People have been talking about this for a long time.”
The bridge, she says, will help turn the two sides of the highway into one connected village.
“This is one of the strongest neighborhoods,” says Blaylock. “This is what people want, to walk to Vitamin Cottage, to REI, they want to ride their bikes and skateboards and Rollerblades. There’s been such an increase in walking around here. It’s really changing. People are excited.”
As she chatted in her store, Shelly Nottoli, 42, walked in the door. They greeted each other with shouts and laughs.
Notolli, who has lived in Highland since 1994, says the bridge “gives us credibility.
“It connects us to the heart of the city,” she says.
Linking top, bottom
Specifically, it’s “linking the top and the bottom of what used to be a vibrant, cohesive neighborhood, before I-25,” says Rebecca Hunt, a history professor at the University of Colorado-Denver.
The Highland part of the neighborhood, in particular, has suffered because “people weren’t aware we had a neighborhood up there, and it’s one of the neighborhoods with some of the oldest and richest heritage in the city,” she says. The bridge “means the neighborhood is alive.”
It received a boost in the spring when Lola Restaurant moved from trendy Pearl Street, south of downtown, to the up-and-coming neighborhood on the bluff.
“We just love this neighborhood, we’re so happy we moved here,” says Jennifer
Lydiard, a partner and general manager of the restaurant.
Temperatures were sinking into the single digits outside at dusk recently, but people already were sitting at the bar, reading menus and listening to lively Latin music. “I love the proximity to downtown without having to deal with the parking. It’s hilly, too, like San Francisco. And it’s got a mom-and-pop feel to it,” Lydiard says.
“Great opportunity”
The bridge, she says, “is a great opportunity for both sides of the highway.”
One of the bridge’s biggest boosters has been Mona Lucero, the owner of the eponymous boutique on 15th Street. In the four years she’s run her store, big changes have come to the neighborhood: new stores, new condos and lofts, new people, more foot traffic.
When she started, she says, “Sometimes you would wait for hours for someone to even walk by, but now there are so many more people walking by.”
Still, it remained an urban cul-de-sac, she says, because of the “spooky” path across I-25 on 15th Street. The bridge, she says, will change that.
“Everybody is really hoping that it will create more of a community from both sides,” she says. “We’re so close to each other, only a block away, but because of I-25 it feels like it’s a ways away.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
Dedicating the span
The permanent handrails might not be in place, but the ribbon will be cut on the Highland Bridge at a ceremony that starts at 10:30 a.m. Saturday.
Activities run all day, including a
winter stroll along Platte Street from noon to 9 p.m., Holidays in Highland, including hayrides, from 3 to 7 p.m., and the Lighting of the Way parade, which starts at 4:30 p.m. at Union
Station and runs across the Central Platte Valley, ending at the Highland Bridge at 5:30 p.m.
