9. IMAGINE A GREAT CITY

On September 14, 1958, a Mexican family reached Denver with their life savings of $500. Gonzalo G. Silva brought his wife and nine children with him from Chihuahua. Like thousands since 1858, they came to Denver looking for a new and better life.

Gonzalo liked the vacant one-story hall at 2010 Larimer Street which had once been the jewelry store of a Japanese immigrant, H. T. Osumi. "We thought $500 would be plenty to open a restaurant," Gonzalo’s son Manuel Silva recalled years later. "But Public Service wanted a $350 deposit and the phone company wanted $35. And in this part of town it is hard to get credit. So we just sat here with no heat, light, or phone."

"Finally Mariano Galindo of La Popular Bakery next door came over and asked us what was happening. Then he borrowed $300 from the St. Cajetan Credit Union and gave it to us. Tomas Molino of Molino Foods also loaned us money. So we opened a restaurant here and within a year we paid Mariano and Tomas back."

The Silvas served only Mexican food and made nearly everything from scratch. Gonzalo Silva prospered and returned to Mexico. His son Manuel took over the restaurant in 1974. Manuel Silva can still be found cooking in back or cashiering in front of the dining room at 2019 Larimer Street. La Casa De Manuel is the third-oldest of more than 115 Mexican restaurants listed in the current metro phone book. For 40 years, this tiny cantina has survived despite Manuel’s 90-day demolition lease. "That means," Manuel explained, "that the owner can tear it down after he gives me a 90-day notice to vacate.

"I like it here," Manuel added, "where we got our start. You’d be surprised but Larimer Street is one of the safest in Denver. Too many witnesses here. Some break-ins, but no hold-up-hands much.

"I keep peace here. Juke box cause fights, so I have no more juke box. Beer cause fights, no more beer. Once when I close a man tells me, ‘hold up hands.’ He stick gun in my face. But his hand shake so much I get nervous. So I tell him, ‘Give me gun.’ He did. I let him go. He come back eight days later for the gun.

"On Larimer we have the craziest hold-up-hands. A guy make hold-up at Herb’s Bar. Have everybody lie on floor. Then the guy emptying garbage in back bangs down a trash can. The noise frightened the robber and he dropped his gun. They grabbed him, beat the shit out of him, and made him call the cops on himself."

To dress up his little cantina, Manuel hired Jose Castillo, a waiter at the Brown Palace Hotel, to paint murals. Most of these depict life in old Mexico. One wall panel, however, shows Spanish explorers overlooking the virgin site of Denver, a sagebrush flat at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek.

This mural in a humble cafe reflects what many books do not—that Hispanics were in Colorado before 1858. Along with Mexican Diggings on the future site of Denver, much of Colorado’s Hispanic history has been lost. Robbed of their history, they have been treated as newcomers and second-class citizens. That Colorado once belonged to Spain, that part of it later belonged to Mexico, that Spanish-speaking settlements in Colorado predated the founding of Denver, mattered little to Yankee newcomers.

They scoffed at "Mexican mud" buildings of adobe that 20^th-century Coloradans have come to regard as a practical and aesthetic building material. They derided as "lazy Mexicans" the people who have done—and still do—most of the hardest work in Colorado, toiling on farms and in factories, on ranches and railroads, and in mines, restaurant kitchens and on construction crews.

When the Silvas moved to Denver in the 1950s, officials guessed that the city contained around 30,000 Spanish-Americans. The 1960 federal census, the first to count Hispanics separately, recorded 43,147 Spanish-Americans in Denver. By 1990, the number had risen to 107,382—23 percent of the core city population. Within the six-county metro area, Hispanics comprise roughly 13 percent of the residents.

A 1950 study by the Denver Area Welfare Council, "The Spanish-American Population of Denver," reported that the average Spanish-American family made only $1,840 a year. Black families earned $1,930 and whites averaged over $3,000. The council estimated that 60 percent of Hispanics lived in substandard housing, that 90 percent of them dropped out of school, that 50 percent of them sought help from social welfare agencies, and that they constituted over a third of the city’s jail inmates. Their infant mortality rate was six times greater than that for whites.

The Spanish-surnamed have become the largest—and fastest growing—major ethnic group in Colorado. Their income and home ownership has risen dramatically since the 1950s. Once the credit unions of Catholic churches such as St. Cajetan’s and Our Lady of Guadalupe were the financial anchors of the community, as they were for the Silvas. Small businesses such as La Casa de Manuel that originally catered to Mexicans have become popular with many others. The surging number and growing status of Hispanos helped in 1983 to elect the city’s first Hispanic mayor.

Mayor Federico Peņa

Federico Peņa, born in Laredo, Texas, in 1947, arrived in Denver in 1973 as a young attorney wearing his long hair in a ponytail. He worked for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, then moved to a private law practice. In 1979, Peņa successfully ran for the Colorado House of Representatives, where he became minority (Democratic) leader during his second term.

Even though Peņa’s ponytail disappeared, he seemed an unlikely echo of Mayor Robert W. Speer, who had done more for Denver than all other mayors before him, put together. But once again, a visionary mayor used a period of slower economic times to rebuild and greatly expand the city’s infrastructure and public stature.

"Imagine a Great City" was Peņa’s campaign slogan. Not since Speer had a mayor promised so much and been so serious about delivering it. Cynics who thought "Imagine a Great City" was just an election gimmick were in for a surprise.

Critics blasted the short, wiry Mexican-American as "Feddy" and his allies as "the Dreamers." Despite all the criticism and jokes, Feddy and the Dreamers made many of their dreams come true. Denver gained a new airport, a major league baseball team, a grand new central library, a convention center, and restoration of Speer-era parks, parkways and public buildings.

Mayor Peņa moved Denver with an unusual power base, which included white liberals, minorities, and labor. He also was the first mayor to solicit support from fringe groups such as gays and historic preservationists, who both found in Peņa their first city hall champion. These diverse backers, combined with new-found allies in the business and booster community, enabled Peņa to do more that just imagine a great city.

During two terms as mayor, from 1983 to 1991, Peņa persuaded Denverites to reinvest billions in their city—even though the city was then in the worst recession since the 1930s. In the spring of 1989, voters approved a $3 billion airport. Two months later residents approved a $242 million bond issue to rebuild streets, provide infrastructure for redevelopment of the South Platte Valley, improve parks, plant 30,000 trees, expand the National Western Stock Show Grounds, update Denver General Hospital, and restore Civic Center Park and the City and County Building.

In 1990, Denver completed the $126 million Colorado Convention Center, with almost a million square feet on a 25-acre site between Cherry Creek and the Central Business District. That same year, the electorate approved a $200 million bond issue for the Denver Public Schools. Another $95 million bond issue won overwhelming support to enlarge the central library and restore and/or expand many branch libraries. Voters narrowly approved a 0.1 per cent sales tax to build a new baseball stadium for the Colorado Rockies. Many old-timers and fiscal conservatives became horrified as Denver’s gross bonded indebtedness climbed to over $1 billion.

Naysayers such as Rocky Mountain News columnist Gene Amole complained that "Feddy and the Dreamers" were on a ruinous spending spree and "charging it on our credit card." A majority of voters, however, proved willing, as Mayor Peņa put it, to "invest in Denver’s future."

The Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce

Mayor Peņa found an ally in the Denver Chamber of Commerce. That 103-year-old relic was rejuvenated in 1987 by a fresh chief executive officer, Richard C. D. "Big Dick" Fleming. The flamboyant and omni-present Fleming transformed the old Denver Chamber into the "Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce" by including representatives of suburban counties. Fleming elaborated in a 1992 interview:

"The world sees Denver as you see it from an airplane—without artificial boundaries. We should treat it that way and deal together with the common problems of air pollution, economic development, transportation, and water. We need to market Denver as a six-county metropolis and let prospects see all the alternatives. That’s a lot better than having each county try to build itself up by running down the others."

Boosters such as Fleming pointed to two successful metro-wide agencies—the Metropolitan Sewage District and the Regional Transportation District. The Metropolitan Sewage District, organized by state law in 1961, encompassed 20 different municipalities and in 1988 gained voter approval for a $97 million bond issue to expand sewers and treatment plants in what environmentalists call a model program. Sewage was recycled as sludge to enrich soil. This agency, recently reorganized as the Metropolitan Wastewater District, is the pacesetter for metro cooperation, perhaps because local governments are not so territorial about their sewage.

The Regional Transportation District (RTD) is more controversial, although it too has been mostly a success story. After the antiquated Denver Tramway Company went out of business in 1970, the legislature approved the establishment of RTD in 1974. Initially RTD aspired to be one of the largest transportation districts in the country, embracing seven metro counties. Residents of Douglas and Weld counties, as well as eastern Adams and Arapahoe, however, removed themselves from the RTD tax district. Remaining voters in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Denver, and Jefferson counties approved a 0.5 percent sales tax to finance RTD.

After this vote of confidence, RTD revitalized bus service and expanded it to the suburbs, buying seven suburban bus lines in the process. A free 16th Street Mall shuttle bus, express buses, numerous park-and-ride stations, and a light rail system enabled RTD to capture national attention as a pace-setting public transit agency.

Culture Comes to a Cowtown

Major cultural institutions also received considerable boosts during the Peņa era. Denver’s renaissance stemmed from a unique tax that has become a model for other cities struggling to sustain their cultural assets. The Scientific and Cultural Facilities Tax, approved in 1988 by voters in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson counties, is a 0.1 percent sales tax which garnered $13 million in 1989 for various facilities.

Most of the funding goes to the major institutions: the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Denver Museum of Natural History, and the Denver Zoological Gardens. The SCFD tax, voter renewed for another decade in 1994, also generates increasing monies for some 200 other organizations, ranging from the Littleton Historical Museum to the Central City Opera House Association, from the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden to the Hiwan Homestead Museum in Evergreen. Hunger Artists are fed funding and so is Dinosaur Ridge, with its awesome hogback trails following the footprints of the giant lizards that once roamed a swampy Colorado.

A 1996 study by Deloitte & Touche found that the cultural facilities outdrew the Denver Broncos, Denver Nuggets, and Colorado Rockies combined. Groups funded by the Denver metro area’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District attracted more than 7.1 million visitors in 1995. Among the most popular destinations are four big Denver institutions devoted, respectively, to art, horticulture, natural history, and the performing arts.

The Denver Art Museum

In 1971, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) found a permanent home within its Civic Center castle, a dramatic design by Gio Ponti of Milan and James Sudler of Denver. The DAM had earlier struggled to find gallery space in nooks and crannies of the City and County Building. Besides European, American, Asian, Latin American, and African collections, the museum has one of the world’s finest collections of Native American materials. The DAM claims to be the first museum in America to have established a separate Native American collection. Here Indian artistic creations have been prized not as curious relics of barbarians, but as artifacts of under-appreciated native cultures.

Since its 1893 birth at the Denver Artists Club, the DAM has championed local and regional arts as well as masterpieces from around the world. Lewis Sharp, who moved from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to become director of the DAM in 1989, expanded the museum along Acoma Street and converted that street to an "Avenue of The Arts." Public sculpture, a parking lot trimmed with metallic pop art, and street and sidewalk art have been installed, making Acoma Street a glitzy entry for the DAM, the Denver Public Library, the Colorado History Museum, and Civic Center.

Denver Botanic Gardens

Denver and the South Platte Valley were classified as "the Great American Desert" by Major Stephen H. Long, who led the first scientific investigation of the area in 1820. The desert theory, along with others, can best be explored at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

The Gardens sprouted in the 1940s, thanks to a coalition of socialites and plant lovers who first tended gardens in City Park. In the 1950s the city acquired the Catholic portion of the old City Cemetery on the east edge of Cheesman Park for $80,000. As part of the deal, the city agreed to remove the remaining 6,000 corpses to Mount Olivet Cemetery. Crews worked rapidly at night to transplant most of the remains, yet expansion of the Botanic Gardens unearths a corpse every now and then. The well-fertilized gardens have expanded in recent decades to cover more of the former boneyard with alpine, cutting, herb, High Plains, Japanese, vegetable, and water gardens. DBG’s large domed Boettcher Conservatory shelters an extensive garden of tropical plants.

In 1973, DBG acquired 750 acres at Chatfield Reservoir on the South Platte River in suburban Jefferson County. At this relatively undeveloped site where Deer Creek flows into the reservoir, DBG opened its Chatfield Arboretum Visitors Center in 1982. There the DBG also focuses on natural vegetation, offering tours and interpretive programs for anyone interested in a breath of wilderness.

The Denver Museum of Natural History

Founded in 1900 on a hill at the east end of City Park, the Denver Museum of Natural History has become the largest and most popular museum in the Rockies. The original temple-like edifice designed by Frederick J. Sterner at 2001 Colorado Boulevard is now buried under precast concrete and glass additions. This museum has more than doubled its space in recent decades, adding the Gates Planetarium and the IMAX Theater. The Museum’s famed wildlife dioramas and dinosaur exhibits continue to be major draws as do block-buster exhibits such as Ramses II, Aztec, and The Imperial Tombs of China. Some 100 exhibits range from Colorado building stones to butterflies, from a life-size diorama of a Cheyenne camp to the cavernous Coors Mineral Hall with its replicas of treasure-filled mines and caverns. "Prehistoric Journey" features animated replicas of the monsters as well as actual dinosaur fossils, helping to attract 1.8 million visitors a year to what has become America’s fifth-largest natural history venue.

Denver Center for the Performing Arts

Soaring glass canopies shelter the concrete acrobatics of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The DCPA complex at 14th and Curtis Streets is an echo of Denver’s old Curtis Street "Great White Way." All of the old Curtis Street theaters, including the fabulous Tabor Grand Opera House, have been demolished.

Their descendant, the DCPA, boasts four theaters, a television studio, voice research laboratories, and the largest professional resident theater company between Chicago and the West Coast. This four-block complex and park is the second-largest performing arts complex in the country, after Lincoln Center in New York City.

The DCPA’s cornerstone is Mayor Speer’s 1908 Denver Municipal Auditorium. Along with weekend and evening concerts, the auditorium has hosted everything from the 1908 Democratic National Convention to auto shows, with flags flying from its domes and light bulbs outlining its pediments, cornice, and corners. The auditorium arena also received a facelift in the early 1990s when the Temple Hoyne Buell Theater was built into it. Named for the Denver architect and developer whose fortune posthumously helped fund it, this state-of-the-art theater is a 2,834-seat reincarnation of the municipal auditorium’s old theater and basketball and wrestling arena. Colorado quartzite lines the walls and the proscenium arch, while the seating is accented with snazzy blue and purple neon ribbons. The Buell is home to the Colorado Ballet and DCPA’s Best of Broadway touring presentations.

Boettcher Concert Hall hosts the Colorado Symphony and Opera Colorado. In this $13 million hall, the 2,600 seats are arranged in asymmetrical banks in a 360-degree surround, so that 80 percent of the audience sits within 65 feet of the 2,400-square-foot stage.

Denver’s "most remarkable musical story of the past decade," as Denver Post critic Jeff Bradley put it, "has been the resurgence of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, brought back to life by its own musicians after the debt-laden Denver Symphony Orchestra folded in the spring of 1989. Adopting a new name and a user-friendly approach, the 78-member CSO quickly expanded its budget from an initial $2 million to nearly $7 million in 1995 and appointed Marin Alsop, the country’s most prominent woman conductor, as its first music director."

The DCPA’s Helen Bonfils Theater Complex contains four theaters with production space and rehearsal rooms. The resident Denver Center Theater Company is the largest professional resident ensemble between Chicago and the West Coast.

"The World’s Greatest Airport"

Mayor Peņa’s greatest achievement—Denver International Airport—lies at the end of Peņa Boulevard. DIA replaced crowded Stapleton International Airport, which by the mid-1980s had become the seventh-largest airport in the world. It was the fourth-busiest in the nation after Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Air-age activity was the key to many of Denver’s dreams of prosperity and national prominence. The ski business, for instance, relied on airborne customers to become one of Colorado’s largest and steadiest growth industries. Unlike gold and silver, coal and oil, and other non-renewable riches of the earth, snow reappears annually. It also can be artificially increased by cloud seeding and snow-making machinery. By the 1990s Colorado attracted some 10 million skiers a year. Ski Country USA, the booster association headquartered in Denver, puffed the state’s 55 ski areas, including Vail, the largest ski area in North America.

Two-thirds of Colorado ski visitors arrive by air, mostly through Denver’s airport. Just as Denver once thrived as the supply town for mountain mining towns, it flourishes as the hub city for Ski Country USA. Thanks to the ski boom, Colorado’s tourist industry became a year-round bonanza.

Denver became and remains the regional metropolis because of its role as the trade and travel hub of the region, yet Denver’s rank among cities nationally has fallen. Since 1900, the Mile High City has been surpassed in population by once-smaller Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, and Seattle.

Denver’s air-age dream has been to attract newcomers with the West’s grandest airport, a marvel that would make it a "world-class city." More specifically airport boosters hoped that the new facility would enable Denver to at least catch up with Dallas, whose new airport made it the air hub of the inland western United States. Like Denver’s slow-starting professional football team, Denver’s new airport finally began to worry the Texans. The Dallas Times Herald editorialized in 1989: "The Denver Airport—a huge project with 45 [sic: 53] square miles and five runways—emphasizes all the more that DFW [Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport] must be vigilant in protecting its position. Currently DFW is expected to be the second busiest airport in the year 2000, behind Chicago’s O’Hare. Denver is likely to be third."

The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the last major aviation hub to be built in the U. S. before DIA, inspired Denver’s DIA fantasy. After its 1973 opening, DFW went from nine to 43 carriers and soared ahead of Stapleton to become the world’s fourth-busiest airport in terms of passengers served. The new airport, along with the oil boom, propelled a 25-percent growth in the Dallas-Fort Worth area during the 1970s. The DFW success story was not lost on Denver, which, during the mid-1980s oil bust, had become the national champion in empty office space and business bankruptcies.

While Denver was envying Dallas, it got a poke in the backside from Salt Lake City. The Utah capital emerged as a rival after Delta Airlines acquired Western Airlines in 1986 and made Salt Lake City its western hub. This new threat was publicized by full-page ads in national journals such as the New York Times. A 1986 ad showed a harried executive arriving late for a meeting with the apology: "Sorry I’m late but I had to fly through Denver." Next time he would fly through Salt Lake City. Mayor Peņa and the Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce retaliated with a $200,000 campaign to sing Stapleton’s praises.

Boosters of the Beehive State stung Coloradans again in 1987 by creating a new Utah license plate. Instead of the corny old beehive of activity representing Mormon industry, the new plate was snow white and featured a skier and the slogan "Utah! Greatest Snow on Earth."

Salt was rubbed deeper into Denver’s thin skin in 1995 when Salt Lake City captured the 2002 International Winter Olympic Games. A month later, in July, Salt Lake also captured a $241-million federal grant to build a light rail system, while Denver’s proposal for federal aid to expand its existing light rail to the southwestern suburbs was rejected until 1997.

Salt Lake celebrated with ads claiming its airport was closer to ski areas and cheaper. Although Salt Lake City has only a third of Denver’s population and Utah only a third the number of Colorado skiers, the Mile High City faces aggressive competition from the City of the Saints.

When Denver opened what boosters claimed was "the World’s Largest State-of-the-Art Airport" in 1994, the city boasted it had built the planet’s greatest inland port. The terminal’s billowing white sails are held aloft by masts with loudspeakers hidden in the crow’s nests. The Denver architects responsible for the airport, Curt Fentress and Jim Bradburn, constructed its terminal roof of translucent, Teflon-coated fiberglass. Sunlight streams into the airport by day, and by night DIA is visible from a hundred miles away. Its snowy white tents echo the white-capped Rockies and commemorate the Arapaho and Cheyenne tepees pitched there long ago.

SOURCES:

Arps, Louisa Ward. Cemetery to Conservatory and A Jubilee History of Denver Botanic Gardens, 1951-1976 by Bernice E. Peters. Denver: Denver Botanic Gardens, Inc., 1980.

Bradley, Jeff, Jane Fudge, et. al. Denver: Confluence of the Arts. Denver: Meridian International, Inc. & Hirschfeld Press, 1995.

Chandler, Roger A. Fentress Bradburn Architects. Washington, D.C.: Studio Press, 1995.

Denver Planning Office. 1989 City of Denver Comprehensive Plan.

Hornby, William J. Eye on the Horizon: The Greater Denver Corporation, 1987-1995. Denver: Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, 1995.

Morley, Judy. Oasis in the City: The History of Denver Botanic Gardens. Denver: M.A. History Thesis University of Colorado at Denver, 1995.

Noel, Thomas J. Denver’s Larimer Street: Main Street, Skid Row, and Urban Renaissance. Denver: Historic Denver, Inc., 1981, 1983.

Noel, Thomas J. "Unexplored Western Skies: Denver International Airport," Journal of the West, XXX, 1 (January, 1991), pp. 90-100.

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