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By Cathy Donohue, Denver

I began walking through Civic Center park in 1963 on my way from my apartment building to my job downtown. It was a beautiful, serene place. People who lived in the apartments near the park sat on the benches in the morning. They are gone now.

It is different today. Structures have been added to the scene — the Supreme Court, the library, the art museum and city and state offices. The list is expanding. There is only one feature of the park that has not grown: the land.

We are faced with the prospect of the city and state governments (the caretakers of the people’s land) wishing to add a structure inside the park — a new state history museum.

There have been public (at 10 in the morning) meetings at which the project is presented as a fait accompli. Few people attend. Those who do feel helpless about speaking because of the format and the atmosphere.

Our government leaders need to think clearly about the consequences of placing this structure inside Civic Center Park.

The citizens have been informed that this will finally be the catalyst to end the long-festering wounds of urban neglect. Why didn’t the art museum, the library or the Supreme Court alleviate the growing blight? These people generators have not driven away the graffiti artists, derelicts or drug dealers.

A new history museum inside the park will not accomplish this either. It will only remove parkland from our city. When will the city begin enforcing current laws and clean up the trash and graffiti? It would seem wiser to clean up the social ills and blight before millions of dollars worth of our land is given away.

We should question the premise that tells us that more green space will be added by the particular scheme. Narrowing 14th Street and shrinking sidewalks will only increase the traffic mess and make pedestrians less safe.

There should be no gift of “free” land. Eventually, more land will be needed for expansion. The city should concentrate on cleanup, restoration, encouraging a positive human presence and police enforcement. The new residents of the Golden Triangle could replace the park benchwarmers of the ’60s.

Before we plunder and diminish our treasures, we should nourish them. Other places of city-owned land (the underused permit center) are suitable. We should look carefully at “gift horses.” Civic Center needs no more structures, no matter who promotes them. The citizens are the beneficiaries of this land, a place of historical and irreplaceable beauty.

Cathy Donohue is a former member of the Denver City Council.

READER COMMENTS

Walking through civic center park is like walking through the slums of San Francisco, only with a little gras sprinkled around it and a couple of flowers.
There is nothing beautiful at all about civic center park, you cn't even see the mountains from there anymore.
And now they want to surround it with every type of government legal building a large city like Denver needs.
What a terrible idea.
I have worked for the parks and rec department and have cleaned up civic center park on many occasion, and it is like cleaning up an alley of winos with all of the trash and the bottles around there. Not to mention all of the drug paraphenelia.
What civic center park needs is a police presence that really does its job of cleaning up the druggies and the alcoholics there.

Apparently, the state has already decided that the block of land currently containing the Supreme Court and History Museum buildings will be converted entirely to use by the courts. The state owns this land, and there is apparently no other option under consideration. Thus the museum must move. The fact is, most of the proposed museum at Civic Center will be underground. The above-ground footprint will (so I have read) be identical to the never-constructed building that has been part of the master plan for Civic Center for almost 100 years. This is not destroying the "City Beautiful" concept; it is fulfilling that concept.

As a resident of Denver and Capitol Hill, and a downtown worker, I think this plan is a good one. I don't find any problem with using space in Civic Center for an important civic (note that word) institution. Will it fix every problem there? I wouldn't think so. But I think it will be a valuable addition.

Hank has it right. First clean up the human debris. It is pretty obvious to anyone who is objective. Competitions to design a better Civic Center suffer the same shortsightedness. As far as a museum location, it could work o. k., but if we are being analytic here, why move the museum? (This is not the topic, I realize, but please allow me.) Move the lawyers to some office space, nearby. The existing underground museum space is quite unique for its present use. Lawyers and courts can work above ground. The present 1970's court-museum complex is not the most attractive, but it could be re-shaped better into total museum rather than total court use.

I believe that all citizens can co-exist in this space, as long as laws are being enforced. Are there no beat cops to bust people doing drug deals, for public intoxication, and for defacing public property? It is the beautiful center of our city and needs to be preserved just as it is, especially since the surrounding land has been overbuilt with strange, disorienting architecture.

Thank you for standing up for open space! Living on Capitol Hill, I frequently pass through Civic Center Park, and on a rare occasion I even play frisbee there. I have to admit that I use the library and art museum more, but I'm pretty content with the facilities that are in the area already.

As for the homeless people and panhandlers in the park - well, we'll always have poor among us, and I think it's nice that they have such a lovely place to spend their time. It would be great, however, if I could feel comfortable reading in the park on a Sunday morning without worrying about getting caught in the middle of a drug deal.

How about establishing an annual state history fair in the park instead of putting up another establishment?

And that's not Aurora...its aroma. The CC generously exudeds a rancid, foul and nauseating aroma that brings forth memories of the lower landing of a NYC subway entrance on a hot and humid mid-August day--before Rudy got elected. I don't recall any Blue Ribbon commissions to study the problem either. Let's face it, you really don't need a "Blue Ribbon" commission to devise a plan to combat STINK.

This sorry scene is going to bring back fond and distant memories for all those folks from NYC who will be attending the coming '08 convention. They'll fell right at home as they wonder if our CC is just a new end-of-the line stop on their old A-train line.

Face it Denverites, the CC is not exactly Mt. Rushmore. And those are not pigeons either, they are flying rats. We can do better.

How about rounding up all the bums, street urchins, derelects and dopers and give them all the boot. They have taken the Civic Center just like the U.S. Marines stormed Normandy Beach and they have taken up unchallenged permanent occupancy.

Do we need yet another Ritter "Blue Ribbon" commision to study, investigate, analyze and deal with this, or should we just ask Rudy how he cleaned up an even bigger mess in NYC?

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