There may be nothing quite like Carpio-Sanguinette Park & Heron Pond Open Space in Denver or anywhere else.
The graffiti-covered, concrete bones of the former Northside Wastewater Treatment Facility have been preserved in the refurbished park as monuments to a working-class neighborhood long defined by heavy industry and contaminated soil. But environmental clean-ups, new accessibility from the 51st Avenue bridge, and a protected natural area are uniting the parcels around it into something unique among the city’s roughly 280 urban parks.
Heron Pond was formerly tainted with arsenic, cadmium and lead. Now the area at East 51st Avenue and Emerson Street is an 80-acre haven for neighborhood visitors, with a BMX pump track, newly paved and accessible paths, and an elaborate nature-themed playground, but also frequent sightings of great blue herons, egrets, migrating ducks and other birds that nest around the pond and wilderness area at the northern edge of the park.
“I’ve worked at Denver Parks & Recreation for 15 years, and 10 of it has been on this project,” said Cinceré Eades, assistant director of urban ecology and trails for Denver Parks & Recreation. “But it isn’t just a park project; it’s a huge partnership with the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, because their enterprise fund helped build it and address a lot of the damage from contamination. That was a huge priority for the neighborhood.”
The park is badly needed, officials said, and all the more rare because it reclaims lands for park use in a city that has almost no open land for new parks.
Carpio-Sanguinette Park & Heron Open Space is actually four distinct parcels that have been united and modernized: Heller Open Space to the west, Heron Pond to the north, Carpio-Sanguinette Park to the south, and 20 acres to the east that were purchased by the Denver Wastewater Group to help with stormwater management. The grounds feature crucial treatment areas for runoff from the 700 acres to the west, but also the protected natural areas that have for decades attracted both birds and birdwatchers to Heron Pond — which itself now has a new bird blind and observation tower.
And yet the borders tell a grittier story, with smokestacks and warehouses and, just 2 miles away, refinery flames and black smoke spewing from the Suncor Energy complex. Parts of Heron Pond collected toxic sludge for decades. But some of the newer aspects, like the massive, nature-themed playground, seem to have dropped out of the sky. Others are refurbished remnants of the 20th century, with retention pools sporting planters that are actually slices of concrete drainpipes.
Neighborhood residents even decided to preserve the park’s popular graffiti walls that, with the provisional approval from Denver Parks & Recreation, can still be added to. (They’ll monitor activity to make sure it doesn’t leave those walls, officials said.)
“It’s fun to see the color and all the art,” said landscape architect Gretchen Wilson, of Dig Studio, Inc., the same company that redesigned downtown’s 16th Street. “It’s community history, and some Denver artists even got their start here.”
Since the $39 million project has been driven and shaped by the residents’ input, it has produced a badly needed asset whose name also honors area trailblazers, ranging from one of Denver’s first Latino city council members (Sal Carpio) to the homesteaders who set up there before that (the Sanguinettes). Late resident and community advocate John Zapien was one of the loudest voices in recent years calling for environmental justice and health improvements in the area, Eades said.
“I remember exploring it on my bike and thinking it was this great big open space that was a little edgy, because you didn’t even know it was hiding up there,” Wilson said.
“Nature really took over in some areas, so we didn’t have to do anything there. The challenge we faced was that the borders of the park are still industrial,” she added. “We had a lot of ideas about whether we would try to screen it out or fight it. But once you’re inside it, you really get a sense of how unique it is. So we worked with it.”
will hold a public ribbon-cutting at the park from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, with first-come, first-served food and refreshments. It’s a preview of the food trucks, art festivals, live music, school visits and other programming for which the edge of the park was specifically designed. A tiny amphitheater features dedicated stage power for live music, while a sprawling picnic area and shelter double as landmarks just off of a newly constructed parking lot — itself a few dozen yards north of the National Western Center.
The park looks completely different depending on where you stand. You’ll see native prairie grasses and xeric (or low-water) trees, flowers and bushes in the constructed wetland. But you may not notice the newly built levee to the east, which protects the neighborhood from overflow along the South Platte River. It’s a special combination of history, art, nature and peaceful reprieve, Eades said.
“We also had the Audubon Society on the steering committee to help preserve the bird-friendly aspects of the place, and they’ll be offering bird walks at the ribbon cutting,” Eades said. “But the community really drove this process, because they were heavily involved over all these years. This is theirs.”
