Denver Thriving

Not that Colorado was spared from the everlasting Great Recession. The same transit authority RTD that has with Fastrack the nations largest transit expansion project underway is currently planning to cut 10% of their servicesfor lack of operating funds. Colorado stocks are down along with the rest of the nation, homeless people abound downtown.

Yet, the city is full of energy and large projects. Fastrack, the largest transit project. Stapleton, the nations largest redevelopment project. Population growing. Forbes naming Denver the 9th best place in the US to do business in 2011. The city is full of young people on bikes, new brew pubs open, cranes tower over the city. For an impressive list of projects see Cityscape.

Right next to the still pretty new Libeskind Art Museum the Clyfford Still Museum for art will open its doors later this year. Still, an abstract expressionist painter, bequeathed his work to a city that would show all his art under one roof. It took almost 25 years for a city to step up, but in 2004 Denver was selected as the place to show this Still's important opus, an important testament to a strong will to be a cultural center.

Denver skyline, mountains from City Park and the Science Museum

New Housing in downtown near Union
Station

Brandnew Museum for Coloroado History. Not opened yet

Clyfford Still Museum

New Court House

Massive mixed use redevelopment of the Union Station area
with new rail station for regional trains to Boulder and
Stapleton

The Denver Fastrack project is similarly proof that the leaders of Denver don't think small. The transformation of the Union Station area in itself is an impressive and courageous urban transformation with transportation as the catalytic element. A similar feat is envisioned for the end of the Stapleton line with massive development near the iconic tent airport terminal crowned by a train station designed by Calatrava. However, Calatrava just resigned from this project and the architectural future of the station and hotel complex is currently in limbo.

Denver, which has formed a political union with the surrounding county, has reached almost the same size as Baltimore. The metro region, depending if Boulder is included or not, is with 2 million residents also comparable to the Baltimore metro region.

Although Denver's main attraction, the Rockies, are miles away and nothing but a scenic backdrop when in the city and although the South Platte River and its tributary the Cherry Creek are not particularly impressive bodies of water, planners have begun to maximize the water's value and created "waterfront" property. Denver was much more ransacked by accommodation of the automobile than Baltimore or DC (freeways, downtown surface parking lots and suburbanization of the city are still visible everywhere), the City has embarked in a massive re-tooling of the City from re-zoning to transit and a systematic recalibration of thoroughfares such as Colfax.

As a result Denver has completely remade its once staid image and moved way up the food chain among the great American Cities.


New "waterfront" hosuing along the Cherry Creek



Calatrava's Stapleton train station concept. He
resigned from the project in September 2011