Back slaps all around. The Democratic National Convention came off (for the most part) without a hitch. The city looked great in real life and on TV. The cops were restrained, and our powerful mayor even got Mother Nature to cooperate. Bravo!
But before well-deserved kudos over-inflate our egos, we should take stock of what worked and whether we can bring those efforts to scale — ensuring Denver is truly a liveable and sustainable city.
The 16th Street Mall, LoDo, Union Station and the connections between the Pepsi Center and downtown venues were terrific, with some exceptions. To the television viewer and most visitors, Denver was bike- and pedestrian-friendly. Transit — the free shuttle and the downtown light rail — created an illusion of a human-scaled, 24-hour community.
If Denver really wants to increase bike usage to 10 percent of daily trips — from less than 1 percent — our public works engineers must reduce vehicle lanes, dedicating more space to bicycles, on-street parking and people.
The 16th Street Mall works because of its scale, quality design and material and the consistency of the street wall created by buildings on either side. Certainly we can’t turn every street into a transit/pedestrian mall, but look what happened when traffic engineers (reluctantly) agreed to convert Wazee Street to two-way traffic, adding parking lanes adjacent to wide sidewalks. This mixed-use street really works as an urban place.
Thanks to drenching rains a week before the convention, Denver’s parks, parkways, trees and plantings looked great. The profusion of green, beautifully planted containers and our fabulous Colorado blue sky green-washed a number of problems — even the profusion of protesters and police in Civic Center.
In fact, our tree stock is dying and stressed. The parks are in poor condition and the parkways are a mess. Little-noticed or commented upon in the excitement of the convention was Mayor John Hickenlooper’s appointment of longtime political appointee and Denver School Board member Kevin Patterson as the new manager of Parks and Recreation.
Patterson, no stranger to Denver, will have to hit the ground running as he takes over a department in need of strong management. Deputy for parks and planning Scott Robson has been aboard for nearly a year. Thanks to his solid, 13-year background, Robson will be a valuable partner to the new manager. However, the recreation deputy’s post is unfilled.
Of course, the massive elephant in the room is RTD and the future of FasTracks. Once voters approved the initiative in 2004, Denver lost focus. It speaks volumes that Denver’s recent $600 million infrastructure bond issue included not a dime for transit-related improvements like a connection between LoDo and Civic Center or parking structures or pedestrian enhancements.
If we are really going to be the beautiful, well-connected, human-scaled city we played on TV, we have a lot of work to do.
Susan Barnes-Gelt (sbg13@comcast.net) is a consultant to local architectural and development companies.
