›› The mood and feel of the neighborhood followed flight patterns and air traffic.
For nearly 70 years, Stapleton International Airport was the global entry point to Colorado. By the time it closed in 1995, the airport comprised more than 4,500 acres of land, property that spread east into Aurora and Commerce City. The airport shaped life in the neighborhoods on its borders.
The 94th Aero Squadron restaurant on 25th Avenue and Fulton Street in Aurora had the décor of a French farmhouse; diners could eavesdrop on radio chatter from the nearby airport control towers over their meals. The roar of jets overhead was a common feature of summer barbecues held on patios in the Park Hill stretch of Denver. A hotel complex on Montview Boulevard and Ulster Street was a regular stop for flight crews stuck between cities, and their partying was the stuff of legend.
Few traces of that history remain. Apart from the stretch of hotels and restaurants on Quebec Street and the lone control tower that stands amid undeveloped dirt, the Stapleton neighborhood now has the unremarkable feel of modern suburbia.
“Nowadays, as hard as it is to believe, we find a lot of people who didn’t know this used to be the fifth busiest airport in the country,” said Tom Gleason, vice president of public relations for developer Forest City Stapleton Inc. In 2000, Forest City started formally buying up tracts of former Stapleton land from the federal government.
Striking a balance between Stapleton’s aviation past and its future as an up-and-coming development is one of the trickiest parts of Gleason’s job. The redevelopment is a massive project in terms of scope, scale and time.
Forest City is still in the process of buying about 3,000 acres of former Stapleton land from the federal government for a total of about $123 million. Full buildout isn’t expected until at least 2025; neighborhoods like Conservatory Green (a stretch that includes the old control tower) and planned developments in Aurora are still in the early planning phases.
“Conservatory Green is underway right now. It’s the first Stapleton residential neighborhood north of I-70 … The control tower is going to be preserved,” Gleason said, adding that the exact fate of the 12-story building has yet to be finalized. Plans for a restaurant, a cultural center and other projects have all been floated.
But even as key parts of the evolving neighborhood remain uncertain, the neighborhood is slowly starting to take on a distinct vibe, one that doesn’t necessarily summon images of airplanes, runways and pilots. The apartment complexes and condos that surround the park at Conservatory Green, for example, have few nods to the past. The feel here is akin to the newer neighborhoods at the former Lowry Air Force Base and redevelopments in Original Aurora.
And planners from Stapleton are building new connections to the outside world, including Aurora. By the end of the year, three streets (Fulton, Iola and Kingston) will be extended from Stapleton to connect with Aurora. By 2014, a new park managed and operated by Stapleton at Fulton Street will open to Aurora residents.
“The benefit for Aurora is that the connections between two adjacent neighborhoods. Now, it’s fenced off,” said Andrea Amonick, manager with the city’s Development Services Division. Amonick and other planning officials from the city hope the access will bring more people to the newly redubbed Aurora Cultural Arts District. “It will provide amenities for Aurora citizens. It provides a lot of benefits. It increases the connectivity.
But all of those ideas remain in the realm of the future. For now, the developed parts of the former airport sit alongside dirt lots and fading reminders of another age. The former hangar where President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II met in 1993 is now a community church. The hotels and restaurants are still the main feature along Quebec Street near I-70, but they no longer serve the same customers that they did in the heyday of Stapleton.
The changes still pack an emotional punch for people like Gleason, who was a member of Federico Peña’s mayoral administration in the 1980s when the votes were cast to abandon Stapleton and move forward with Denver International Airport.
“There will always be some elements, but I think you’ll see more and more that it’s hard to determine what Stapleton used to be,” Gleason said.
For the residents who no longer have to scream over the drone of commercial jets on their patios, that shift isn’t necessarily a bad thing.