10. MILE HIGH METROPOLIS

 In 1991, Wellington Webb pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Colorado political history. The former state legislator and city auditor had less than 7-percent support in opinion polls asking who should replace the retiring mayor, Federico Peņa. After running short on campaign money to buy ads, Webb walked all 73 Denver neighborhoods to court voters personally. He won the election with 58 percent of the vote.

Wellington Edward Webb was born Feb. 7, 1941 in Chicago, where his father, Wellington Marion Webb, was captain of the club car on the deluxe Union Pacific passenger train called the "City of Denver." That crack overnight 100 m.p.h. train inaugurated in 1936 left Chicago at 6:20 p.m. and arrived in Denver at 9:20 the next morning.

Asthma bedeviled young Wellington, so the family took him to Denver when he was five. Like thousands of other families, the Webbs came for Colorado’s climate cure. In Webb’s case, it worked. The sickly youngster grew into a giant of a man, standing 6’ 4" in size-12 sneakers.

Webb became a basketball star at Denver’s Manual High School and received a scholarship to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, where he earned a masters degree in education. He taught high school and coached basketball at Adams City High School, then taught African-American History part time at the University of Colorado at Denver.

After being elected mayor, Webb said: "Denver is still a friendly city. Most people still look you in the eye. My election and that of Mayor Peņa shows that Denverites give everyone a chance, regardless of their skin color. My goal is to keep this a friendly, safe, tolerant, and exciting city."

Oh, Give Me A Home

Mayor Webb presided over a prosperous city as well. But even the flush times had a downside. For example, the 1990s boom has been a curse to the homeless, who traditionally squatted in the South Platte River bottoms. Arapaho Indians had camped along the river, later followed by busted prospectors, broken down cowboys, homeless homesteaders, poor immigrants, and downsized capitalists.

For decades squatters were allowed this unofficial reservation. Ancient hobo paths along the river bottoms, however, are evolving into cafe and condo lined trails for strollers, in-line skaters, joggers, and cyclists. These newcomers do not want to be disturbed by the sight of possibly begging indigents.

Nor are leisured indigents welcome in Denver’s old skid row— it is now trendy LoDo with million-dollar lofts, Coors Field, and upscale restaurants selling $25 cigars. The homeless were also chased out of their nests under the bridges over Cherry Creek. Denver Country Clubbers had complained about vagrants following the creek into their golf course.

On an average day in the metro area, some 3,300 people are homeless. Not all of them wanted help from the Catholic Worker House, Central Presbyterian Church, Denver Rescue Mission, First Baptist Church, Sacred Heart Shelter, the Salvation Army’s Crossroads Shelter, Samaritan House or other overnight shelters. Many called the riverbank home, until some 200 were evicted early in 1997 as part of a $40 million campaign to transform the riverfront into upscale housing, offices, parks, and even an aquarium.

Despite this removal, the homeless generally have found that they had a big friend at city hall. Mayor Webb agonized over the removal, vowing to relocate the riverside homeless—and even their pets—into comfortable quarters.

In 1995, when the corpse of a vagrant was found in Civic Center, most people and all but one politician, looked the other way. Mayor Webb, however, called the press to publicize the plight of the homeless. On December 19, 1996, the mayor hosted a candlelight memorial service at City Hall for the 43 homeless people who died in Denver in 1996. "I wanted," he explained, "to dignify their tragic deaths."

"Neighborhoods don’t step forward to welcome the homeless," the mayor observed. "It’s always ‘Not in My Back Yard.’ So we’ve put these people in our own backyard down here at City Hall." Webb’s administration offered the city-owned office building just across 14th Street from City Hall to the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. The coalition revamped it in 1996 as 100 single-room apartments.

"I toured the Forum Apartments before the homeless moved in," Mayor Webb recalled. "It has security, a shower and a kitchen in every unit. Now, when I walk into City Hall I no longer see a vacant, deteriorating building but one filled with people. It looks just like any other apartment or condo." Nor has it deterred upscale loft and restaurant development in the adjacent Golden Triangle neighborhood bounded by Broadway, Speer Boulevard, and West Colfax Avenue.

What motivates his honor?

"I don’t help the homeless because they vote. They don’t. In fact, they are a political liability. Helping them alienates some voters—who want the poor to just disappear."

"I learned to be kind to all kinds of people from my parents, my grandmother, and my great, compassionate wife. I also learned from my first real job, working at Fort Logan Mental Health Center. For three and a half years, I taught gym classes for emotionally disturbed kids. Many of our homeless remind me of those kids."

The mayor was raised to practice Christian kindness. "My folks wouldn’t let us five kids go out on Saturday night unless we went to church on Sunday—no matter how tired we were. If we fell asleep in church, we had to sleep with our eyes open!"

"I’ve learned to take chances on people. In 1991, when I was at 7 percent in the polls, the people of Denver took a chance on me. I want to gamble on people, to create opportunities. There is a lot of talent in any pool of people—the homeless too."

"Denver is one big family. We need each other and we need to care for everyone. When I spent the night in the Samaritan Shelter, I was struck by the diverse backgrounds of the homeless. You can’t stereotype them as comic strip hobos, bums, and winos. Most distressing are the homeless mothers with children. Kids under 17 make up almost a third of that population. If we ever turn our back on the homeless, no matter how far we have advanced otherwise, we have become a backward society."

The Denver Public Library

Mayor Webb, who once worked as a shelver in the Denver Public Library, took a special interest in Denver’s grand new Public Library on the south side of Civic Center. The library serves the entire state and region through its special collections and interlibrary loan programs. With a dramatic 1995 addition designed by Michael Graves, one of America’s foremost Postmodernists, the central library offers a 4.3-million-item collection. It is the eighth-largest public library in the nation, and is second only to Boston in per capita circulation. Over half of all Denverites have library cards.

The Denver Public Library’s Western History/Genealogy Department houses a priceless collection of architectural drawings, art, diaries, 6,000 maps, 2,500 manuscripts, newspapers, menus, 500,000 photographs, posters, postcards, and theater programs. Its huge collection of books includes many rare and some unique items on Denver, Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region. Nationally, DPL stacks up well against the great private research libraries as well as other public libraries.

The Colorado Historical Society

The Colorado Historical Society (CHS) also has a notable collection of printed materials as well as thousands of artifacts. Among its treasures are some priceless Depression-era WPA dioramas. One of these, a large scale model of Denver in 1860, enables visitors to see how far Denver has come since its golden origins at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River.

The CHS’s State Historic Preservation Office oversees revenues from a gambling bonanza that has amounted to more than $50 million since limited stakes gambling began in three Colorado towns in 1991. Voters approved gaming with the proviso that it be taxed to fund historic preservation projects. This fortune, which annually averages about $10 million, is distributed statewide.

Within the metro area, the State Historical Fund has made many preservation dreams come true. Restorations range from Mayor Speer’s old Municipal Auditorium to the J.S. Brown Mercantile’s reincarnation as the Wynkoop Brewing Company, the first of some two dozen brewpubs to spring up in the metro area since 1990. Gaming funds also helped the Platte Valley Trolley transport people from Confluence Park to the Children’s Museum and Mile High Stadium. The Golda Meir House, where the first female prime minister of Israel spent her Denver years, has been reincarnated as meeting rooms and a museum on the Auraria Campus. At Fort Logan, the fund facilitated restoration of the Field Officer’s Quarters where young Dwight David Eisenhower lived while courting a Denver girl, Mamie Dowd. Other State Historical Fund projects aided main street restorations in Boulder, Castle Rock, Golden, and Littleton. By preserving past achievements, these towns hoped to create a stronger sense of place among both longtime residents and newcomers pouring into the fast-growing metropolis.

New Denverites
Denver has always been a city of newcomers. One historian, Lyle W. Dorsett, referred to Denver as a "turnstile town." Studies tracing individuals through Denver City directories and the federal census records suggest that people came to and left Denver even more often that the American average of a move every five years. Each new boom and bust cycle in mining, oil or high tech industries washed thousands of people into and out of the Mile High City.

Nineteenth-century Denverites came in the greatest numbers from New York, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and the midwest. By the 1990s, Californians comprised a quarter of the newcomers. In 1994, the peak year for California arrivals, 33,522 Golden Staters applied for Colorado drivers licenses (in the same year only 9,975 Coloradans requested California driving privileges).

After Californians, the most numerous recent immigrants have come from Texas, Illinois, New York, and Kansas. Now, as throughout Denver's history, native-born whites have formed the bulk of the immigration to Denver. Heavy in-migration led the Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce to predict a metro area population in the year 2000 of 2,196,035. By the year 2020, the sprawling metropolis will include Clear Creek and Gilpin counties, according to planners, and have a population estimated at 2,800,000. Denver's awesome mountain setting and salubrious climate attract many newcomers. The city, and especially the suburbs, are communities of strangers whose strongest bond may be the diseases known as Broncomania, Rockies Fever, and Avalanche fever. Although the National Football League's Denver Broncos have been around since 1960, fan loyalty finally paid off with back-to-back Superbowl Championships in 1998 and 1999. The National League Colorado Rockies played their first game in 1993, and the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League, who arrived in 1995, brought the city its first major professional sports championship-the 1996 Stanley Cup. Denverites differ from other people in several ways. They boast one of the highest per-capita education levels in the country. Although 19th-century Denver was an industrial city with many smelters and manufacturers, the modern city relies more on a service economy and high tech businesses such as telecommunications that require a well-educated labor force. The city is an educational center with a general campus and health sciences center of the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College of Denver and the Community College of Denver. Regis University, a Jesuit college, opened its Northwest Denver campus in 1887. The University of Denver, founded in 1864, is the city's oldest institution of higher education.

Denver is characterized by single family residences and a high rate of home ownership- even the poorest citizens often live in single-family, detached houses which they own. The American dream of home ownership has become reality for many in the Mile High City.

Automobility

Denverites are unusually mobile. They boast one of the highest per capita licensed motor vehicle ownership rates in the world with more auto registrations than adult residents. Cars are basic to the Colorado lifestyle, but Coloradans pay a price for their mobility. Roads have scarred the state as have parking lots galore. Automobile exhaust is the chief cause of the brown cloud—highly visible and unhealthy pollution that darkens a city which once puffed itself as America’s health spa.

This automobile metropolis retains its greatest asset — easy escape. Within an hour’s drive to the East lie prairie ghost towns and the exquisite solitude of the High Plains. An hour’s drive to the West takes Denverites to campgrounds, hiking trails, mountain lakes, ski resorts, and wilderness areas snuggled against the Continental Divide.

Denver has grown into a metropolis sprawling across six Front Range counties and spilling into another outer ring of counties—Clear Creek, Gilpin, Weld, Larimer, Elbert, and Park. In 1996, the metro area passed the two million mark in population. Many newcomers settled in the Denver suburbs of Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, or Boulder, which have grown into the third, fourth, sixth, ninth and tenth largest cities in Colorado.

Aurora

Explosive growth transformed a tiny farm town into Colorado’s third largest city with a population over 250,000. Aurora originated in 1891 with the founding of Fletcher. City father Donald K. Fletcher failed financially during the Panic of 1893 and fled Colorado, leaving folks in Fletcher saddled with bonded indebtedness for a failed water scheme. Irate residents renamed their village for Aurora, goddess of the dawn. She remained a sleepy country hamlet until the establishment of Stapleton Airport, Fitzsimons Hospital, Lowry Air Base, and Buckley Air Base.

Aurora boomed after World War II, becoming Colorado’s fastest growing town, zooming from 3,437 in 1940 to 222,103 in 1990. During the 1970s, Aurora began an aggressive annexation program that has given it an area of 138 square miles, larger than Miami, Buffalo, and San Francisco combined. With new assets such as a huge park at Aurora Reservoir, a dozen designated landmarks, and the Aurora History Museum and the Plains Conservation Center, Aurora promotes itself as "The Gateway to the Rockies."

Indeed, the Rockies can be seen better from Aurora because, unlike Denver, it has outlawed large billboards and passed height restrictions. Gazing into the metro future, Aurora Mayor Paul Tauer, a former history teacher at Denver’s South High School, predicted "a twin-city relationship like Minneapolis-St. Paul, with Aurora in the role of Minneapolis and Denver playing St. Paul."

Lakewood

Lakewood was platted in 1889 by William A. H. Loveland, his wife Miranda, and Charles Welch as a 13-block country town strung out along West Colfax Avenue. It has become Colorado’s fourth largest city with a 1990 population of 126,481. Epitomizing the anti-urban sentiment of many suburbanites, Lakewoodites have been leery of urbanization. Clinging to the notions of a country hamlet, they refused to incorporate until 1969. Residents fancied ranch houses and spacious lawns. Many prefer to identify with the rural ideals and the rugged independence of the mountains to the west rather than with the monster metropolis of which they are a reluctant part.

The federal government, whose activities often make or break western towns, destined Lakewood to grow when it established a munitions plant in 1940 on the Downing-Hayden Ranch, stretching from West Sixth to West Alameda avenues, between Kipling and Union streets. This $35 million World War II facility was guarded by concrete watchtowers and 15 miles of chain link fence. It was topped by barbed wire that did not keep out coyotes looking for the turkeys once raised on the many poultry farms thereabouts.

West Sixth Avenue was converted to Denver’s first freeway to expedite access to the wartime industries. After World War II ended in 1945, the ordnance plant was converted to the Denver Federal Center, which has evolved into the largest compound of federal agencies outside Washington, D.C. Some 30 agencies provide stable, well-paid jobs and enviable benefits to almost 10,000 employees, of whom only 317 can be accommodated in a bomb shelter, to keep the government humming in a post-nuclear war world.

Lakewood has taken steps to engender community pride, launching a Lakewood on Parade day in 1977. Another community asset is Belmar Park and Lakewood’s Heritage Center on what was May Bonfils Stanton’s estate at the corner of West Alameda Avenue and South Wadsworth Boulevard. The original 750-acre grounds surrounded a $1 million, Carrara-marble mansion. May Bonfils Stanton, heiress of a Denver Post fortune, declared that "the 20th century does not exist." She slept in a bed once owned by Marie Antoinette, sat in a crested chair that had supported Queen Victoria, and owned a piano played by Frederic Chopin.

After her death at Belmar in 1962, the mansion was demolished. Where formal gardens, lily ponds, game parks, and an exquisite Italian-style villa once stood, development began in 1964 with the construction of the Villa Italia Shopping Center. The Irongate Office Complex ultimately arose near Belmar’s grand entry gate, which still stands. The rest of the grounds have gone to housing subdivisions and Lakewood’s municipal government center, with a city hall, the 127-acre Belmar Park, and Lakewood’s Heritage Center.

The Heritage Center has grown from a tiny museum in the old calf barn to a complex of structures ranging from the 1869 Ralston schoolhouse to a 1930s style ranch house, the Hallack-Webber residence. Lakewood also enacted a special ordinance to protect treasures such as the 36-foot-high neon sign of a cowboy and palomino horse on top of Davies Chuck Wagon Diner on West Colfax Avenue. Lane’s Tavern, another legendary hangout, closed in 1995 but has been reconstructed at the Heritage Center.

By the year 2000, Jefferson County probably will be more populous than Denver County. To deal with growth, Lakewood’s 1996 master plan focused on the 21st century while preserving and celebrating the town’s 20th-century history. Lakewoood’s Heritage Center Director Deborah Ellerman reported in 1997 that, "Our heritage center will focus on this community’s rich agricultural history, on the commercialization of West Colfax Avenue, and family histories. By building understanding and appreciation for Lakewood’s 20^th-century history through preservation and interpretation, we hope to create a stronger sense of place, a greater sense of community in the 21st century."

Arvada

North of Lakewood on the west side of the metro area is Arvada, with a large, active and ambitious Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, a lively historical society, and a downtown historic district. It is Colorado’s sixth-largest city, with a population of more than 100,000.

Arvada traces its origins to the 1850 gold strike on Ralston Creek, but settlement did not come until Benjamin Franklin Wadsworth staked out the town on Ralston Creek near its junction with Clear Creek in 1870. Wadsworth donated land for churches, helped organize a public school, dug the Wadsworth water ditch, and converted part of his home to the post office. His wife, the first postmistress, named the town for the biblical figure Arva, leader of the Arvadites who settled in what today is Lebanon.

Eugene E. Benjamin enhanced the town’s role as a farm hub in 1925 by opening the Arvada Flour Mill, which crowned the skyline and touted the town in sacks labeled Arva-Pride. Hoping to make the town shine further, the chamber of commerce erected a large electric "ARVADA" on the water tank. Both landmarks have been preserved.

Arvadans in 1973 approved a $7 million bond issue to create not only parks and open space, but also the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. It opened in 1976 in a grassy south-facing hillside park. The spacious brick complex housed a 2,000-seat amphitheater, a 500-seat theater, and 1,500 square feet of gallery space, as well as studios, meeting halls, and a museum. It outshone any other Denver suburban showcase for the visual arts, humanities, and performing arts, attracting nationally prominent artists and exhibitions.

Westminster

Westminster traces its name to Westminster University, a Presbyterian school founded in 1892 on the highest point in Adams County. The "Princeton of the West" erected a magnificent red sand stone edifice, prominently sited at West 88th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard.

Even earlier, Edgar Bowles homesteaded the area in 1871 and built the big, red-brick home at 3924 W. 72nd Avenue that was restored in 1988 as the Westminster Historical Society museum. Bowles raised majestic stable horses that put Westminster on the map. He also became a member of the first school board, promoted organization of the first church in Westminster, and oversaw Westminster’s incorporation as a town in 1911. To coax the Denver Interurban Rail Line to Westminster, Bowles gave land to construct a depot for that commuter train from Denver. With fast regular train service, Westminster began to blossom as a suburban town. Population climbed from 235 in 1920 to 1,686 in 1950. Growth accelerated with the 1952 completion of the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. Two Westminster exits feed what is now a city of more than 83,000.

Westminster’s boom was not shared by its university, which in 1915 decided to become an all-male school. After losing many students to the military during World War I, Westminster University closed. Although resurrected in the 1920s as Belleview College, a seminary for the fundamentalist Pillar of Fire Church, it never became "the Princeton of the West."

Westminster celebrated its arrival as the state’s ninth largest city with a new City Hall in 1988. Borrowing a world-famous symbol from Westminster, England, the town erected its own 136- foot-high clock tower. This architectural allusion to Big Ben is only half as tall as the London landmark, but its bells outnumber Big Ben’s 14 to one. While many suburban governments erected penny-pinching, nondescript public buildings, this tower has given Westminster pride, identity, and an echo of both distant Big Ben and the nearby towers of Westminster University.

Boulder

Deadwood Diggings, as Boulder was called before formation of the Boulder City Town Company, has become Colorado’s tenth-largest city. Shunning such status, Boulder has struggled to keep its population under 100,000 and has led the state in fighting growth. This town created greenbelts and tightly restricted building permits to insulate itself against creeping metropolitan sprawl.

Besides capitalizing on its role as an educational center, the university town developed cultural and recreational amenities. By protecting its spectacular natural setting, respecting its older neighborhoods, and restoring its main street as the Pearl Street Mall, the town used its past to cushion residents against the shock of rapid growth.

Gold strikes first attracted settlers to Boulder, but coal, tungsten, and oil later became more important. The University of Colorado, which opened its doors in 1876, has developed first-rate science and engineering programs that attracted major federal scientific centers such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Bureau of Standards, as well as such high-tech enterprises as IBM and Storage Tek.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., America’s leading city planner and landscape architect, gave Boulder a dream to which it has clung with his 1910 work, The Improvement of Boulder, Colorado: "The main lookout of citizens is not how to make money as quickly as possible so as to go somewhere else to enjoy life, but how to get as much satisfaction out of life as they can in a very agreeable locality."

Boulder became a model of growth management during the 1970s, enacting a one-percent sales tax to buy a huge carpet of green-space. The town also limited motor vehicle noise to 80 decibels, building heights to 55 feet, and new housing permits to a two-percent annual increase.

Ironically, the town renowned for planning originated in a plan gone awry. Town founder Captain Thomas A. Aikins and ten other gold seekers struck out in 1858 for the Cherry Creek diggings. After stumbling across Boulder Creek, Aiken named it for its many boulders. Aikins and others founded "Boulder City" on February 10, 1859. They platted a two-mile long town in the mouth of Boulder Canyon, offering 4,000 home sites at $1,000 each. These lots, measuring 50 by 140 feet, were larger than the 25-by-125-feet parcels standard in Denver and elsewhere. The community’s early interest in elbow room was reflected in the initial town plat’s generous assignment of almost half the land to roads, alleys, parks, and public space.

Some disagreed with Boulder’s growth control tactics. Amos Bixby, a boomer and editor of the Boulder Valley News, wrote in 1880, "Early in the affairs of the Town Company, two parties arose—one in favor of holding the lots high, in order to make a ‘big thing’ for themselves; the other in favor of giving away alternate lots to those who would build on them, or doing most anything to induce population and capital. Unfortunately, the high-priced party prevailed, but the lots were not taken at $1,000 each...It was the hope and reasonable expectation, of the advocates of the liberal policy, to have centered here the men of money and enterprise...and thus to have made Boulder what Denver afterward became, the leading town of the territory."

Metro Overview

From airplane windows, observers see a Mile High metropolis of residential subdivisions that surround shopping center nuclei. These retail centers are the financial as well as the geographical hubs for many metro communities because they are sustained by sales tax revenues. This economic reality drives each community to offer tax breaks and concessions on landscaping, parking, and other requirements to subsidize proliferation of ever newer shopping malls, discount stores, and strip shopping centers.

Consequently, the metropolis is littered with half-empty, old strip mall stores, huge, ugly boxes of short-lived discount stores, and elderly, struggling shopping malls. The Colorado legislature has neglected the issue of regional or statewide planning that might rationalize metro growth and end the wasteful, cutthroat competition for retail sales taxes. The Denver Regional Council of Governments was created to resolve such problems, but it has been a weak advisory body.

Political entities proliferate to join the competition for new retail outlets and sales tax revenues. Metro Denver has more than 300 special jurisdictions, including some 65 cities and towns. This governmental maze makes administration and planning difficult, confuses taxpayers about who taxes and who serves them, and leads to wasteful duplication of services. Each community, no matter how tiny and poor, is forced into uneven and bitter competition to annex more land and capture more retail business.

An example of the problem is the blue collar town of Federal Heights, caught in between two much larger and more aggressive Adams County neighbors. Westminster and Thornton used tax breaks and other ploys to persuade giant Kmart and King Soopers stores to move out of Federal Heights, leaving that town with giant empty stores—and a loss of 30 percent of its sales tax revenues.

Whenever a new state-of-the-art shopping mall opens on the outer edge of suburbia, it generates new traffic problems and cancerous growth. It also takes business away from struggling older core city and suburban retail centers. Retail malls and residential subdivisions now sprawl over the Front Range from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. If every metro city and county built out to its current comprehensive plan for growth, according to a 1997 study by Alan Katz of The Denver Post, Denver’s urbanized area would swell to 1,150 square miles—an area larger than Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco combined.

Neither the legislature, nor the governor, nor local officials have dealt with sprawl, although planners have long pointed to the Oregon model for effective, politically possible, growth management. Oregon’s path-breaking 1973 law forced all counties, cities, and towns to rezone their turf to meet strict state guidelines aimed at controlling suburban sprawl, reducing pollution, and preserving rural lands, small towns, open space, and scenic landscapes.

The Denver Water Department

Limited water resources may force Coloradans to deal with the issue of unbridled growth. For the giant green oasis at the base of the Rockies lies in what early explorers called the Great American Desert. The semi-arid Denver area is characterized by an average precipitation of only 14 inches a year. Even that figure is misleading, as Denver’s moisture has fluctuated for the past century between 7 and 23 inches a year.

Many metro communities depend on the indispensable product of the Denver Water Department. The DWD, an agency of the City and County of Denver since 1918, uses a vast network of trans-montane diversions, reservoirs, and pipes to capture flow from the Colorado River, which carries more water than the South Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande rivers combined.

Without water diversions, Denver might go the way of Colorado’s first great civilization—the Anasazi, the prehistoric Indian culture commemorated at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. If Denver experienced an extended dry spell such as the 25-year drought that apparently chased prehistoric Indians out of their Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, the Mile High Metropolis could evaporate. A mass exodus might leave the canyons of 17th Street as ghostly as those silent stone cities in the canyons of Mesa Verde.

Like other westerners, Denverites are generally optimistic and energetic. Why fret about drought, smog, sprawl, and other problems, when it is possible to escape to the mountains for the weekend? As the metropolis zoomed past the two-million mark in 1996, its residents remained determined to find a way to keep their lawns green and to boost the Mile High City higher. Like the Arapaho camped long ago along Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, Denverites look up to the shining mountains and expect sunny tomorrows.

In the 1990s, Denver was riding high. Whereas towns once competed for railroads and grand hotels, today’s cities compete for the largest and newest airports and ball fields. Not only could Denver boast the largest and newest state-of-the art airport and baseball park, in the 1990s it also built a spectacular, new public library, an aquarium, and successfully revitalized its once rotting core as a vibrant recreational and residential district.

SOURCES:

The Denver Art Museum: The First Hundred Years. Denver: D.A.M., 1996.

Bradley, Jeff, Jane Fudge, et. al. Denver: Confluence of the Arts.

Denver: Meridian International, Inc. and Hirschfeld Press, 1995.

James, Franklin J. "Patterns of Homelessness in the Denver Metropolitan Area." Denver: University of Colorado at Denver, 1995.

Mehls, Steven, Drake, J. and James E. Fell. Aurora: Gateway to the Rockies. Denver: Cordillera Press, 1985.

Pettem, Silvia. Boulder: Evolution of A City. Foreword by Liston Leyendecker. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994.

Smith, Marion. Westminster Then and Now. Westminster: City of Westminster, 1976.

Smith, Phyllis. A Look at Boulder: From Settlement to City. Boulder: Pruett Publishing Company, 1981.

Tucker, Deborah. To Make A Mayor. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995.

Wilcox, Patricia, ed. Lakewood-Colorado: An Illustrated Biography.

Lakewood: Lakewood 25th Birthday Commission, 1994. 316 p., endnotes, illus., maps.

BACK TO CHAPTER LIST >