Consider, if you will, the joy that comes across the face of a child as a loveable mutt sits patiently in line at the front entrance to the Denver Botanic Gardens.
When it is the dog’s turn, the pup walks up to the ticket window, stands on its hind legs and puts its paws on the counter. The attendant, laughing, provides a treat or two, a happy dog walks away and the kids in line look on in wonderment.
The treats, supplied by neighbors but dispensed by staff, have been distributed to a half-dozen or so dogs over the years. They give folks waiting in line a bit of comic relief. But the treats also provide a real-time interaction between the neighbors and the gardens — precisely the sort of unique relationship that can grow between a big institution and citizens who inhabit an urban neighborhood.
But that’s all going to change.
With little fanfare, Denver Botanic Gardens has taken the wraps off $18 million in improvements. A new concrete parking garage looms over the York Street corridor and a solar-roofed stone building is now the spiffy, post-modern entrance.
As the former public representative to the board of the American Institute of Architects Colorado chapter and a longtime homeowner in the East Cheesman Park neighborhood, I look on these improvements with mixed feelings.
While the parking garage technically meets the city’s requirement of no more than one story above ground, it looks outsized for the scale of the neighborhood.
The entrance building is a big improvement over the various temporary structures that have been used over the years. But there’s no provision for the dog treats that have made the entrance a special place for hundreds of young visitors, and for our dog, Pica.
Many more improvements are planned for the gardens in coming years. Some of them, like the new sprinkler system, are terrific; they’re green, they save money and they improve the quality of the gardens’ experience.
But others are more problematic. Here are four things community leaders should keep in mind as the gardens evolves:
• Build to scale. The East Cheesman neighborhood is a unique mix of single-family homes like ours, garden apartments and mid-rise residential buildings, including the Arboretum, a recent disaster of a condo conversion whose future is uncertain. The balance of the neighborhood should not be tipped too far in the direction of monoliths.
• Involve the neighbors. In one of the more bone-headed moves connected to the upgrades, the gardens recently relocated a highly popular community garden to a terribly inconvenient location. What would Michelle Obama say about that?
• Get the details right. The parking garage will need a lot of greening to mitigate the impact of its sheer bulk. A ton of details must be gotten right, perhaps with the input of both professionals and neighborhood volunteers.
• No bailouts, please. There’s been talk that a large home on Ninth Avenue owned by former Denver Nuggets General Manager Kiki Vandeweghe might be purchased by the gardens. This amounts to bailing out someone whose wealth far exceeds the average homeowner. It is terrible policymaking. Let Vandeweghe donate the house to the gardens or let some wealthy patron buy the house and donate it.
Thanks to bond issues and other public initiatives, big changes are coming to the Denver Botanic Gardens and neighborhoods adjacent to Cheesman Park. They will take time, patience, a sense of scale and real input from area residents.
Henry Dubroff is a writer and entrepreneur who divides his time between Santa Barbara, Calif., and Denver. He was business editor of The Post from 1988-95.
