Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
A short section of orphan railroad tracks is among the reminders of what came before Denver built one of its more inspired flood-mitigation projects, the 39th Avenue Greenway, in the near-northeast part of town.
So is the auto salvage yard that still sits just over a fence from the walking path.
The greenway, which opened five years ago this month, nods to the past of Denver’s Cole and Clayton neighborhoods — for decades a mix of industry and working-class homes — even as the area is changing rapidly.
As it unfurls for a mile going east from Franklin Street, the 12-acre linear park is centered around a drainage channel that flows gently, like a small stream. Natural vegetation grows alongside the water, while sometimes-meandering walking paths up the embankment connect a community garden, pedestrian bridges, a plaza with seating, playgrounds and several pieces of public art as the greenway continues on to Steele Street.
All of it is within walking distance of century-old houses, factories and the new high-rise apartment buildings that have gone up in the River North Art District to the west.
Anytime I visit the greenway, usually looping it into one of my morning runs, I marvel at the ways it links the underappreciated history of the neighborhoods to the fast-changing face of urban Denver. Others join me, whether playing fetch with their dogs, going for a walk, pushing a stroller or watching their children play on the inventive playgrounds.
It’s a pocket of calm near the increasing bustle of RiNo, near still-working plants like a Coca-Cola bottler and the Nestle-Purina pet food factory — whose proximity you can, alas, occasionally smell, depending on the wind’s direction — and near schools as well as the resurging York Street Yards business center.
In recent weeks, the greenway’s still-developing vegetation and trees offered unexpected bursts of fall color, too.
I remember how unusual the plans for the 39th Avenue Greenway sounded nearly a decade ago, as I covered the advent of the city’s Platte to Park Hill program as a city government reporter. The roughly $300 million undertaking to reduce street flooding across several neighborhoods attracted tons of heat and pushback. Most of it was focused on higher-profile projects — namely the substantial regrading of City Park Golf Course to create stormwater detention areas — and the program’s side benefits for the then-upcoming Interstate 70 project to the north.
The greenway plan, too, sparked worries about chemicals and other pollutants in the soil. City officials said they’d clean up whatever they found as they ripped up abandoned railroad tracks east of York Street and disturbed other parts of the area’s industrial past.
Now that it’s built, the greenway’s channel usually has some water in it, but it fills up more impressively after storms. The water passes through vaults that capture trash, keeping it out of the South Platte River downstream, and the exposure to sunlight helps remove contaminants. The vegetation helps filter the stream before it disappears back underground at Franklin.
It’s hard to understate the difference between what seemed, at the time, an underwhelming plan for a dressed-up drainage ditch and the actual reality on the ground. It’s now honest-to-goodness parkland that was well thought out in a part of the city that so desperately needed it.
After covering the controversies around all the stormwater projects and then seeing them built, I didn’t come to appreciate the 39th Avenue Greenway until I moved to Cole a couple years ago from another part of Denver.
I rediscovered it, in a way, on an early exploratory run.
Now I run there most often as part of an out-and-back course, taking in the trees and plants and odd features — like the short stretch of disconnected train tracks that’s there, as a kind of monument to the past, and several pieces of public art.
My favorite is a pair of giant orange metal sculptures resembling megaphones, situated across the channel from each other and positioned to enable people to talk across that distance. Called “Conversation,” the piece draws on the history of discrimination affecting the area, which has been home to some of Denver’s most racially diverse neighborhoods, and is intended to highlight the importance of racial dialogue.
When I turn around to head back west, I look up, taking in Mount Blue Sky and the rest of the Front Range on the horizon as I trot toward the still-emerging RiNo skyline that bookends the other side of the greenway.
