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Runway Model City: Across the country, former airports like Denver's 1929 Stapleton Airport are becoming neighborhoods

Story by Salvatore Deluca / Apr. 11, 2003

From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

Stapleton's control tower will be preserved. In Colorado, a state rich in natural resources and outdoor enthusiasts, sprawl and pollution have been the most contentious issues for the last three decades, pitting developers against conservationists.

Yet with the redevelopment of the 4,700-acre Stapleton International Airport, which closed when the new Denver International Airport opened in 1995, the two interests might be merging.

The City of Denver and Cleveland-based developer Forest City Stapleton, Inc., are transforming the former airport, located five miles northeast of downtown, into a cluster of communities where residents can easily walk to work, school, and stores. The redevelopment will have high-density housing, effective mass transit, and a heterogeneous population. But the plan also aspires to create a neighborhood that, in a hundred years, will be as distinctive as those that were built in Denver between 1900 and World War II.

These houses are already occupied. "If we do our job right, it will be a seamless transition from an airport to one of the best neighborhoods in Denver," says Tom Gleason, Forest City's vice president of public relations.

Stapleton's redevelopment could be the start of a trend. Across the country, cities like Austin, Tex., are eyeing their close-to-downtown airports for future neighborhoods.

When the 1929 Stapleton Airport closed in 1995, Denver adopted a 25-year plan to remove its hangars and runways and build houses, schools, offices, parks, dry cleaners, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and grocery, clothing, and hardware stores. The airport's control tower will remain as a memorial to the site's past life.

The project, which represents an estimated $4 billion in new real-estate value, began in the spring of 2001, when Forest City bought 270 acres from the city. Over the next 15 years, Forest City has agreed to buy at least 1,000 acres every five years, paying up front for the infrastructure, and the city will reimburse the developer with tax credits. So far, various builders have built 700 single-family homes, and 250 are occupied.

Front porches and picket fences Stapleton's flat, slightly elevated site has panoramic vistas of the Denver skyline and the front range of the Rockies. When the Stapleton communities are finished in 15 years, there will be 12,000 homes and apartments built to house 30,000 residents, from singles to seniors, retail clerks to corporate executives, first-time buyers to empty nesters. Forest City foresees 35,000 employees working there.

Steve Turner, a city urban designer who covers Stapleton, says Forest City wants to capture the essence of Denver's most beautiful neighborhoods, like Park Hill, which Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. laid out in 1886, or the early-20th-century mansions of the Seventh Avenue Parkway Historic District. Forest City's decision to use many different builders for different blocks will ensure the architectural diversity of historic areas, he says. "The residential units do capture some of the flavor and the attraction of older neighborhoods," Turner says. With touches like front porches, he says, "It should be just like you would see in a 1910 or a 1920 neighborhood. It's much better than a cookie-cutter development from the 70s, where every house looks identical."

Four years ago, Austin, Tex., followed Denver's lead in closing its 709-acre, close-in Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and renovated outlying Bergstrom Air Force Base as Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Mueller is also being turned into a mixed-use community.

San Diego is now in a similar situation with its 600-acre international airport a mile and a half from downtown. Driven by a strong local economy and, to a lesser degree, safety concerns, a study is under way to determine whether building a larger airport farther away from downtown would be beneficial.

Aerial view of the first Stapleton neighborhood, with its former runway At Stapleton, the most controversial project so far was construction of a big-box retail center with a Wal-Mart and Home Depot—a way for both the developer and the city to boost tax revenue. "Disappointment isn't the right word, but I wish that wouldn't have been the first thing that went up," Turner says.

To encourage walking, a quarter of the redeveloped land will be public parks and open spaces. Bus connections with Denver will begin as sections of Stapleton are finished. Union Pacific, which now provides rail service between downtown and DIA, is considering making a stop at Stapleton.

What will living in Stapleton be like in 2020? "It'll be a nice place to get a coffee and a New York Times on a Sunday and just relax," Turner says.

Visit the Preservation Online Website

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Building Stapleton, One Neighbor at a Time

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Building Stapleton is a service of The Kearns Team and is not affiliated with Forest City Stapleton, Inc. or The Stapleton Development Corporation. Material for this website has been developed by The Kearns Team and obtained from Forest City Stapleton, Stapleton Builders, The Denver Metro Economic Development Corporation, the City and County of Denver, Denver Public Schools, and other sources. Material is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.