Ralph Keyes’ lovely little book “The Quote Verifier” attributes the famous line, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” to political scientist Wallace Sayre. Sayre, in turn, may have been inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s observation that the intensity of the academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the “triviality” of the issues being considered.
Whatever the source, the same rule applies to local government politics, as is proven by the current controversy over a proposal to relocate the Colorado History Museum to the southwest corner of Civic Center, just east of Bannock Street and north of 14th Avenue.
The plan calls for the new museum to match the same 13,000-square- foot footprint of the old Carnegie Library on the northeast corner of Civic Center, just south of Colfax. A new exhibition hall would then be built underground, linking the two mirror-image buildings, and a restaurant might be included at one or the other of the linked edifices.
The stakes in this proposal would seem modest indeed compared to Colorado’s seemingly insoluble budget dilemmas or the other big-deal issues I usually write about in this column. But those subjects are so complex as to defy understanding. In contrast, the Civic Center controversy is so bitter precisely because the proposal is so small that everyone can understand it and form an opinion, usually a strong one, about whether plopping another building into the hodge-podge surrounding Civic Center would help or hurt a down-at-the-heels park that most Denverites visit once or twice a year, if that.
The Denver Post’s offices are just across from Civic Center. From our newsroom, I can stare at the assorted drug deals and panhandling that dominates daytime activity in this fabled urban greensward.
On a more positive note, I pause every day on my walk home to look east from the state Capitol and savor the view of city hall against Denver’s mountain backdrop, a view made possible by the park’s precious open space.
Despite my affection for Civic Center, there are two times a year when I avoid it like the plague. Our family loved the Capitol Hill People’s Fair when it was a friendly neighborhood event at Morey Middle School. We shun the bloated and commercialized mutation that invokes the same name in Civic Center. We also steer clear of the overpriced and overcrowded Taste of Ptomaine festival over the Labor Day weekend.
Instead of such sporadic wretched excesses, Civic Center sorely needs routine activities on a human scale to lure reasonable numbers of ordinary folks to reclaim their park from the druggies and other undesirables who haunt it now.
Supporters of putting the history museum in Civic Center, like Denver Post columnist and former city councilwoman Susan Barnes-Gelt, think it would be just such a catalyst for positive change. Critics, like Post columnist Joanne Ditmer, believe the move would trigger the fall of Western civilization or, worse, a third term for President Bush.
I talked over the issue this week with Councilwoman Jeanne Robb, whose thoughtful views I have come to respect. She cited this summer’s Wednesday farmers markets as exactly the kind of event Civic Center needs to thrive. I agree.
The question is thus whether locating the museum in the park would draw visitors who would linger to enjoy the park itself or whether those visitors would merely view the exhibits and head back to their parking lot, as visitors to the art museum and library do.
That, in turn, depends on how well the new facility would be integrated into the park — with the most important element being the restaurant, which should include a sizeable open-air section.
In the end, I vote to put the history museum in the park. Carefully crafted, it should be the kind of human-scale activity that Civic Center has long needed.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@
) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
