LAKEWOOD — The neighborhood around Mount Olympus has been going downhill ever since the Romans overran Greece. As a result, Athena has relocated to a spiffy new row house in Lakewood’s Belmar redevelopment.
So far, my favorite Greek goddess and this resurgent inner-ring suburb seem to be a perfect fit.
As a longtime observer of the urban scene, I coined the term “Athena cities” in 1997 to describe communities like Lakewood and, later, Centennial. In Greek myth, Pallas Athena was never a child but sprang full grown from the mind of Zeus. Lakewood likewise was born as an adult, with 92,000 residents the day it was incorporated in 1969. Her younger sister, Centennial, was even heftier, boasting 103,000 citizens when she was born in 2003.
The term “Athena city” may be whimsical, but it aptly describes the special set of problems that accompany municipalities where most of the residential and commercial development long predates any semblance of coherent city planning.
Unlike modern Aurora, which grew from an original core under a city master plan, Lakewood and Centennial were superimposed upon homes and businesses that had already developed in a maze of special districts with little or no coordinated planning.
Lakewood has spent 38 years replacing those special districts with a unified municipal service structure. It boasts a well-regarded police department, a fine system of parks and trails, and a generally high quality of life.
But it also faces the same problems that beset aging inner-ring suburbs across the nation — including what to do with old shopping centers.
Villa Italia, once the heart of Lakewood, was 35 years old and in steep decline in 2002. Lakewood couldn’t risk letting the center “go dark” and creating a cancer in the heart of Jefferson County. Working with Continuum Partners, the city set out to transform the old mall into a mix of retail and office space, plus 1,300 residential units.
I visited Lakewood’s new mayor, Bob Murphy, former mayor Steve Burkholder and city manager Mike Rock recently to assess the progress of one of the region’s most important revitalization efforts.
Simply put, Belmar — built around “new urbanism” concepts — is already a success story. Murphy notes there are already about 400 homes on the 100-acre site, and those residents help provide a critical mass to generate a vital night life that attracts still more visitors.
In emphasizing a strong residential presence, Belmar mimics another recycled success story, Englewood’s vibrant “urban village” built on the site of the old Cinderella City shopping center. In turning the obsolete retail mall into a new city center, Englewood capitalized on the southwest light-rail line stop at the site. Lakewood is also gaining a light-rail line along 13th Avenue as part of the FasTracks program. It won’t serve Belmar, but Murphy counts on it to help upgrade the Colfax Avenue corridor.
Lakewood also drew lessons from a less successful recycling of an old shopping center — Boulder’s Crossroads. Boulder gave that aged facility a facelift but didn’t focus on residential development, “and thus lost the vitality of night life that we aimed for at Belmar,” Rock told me.
Walking through Belmar with Mayor Murphy, that vitality was evident. Passing a multistory parking garage, I was delighted to find a series of ground-floor artist studios adding flair and substance to the neighborhood. The same parking structure will ultimately include a 1.2 megawatt solar power facility on its roof.
Retail shops and restaurants, most at a human scale, complete the picture. But the centerpiece is the ice skating rink, where skaters infuse the complex with the kind of grace and vitality that used to accompany the skaters gliding outside the old May D&F in downtown Denver.
May D&F is long gone, and its old ice rink site is now just a hotel driveway. But the spirit of community and accompanying commerce that those skaters inspired lives on in Belmar.
No wonder Athena moved to Lakewood. In her short skirt and armored greaves, the warrior goddess cuts quite a figure pirouetting on the ice.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@
) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
