There is a skeleton lying beneath the “dusty cowtown” streets of Denver. The bare bones of an urban landscape that once was, could have been, and has since repeatedly been smothered in asphalt. A framework of a lively, happening, urban landscape that was in the midst of materializing when it was snuffed out and paved over leaving the city frozen in time, middevelopment by the advent of the car centric cities that have become so synonymous with the western United States and climate change. In a new landscape of sprawl, strip malls and empty skyscrapers, the city has struggled to live up to the expectations of the pre-pandemic era. Scrambling to scrape together the semblance of civic aura while our sports teams delivered championships in back to back years, as all our politicians seem to do, they seem to have done just about anything but actually address the root causes of the problems they claim so publicly to wish to remedy. This past month however, the starkest irony yet took place on Denver’s main avenue as the spine of the skeleton was uncovered only to be ripped out in service of perhaps the most disastrous, backwards half measure ever attempted in the mile high city.
Denver currently houses about 700,000 people in an area that could likely accommodate over 2 million and the emptiness remains palpable. Empty sidewalks, empty storefronts, empty strip malls, parking lots choking out our urban centers. It did not have to be this way. As noted by urbanist Ryan Keeney’s landmark study, the last vestiges of an authentic urban fabric that harkens back to the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Manhattan and even Paris, are tidally fixed to the joints of the streetcar skeleton. Cozy neighborhood corners like those at 12th and Madison, 13th and Pearl, 11th and Ogden, 23rd and Dexter, all where the old streetcar network, once the envy of even European cities like London, Rome and Munich, passed by and intersected, fostering authentic communities and urban development.
With today’s automobile centric world, even these havens of urbanism are in trouble, turnover in these mini hubs are high and some seem shuttered all together. Over the decades, many old businesses have been closed and demolished to clear up parking space for neighboring stores. Last year alone Denver lost 12% of it’s restaurants including classics like Steve’s snappin dogs and Enzo’s End as well as beloved places like Cafe Brazil, D bar, and Crêpes n’Crêpes, which, after being forced out of their Cherry Creek location due to high rent, finally bled out the in a space that hasn’t been able to keep a restaurant open for as long as I can remember despite being located next to the 12th and Madison streetcar corner that serves as a central square to my home neighborhood of Congress Park.
It did not always seem to be going in this way. When I left my hometown for college in 2018 the city looked to be going in the opposite direction. Downtown seemed to be bustling day and night as never before. Fastracks commuter rail lines were opening left and right making union station feel like the urban transit hub it was meant to be and everything seemed possible for the future of an urbanizing regional hub. Dreams of a train line down Colfax and Colorado, Denver’s natural “Cardo” and “Decumanus” (the roman term for North-South and east West thoroughfares that became the standard model for all modern cities) seemed less far fetched than ever. It seemed that in 7 or 8 years the city would have a thriving urban core, comparable to Boston or San Francisco capable of rising above the polycentric sprawl that defines cities like Phoenix or Oklahoma City. Hancock’s government touted successes in transit and housing as the first of a litany of projects aimed at turning Denver into the city it was always supposed to be before Ford and GM snuffed it out with a steamroller.
8 years later and that dream is not only faded but unimaginable. The 16th Street Mall, once Denver’s Times Square hopeful, has been ripped up and practically shut down. Most of the original businesses lining Union Station have turned over and few empty spots have been filled. Countless businesses with seemingly bright futures shuttered during and after the pandemic including my personal favorite spot; Torta Grill. The transit dream too has died, Not only has the progress made by RTD’s Fastracks project, once promised to connect Denver to Boulder by rail, grinded to a halt, the network itself has been picked apart, frequency reduced, even certain routes discontinued. When the 2023 NBA finals came to town, my family found it more efficient to travel by Lime scooter than the light rail we had relied upon just a year prior for the Avs Cup run.
The city and its institutions are floundering. In their haste to pull out of the tailspin, the city has only gone backwards. Building more empty uninspiring condo units, useless in garnering an “street ballet” and too expensive to be afforded by those part of Denver’s dramatic and worsening housing crisis. In certain cases, the proposed solutions are cowardly compromises that are not only ineffective but actively prevent positive change. In the brain of connected cells that is a city, these stop gaps act as chemical antagonists rather than agonists for urban excitement, filling a hole with something inert while simultaneously preventing something useful from taking its place. An uninspiring apartment building, priced out for most of the working class, without openings for street vending, provides little to no value for the city while simultaneously filling valuable real estate with no hope for further development.
No project fits this bill better than the bus rapid transit corridors that have been installed everywhere in financially stressed cities from Boulder to Buenos Aires. A BRT is a punt, a cheap half measure put forward in place of a more efficient, popular, and expensive rail corridor. Causing all the construction issues, delays and traffic of an above ground train while providing practically none of the energy efficiency, development and excitement that comes with a rail line. Additionally, being a large undertaking and civic disruption, it shuts down conversation about the rail transit corridor that is actually necessary in fixing the problem created and worsened by big asphalt.
The Denver-Boulder rail corridor was sold out in favor of a BRT and… While the Flatiron Flyer™, like so many of those empty sub developments that litter what should be active urban spaces, was hailed as a success, it has not provided the excitement, connection, and ultimately ridership that the rail line we were promised would have. Not to mention that the talk of the necessary rail line has practically died completely, leaving us in the unhappy medium for at least another 30 years. All while our leaders tell us they’ve succeeded.
Perhaps, none of these have been as particularly brazen, backwards and nearsighted as the BRT project that is currently ripping up Denver’s main avenue of Colfax and sniffing already struggling business out. In an era already tough on small businesses, the project’s construction has hurt and killed business across Denver’s thoroughfares from the Lion’s Lair to the famous Squire Lounge on the same block of the late great Torta Grill. In addition to turning Colfax into a living hell for businesses and visitors alike in the present, the BRT project presents little hope at reshaping Colfax the way it needs to be. A train line would require all of the same construction and disruption as this project but would be several times as efficient and sustainable once completed, not to mention popular. The fact remains, dedicated lanes or no, people really don’t like taking the bus. It’s loud, it’s bouncy and for some indescribable reason, there is simply a lesser “aura” than a streetcar of even the same capacity. Simply put “There’s a new train running down Colfax” is infinitely more exciting than “the buses on Colfax are in the middle of the road now”.
It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that a couple of months ago this misguided project ran into the most poignant example of irony it could possibly face when it exhumed large swathes of the lost Denver streetcar tracks upon ripping up Colfax only to pull some them out of the ground and ditch them while reburying others In yet another batch of blacktop.
The absurdity of it all is glaring. Committing to do all the same disruptive things necessary to reinstate Denver’s successful streetcar line, except for the rails, to come across the literal solution to the problem only to sweep it aside to continue another exploit in making the problem originally caused by burying the solution worse. The BRT not only fails to solve the problem but actively rips up and throws out the eventual solution for the foreseeable future. The lack of commitment to the solution to the car problem is, to once again, a commitment TO the problem.
Despite a brief appearance in the sun and the headlines, the dream of the return of Denver’s streetcar now seems deader than ever. Even coming face to face with an omen from Denver’s past wasn’t enough to deter the city from paving that lesson another 40 years down the road. A city in decline is so committed to the appearance of progress that it has once again accelerated said decline at the cost of the hope for recovery.
Denver is a Cow Town one way or the other. The city’s connection to the ranching industry, economically, geographically and culturally may never be challenged. While many assume the connotation of that term is negative, describing a dusty empty “fly over” town, this does not have to be the case. We as Denverites get to decide what kind of Cow Town we are and what it means to be one, whether the term is affectionate or pejorative. I could see a future where our status as a cow town is a point of pride as ubiquitous and renowned to Denver as beans to Boston and brotherly love to Philadelphia. In other words, we could reclaim the term and rise above the label of a cow Town to become “THE Cow Town”.
The Colfax BRT project seems to be yet another step, another commitment to the derogatory use of the term, empty streets, empty buses, empty lots. While the outlook is dark, there is always hope, for despite the latest dagger in its heart, the skeleton of the “The Cow City” still lies under the surface, ready to be uncovered, this time with ambition and growth in the heart of our leaders, and restore the promise of the shining “City Next to the Hills” we were en route to become before it was frozen in concrete Carbonite.
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