Tonight the Denver City Council has an opportunity to set things right by the family of noted Denver landscape architect, the late S.R. DeBoer.
The council is set to consider an application by neighbors to label the DeBoer property, near Harvard Gulch Park, as part of a historic district.
DeBoer’s descendants vehemently oppose the effort, and the council ought to vote to kill it.
Despite the claims of a few zealots, the property is of questionable historic value. And the process has been so flawed that the last thing the council should do is set up this case as a precedent-setting “hostile designation.”
The tale began last spring when the grandchildren of DeBoer, who designed many of Denver’s public parks, agreed to sell a developer several south Denver residential lots they’d inherited. Their grandfather worked and lived on the property, but the modest brick buildings, never of particular architectural significance, had been compromised by additions and remodeling. DeBoer’s grandchildren, all of whom are retired or approaching retirement, are struggling financially. When their mother, DeBoer’s daughter, died in 2005, they moved to sell the property.
Without the DeBoer descendants’ knowledge, a neighbor filed an application for historic designation for their own property and that of the DeBoers.
The West University Community Association, the neighborhood group encompassing the area, declined to support the bid. Denver’s planning board voted against it, with acting chairman Fred Corn saying he thought “the purpose of the application was to prevent development of the property.”
Meanwhile, the developer backed out of the $1.9 million purchase deal. In a highly questionable move, a member of the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission, which advanced the application, made an offer to buy the property for $1 million less than the prior deal. While member Elizabeth Schlosser had recused herself from the final vote, her attempt to buy the property at a fire sale price doesn’t pass the smell test.
The situation has been a bureaucratic nightmare for the DeBoer descendants and a travesty of the landmark process. The council should end it now.
