My neighborhood, Elyria, is about to be recycled. Appropriately, our current front door is Queen City Architectural Salvage, which, on first glance from Brighton Boulevard, appears to be a junkyard. Oh, my, such generalizations can get us in trouble!
Behind the fence are treasures with stories to tell; without the artifacts, the stories fade. In the reclamation business, you have to zero in on the irreplaceable content, restore it, polish it, and preserve the tales worth retelling.
So let it be with Elyria.
As a bit of real estate first platted by A.C. Fisk of Elyria, Ohio, in 1881, Elyria’s history has been told by Elizabeth MacMillan in her 2004 mini-tome, “The History of Elyria, 1881-1941.” But on the cusp of the new plans for the stock show (now called the “National Western Center”), Elyria crests a wave of civic enthusiasm that will forever doom its surviving charm, if not its current residents. As an example, the plan advanced by the Denver City Council last week includes zoning for up to 20,000 new dwelling units and 5 million square feet of commercial space in our neighborhood of 250 homes.
To be fair, we have needed a plan for decades, which is why the residents authored and approved the Elyria 2020 Vision Plan in 2006. But the organically grown plan — which, admittedly, did inform the current city-backed document for the NWC — envisioned an enhanced Stock Show surrounded by vibrant neighborhoods, not at their expense.
When the Regional Transportation District sited the North Metro Station in Elyria in 2009, the hub for viable urban redevelopment became an organizing predicter for a century of future activity.
Taking the free rein granted by the City Council’s $800,000 planning appropriation in February 2014, the Western Stock Show Association convened interested parties and sat down in their Humbolt Street headquarters to scribble on napkins. Before long, over $1 billion of public investment was spooling out of Rumpelstiltskin’s stable.
The plans headed to the City Council recently and were gleefully backslapped into existence with the assistance of a smattering of locals, most of whom don’t have an e-mail address or computer access. The plan, however, happen to be missing a few key elements that the 580 signatories of the Elyria 2020 Vision Plan included nine years ago, among them a new school and rec center. Turns out none of the committee members have kids in the north neighborhoods.
For another, doubling the footprint of the complex between Elyria and Globeville is supposed to result in “connecting.” A market proposed by Elyria in 2001 and now in the NWC plan fails to include the cooperative ownership the neighborhoods wanted for 14 years. The NWC plan does mention the words “Native” and “American” side by side, but only once, in the historic timeline.
The fact that the entire site sits in the Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate 70 Superfund barely made it into the appendix. And in the spirit of Western freedom, while the “resident contingent” has the right to speak for the neighborhoods, none of them has the obligation to be informed by the neighborhoods.
Although the current stock show agreement allows for a $1 a year lease for the 2 million square feet of taxpayer-built facilities, nobody on the NWC committee can explain who’s going to reap the benefits of all the new “non-profit” income and whether the auditor will have authority to inspect and report on the books.
Somebody must be laughing up their sleeves at this buffoonery, but it’s not the kids of Globeville who attend 110-year-old Garden Place Elementary, who sit in class for eight hours a day suffocating in the armpit of two interstate highways and Denver’s largest freight rail yard.
And as long as the sleeve-laughers get their way, the north neighborhoods will simmer.
Tom Anthony is a longtime activist in the Elyria neighborhood of Denver.
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