For months, bulldozers have been digging up the ground around the old Denver Post printing plant in Globeville, the huge rectangular building west of I-25 and south of I-70 that is covered in graffiti.
The area will soon be known as Fox Park, a residential neighborhood being built on a former Superfund site between Sunnyside and Globeville.
While the print shop has been closed for years, the building has become perhaps the best unsanctioned canvas for local street artists. And the 41 acres surrounding the property, dubbed Fox Island because of its poor connectivity to the rest of the city, are a gaping hole in a growing city.
Despite developers’ eagerness to buy up large tracts of land and convert them into housing elsewhere in Denver, they avoided Fox Island for years, even though more than 500,000 motorists drove past the construction site every day.
Why? The country was a toxic waste dump.
This was once the site of the Argo Smelter, a time when Denver processed heavy metals. The site was declared a Superfund site – a hazardous location – by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999.
Over the years, neighbors in Globeville have developed cancer. The neighborhood is still considered one of the most polluted in the country.
While Denver was booming, Globeville was home to working-class families with deep roots in the area. The toxicity of the soil prevented most development and was a deadly buffer for gentrification.
On Wednesday morning, developers, federal and city politicians, architects and others gathered on site to celebrate the completion of a comprehensive environmental cleanup that makes this construction project possible.
Here are six things we learned from this celebration.
The city council has had its eye on the property and its potential for years.
In 2012, then-City Councilwoman Judy Montero brought her then-assistant Amanda Sandoval to the edge of the property and asked her what she could envision there. The two spent an hour imagining what Globeville, one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the country, could enjoy on the site.
At the top of their list were urban forests, affordable housing, a grocery store, and space for arts and culture.
More than a decade later, Sandoval, now president of the City Council, is celebrating a new future on the property: the creation of Fox Park. And much of what she hoped for has come to pass.
One World Trade Center will feature offices, retail stores, restaurants and more. And that’s just a taste of what’s being built.
Denver needs housing, and the project will provide it: 3,469 housing units – including hundreds that will be classified as affordable.
The city is getting a new Virgin Hotel and Mayor Mike Johnston expects Sir Richard Branson to fly through town to celebrate.
Anschutz Entertainment Group, Denver’s leading live music promoter, will open a 2,500-seat venue at this location.
A grocery store with an area of over 2,200 square meters is being built, a much-needed institution in a food desert.
Connections will be created between Sunnyside and Fox Park, including new bike and pedestrian paths and a park above an underground car park.
The Denver Post printing plant is to be preserved and reused as a cultural space.
To counteract the heat island effect, the Denver Botanic Garden will create a tree canopy and replace the soil with native grasses.
And more than 14 acres of the land will become parks, open spaces and public squares for Denver residents to enjoy.
Outside developers say they became insiders in the park’s construction.
The company developing the project is Vita Fox North LP – a collaboration between Indianapolis-based Pure Development and Mexico City-based Interland.
Jose Carredano, managing partner of Fox Park, says his company has met with neighbors more than 40 times to get residents on board. During these meetings, neighbors and the developer reached an agreement on the benefits for the community.
Globeville residents have had opportunities to demonstrate their civic engagement over the past few decades, pushing for a say in the changes taking place in their community: the major reconstruction of I-70, the renovation of the National Western Center, and now this one.
“We have a real community that supports us, a real community that wants to grow with us, and so we understood it, and we were able to be part of that community with them,” Carredano said. “Our community benefits agreement was so easy to do because all we had to do was sit down, talk to them, understand them and work out a plan together.”
Councilmember Sandoval said she was moved by the passion Globeville residents brought to the council hearings on the rezoning. Although some council members expressed concerns about affordable housing and the density of the site, the neighbors showed up. Their voices were heard. And Sandoval ultimately trusted the developers enough to support the redesign.
“We are forever and ever grateful for the way Denver welcomed us,” Carredano said. “We are investors and developers who were not from Denver and saw Denver as a great opportunity. We understood that Denver should become a better city and grow. But that can only happen with partnerships.”
Federal and local politicians praised the speed of environmental remediation.
KC Becker, director of EPA’s Mountains and Plains Region, described how working with developers accelerated the process at a pace that the federal and state governments could not have achieved alone.
“Today’s event marks a successful and unique public-private partnership to return contaminated lands to meaningful use,” she said. “It will create millions of square feet of new commercial space and thousands of housing units for people of all incomes, as well as additional community benefits and opportunities for Globeville.”
The developers allocated $20 million to clean up the site.
“Sometimes government agencies take a long time,” said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette. “And when we have these partnerships, it really helps speed things up.”
Mayor Mike Johnston sees the project as a meeting of the Old West and the New West.
“I think this project is a story of historic collaboration with historic speed and historic results,” Johnston said.
He sees Fox Park as a bridge from the Old West to the New West.
“A hundred years ago, the people who came to Colorado looking for opportunities came to this place to dig things out of the ground,” he said. “Now we have a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who are looking for the things we can build by digging things out of our heads, by figuring out what are the big ideas and big opportunities that make growth possible for everyone.”
Some Globeville residents still have questions about the long-term impacts of the project.
Julisa Bezjak, a 20-year-old Globeville resident who works as a barista at the nearby Prodigy Coffeehouse, served coffee and croissants to the politicians and developers at the celebration.
She lives with her parents in the neighborhood and has long-standing family ties to the community.
What the bigwigs said excited her. But Bezjak has also seen how her neighborhood has changed so quickly and she is skeptical.
“Denver is already much more densely populated as a city,” she said. “So I’m a little nervous about whether the housing being built here is for Denver residents or whether it’s specifically designed to attract people from outside the state to move to Colorado.”
She has high hopes for the prospect of a grocery store and alternatives to the 7-Eleven and McDonald’s chains, which she says are the main sources of food for her community.
And after recently learning that Globeville is considered the most polluted neighborhood in the country, she is grateful for the cleaner soil.
Still, she’s worried about the increase in car traffic in her neighborhood and the rising cost of housing. Will her long-time neighbors be forced out of their neighborhood even faster than they already are?
Bezjak, who drove to the event in her Honda Civic, was shocked to see so many Teslas. The people getting out were wearing suits. She felt underdressed.
She had never spent time with developers and business leaders before and enjoyed listening to them talk about the future of their community.
“I’m just really excited to see where this all goes,” Bezjak said. “I’m not sure if I’ll live in Globeville forever, but I know my parents or grandparents will probably be there for the next 20 years, so I’ll definitely be able to follow what’s happening here. And even if I’m not directly affected, I’ll be able to witness it.”
