We used to call it "Denvoid"
"Cross every ocean for the sake of locomotion/but I wouldn't have a notion/how to save my soul ..."
- Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, "Locomotion," 1984
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else. As a child, I dreamed of being whisked away to England and wearing a uniform to school; as a young woman, I developed friendships with people far away and planned a romantic escape to the South Seas, vowing never to return. But try as I may, I haven't been able to stay away from home for more than a few years at a time. Something is tethering me to Denver. It's not my family - no, both my parents left their childhood homes and met here, and there was always an unspoken expectation that I'd leave for good, too. I don't think it's necessarily where my bones say I should be, either, because that deep, metaphysical attraction has always drawn me to places that are gray and rainy, with ferns and moss growing in the sidewalk cracks. Whatever this magnetism that keeps drawing me to Denver is, I've fought it for ages and opted for other adventures, moving first to New Zealand, then to Portland, Oregon; next to Chicago, and on to Izmir, Turkey, on a path in search of purpose.
After coming back to Denver in 2003, I had a conversation with a friend I'd worked with in Chicago, telling her what I was up to and how interesting it might be to study a new generation of young people's connections to the city in which I had spent my youth. She sighed, and with a sad, pitying tone in her voice said, "Oh, you're right back where you started!"
For a while, that notion gnawed at me, giving me headaches and keeping me up at night. What had I done, taking the offer of a free Ph.D. from my alma mater and the chance to help start a research center devoted to the very questions that I'd been asking for years? Couldn't I do better than this?! No matter how absurd my objections to coming home, they have stuck and resurfaced in periods of stress or frustration. My journey feels sometimes like a vertiginous spiral, leaving me dizzy and directionless. I think it has something to do with the "Denvoid" dynamic.
When I was in high school, and again when I came back to Denver halfway through college at age 19, I hung out at places like The Market on Larimer Street and Paris on the Platte - coffee shops then filled with chain-smoking poets and adolescent artists who spent hours drawing apocalyptic scenes in sketchbooks. We were all in search of our muses, and Denver seemed distinctly lacking in the realm of the weird, edgy and notable. To put ourselves in the path of the most urban action available, we lived in studio apartments on Capitol Hill and Poets Row, and we could hear drug deals being made outside our windows on summer nights. We wore thick-soled Creepers and Doc Martens shoes, smoked French cigarettes, hung out in artist studios that smelled of oil paint and turpentine, danced at Rock Island under the 15th Street viaduct, and walked around with our spiky hair and striped tights in the dark corners of lower downtown before developers and historic preservationists started letting the light - and the sports bars, swanky restaurants and million-dollar lofts - in.
For all its grittiness in the early 1990s, Denver still didn't satisfy. And as I developed a fascination with architecture and urban spaces, I started to see how sleazy Denver was, in a way - how eagerly its leaders jumped on new architectural fads, razing interesting old buildings to plant horrific postmodern disasters in their place, spending megabucks on sports stadiums and malls while neglecting public space. Even as I loved walking up 17th Avenue, the one place where you can experience an "urban canyon" skyscraper effect here, I considered Denver a city that had lost its character - its sense of self - and rolled over for the sprawl machine. It was my friend Marcus who first called it "Denvoid." We were getting out of here as soon as we could.
In Portland, I fell in love with the idea of a city saved from itself - a city whose leaders had fought back hard against builders of roads and destroyers of history. They had consistently sided with the people and their desire for beautiful built and natural public environments, preservation of local culture and commerce, less car traffic and more mass transit, and innovative governance to help the city and its region retain their unique character and quality. I loved the passion Portlanders had for their city. And I invested a great deal of energy myself in learning how it became what it is: the Mecca of urban planning, a shrine to all things possible in democracy, a hipster paradise. While Portlanders were tooling around on 1960s-vintage Vespas and riding light rail, Denverites were still sitting in traffic in their American cars. Or so I liked to think.
After I took the Ph.D. opportunity and came back from Turkey to start my studies, I noticed much about Denver had changed. Mayor Webb had invested in making LoDo a decent place to live and had authorized the development of some interesting public spaces: Commons Park along the Platte, the Denver Skatepark, a gorgeous new Convention Center (replacing the postmodern monstrosity that had been built in the late 1980s), and the new cultural complex that ties together the Denver Art Museum, the library and Civic Center Park. There was a Museum of Contemporary Art, a redeveloped Santa Fe Drive filled with galleries, tons of public art that hadn't been there before and (for better or for worse) lots of nice housing and cleaned-up neighborhoods. The RTD transit system had expanded, and the people had voted to take it even further, developing new light rail lines and transit corridors. My old favorite haunt, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex, was being well cared for, with a new opera house to replace the old Auditorium Theater and a redesigned street presence along 14th Ave. There was really something to see here. I moved into an apartment in uptown and let myself get acquainted with seeing Denver differently, through the lens of my own passions - namely, Argentine tango, architecture, planning, theater, and art - and decided to give the city another chance.
Sometimes, when I feel lonely for Portland's Forest Park or Chicago's Art Institute, I still call Denver, derisively, "the 'void." But things are changing here: the population is more diverse than it was in the '80s and '90s, and now it's common to hear several different languages being spoken around town; Mayor Hickenlooper and his planning czar, Peter Park, are investing in making Denver "liveable" and asking what that means to different people; the city seems to have matured in the culture department, and there are lots of interesting people around; and it's still really close to some beautiful natural places to play in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
I came home, but I did not fail. There is much to learn about this city of my youth, from those experiencing it as adolescents now and from those who migrated here in adulthood as I did to the Pacific Northwest. There is something tethering us to Denver, and I want to know what it is.
- Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, "Locomotion," 1984
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else. As a child, I dreamed of being whisked away to England and wearing a uniform to school; as a young woman, I developed friendships with people far away and planned a romantic escape to the South Seas, vowing never to return. But try as I may, I haven't been able to stay away from home for more than a few years at a time. Something is tethering me to Denver. It's not my family - no, both my parents left their childhood homes and met here, and there was always an unspoken expectation that I'd leave for good, too. I don't think it's necessarily where my bones say I should be, either, because that deep, metaphysical attraction has always drawn me to places that are gray and rainy, with ferns and moss growing in the sidewalk cracks. Whatever this magnetism that keeps drawing me to Denver is, I've fought it for ages and opted for other adventures, moving first to New Zealand, then to Portland, Oregon; next to Chicago, and on to Izmir, Turkey, on a path in search of purpose.
After coming back to Denver in 2003, I had a conversation with a friend I'd worked with in Chicago, telling her what I was up to and how interesting it might be to study a new generation of young people's connections to the city in which I had spent my youth. She sighed, and with a sad, pitying tone in her voice said, "Oh, you're right back where you started!"
For a while, that notion gnawed at me, giving me headaches and keeping me up at night. What had I done, taking the offer of a free Ph.D. from my alma mater and the chance to help start a research center devoted to the very questions that I'd been asking for years? Couldn't I do better than this?! No matter how absurd my objections to coming home, they have stuck and resurfaced in periods of stress or frustration. My journey feels sometimes like a vertiginous spiral, leaving me dizzy and directionless. I think it has something to do with the "Denvoid" dynamic.
When I was in high school, and again when I came back to Denver halfway through college at age 19, I hung out at places like The Market on Larimer Street and Paris on the Platte - coffee shops then filled with chain-smoking poets and adolescent artists who spent hours drawing apocalyptic scenes in sketchbooks. We were all in search of our muses, and Denver seemed distinctly lacking in the realm of the weird, edgy and notable. To put ourselves in the path of the most urban action available, we lived in studio apartments on Capitol Hill and Poets Row, and we could hear drug deals being made outside our windows on summer nights. We wore thick-soled Creepers and Doc Martens shoes, smoked French cigarettes, hung out in artist studios that smelled of oil paint and turpentine, danced at Rock Island under the 15th Street viaduct, and walked around with our spiky hair and striped tights in the dark corners of lower downtown before developers and historic preservationists started letting the light - and the sports bars, swanky restaurants and million-dollar lofts - in.
For all its grittiness in the early 1990s, Denver still didn't satisfy. And as I developed a fascination with architecture and urban spaces, I started to see how sleazy Denver was, in a way - how eagerly its leaders jumped on new architectural fads, razing interesting old buildings to plant horrific postmodern disasters in their place, spending megabucks on sports stadiums and malls while neglecting public space. Even as I loved walking up 17th Avenue, the one place where you can experience an "urban canyon" skyscraper effect here, I considered Denver a city that had lost its character - its sense of self - and rolled over for the sprawl machine. It was my friend Marcus who first called it "Denvoid." We were getting out of here as soon as we could.
In Portland, I fell in love with the idea of a city saved from itself - a city whose leaders had fought back hard against builders of roads and destroyers of history. They had consistently sided with the people and their desire for beautiful built and natural public environments, preservation of local culture and commerce, less car traffic and more mass transit, and innovative governance to help the city and its region retain their unique character and quality. I loved the passion Portlanders had for their city. And I invested a great deal of energy myself in learning how it became what it is: the Mecca of urban planning, a shrine to all things possible in democracy, a hipster paradise. While Portlanders were tooling around on 1960s-vintage Vespas and riding light rail, Denverites were still sitting in traffic in their American cars. Or so I liked to think.
After I took the Ph.D. opportunity and came back from Turkey to start my studies, I noticed much about Denver had changed. Mayor Webb had invested in making LoDo a decent place to live and had authorized the development of some interesting public spaces: Commons Park along the Platte, the Denver Skatepark, a gorgeous new Convention Center (replacing the postmodern monstrosity that had been built in the late 1980s), and the new cultural complex that ties together the Denver Art Museum, the library and Civic Center Park. There was a Museum of Contemporary Art, a redeveloped Santa Fe Drive filled with galleries, tons of public art that hadn't been there before and (for better or for worse) lots of nice housing and cleaned-up neighborhoods. The RTD transit system had expanded, and the people had voted to take it even further, developing new light rail lines and transit corridors. My old favorite haunt, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex, was being well cared for, with a new opera house to replace the old Auditorium Theater and a redesigned street presence along 14th Ave. There was really something to see here. I moved into an apartment in uptown and let myself get acquainted with seeing Denver differently, through the lens of my own passions - namely, Argentine tango, architecture, planning, theater, and art - and decided to give the city another chance.
Sometimes, when I feel lonely for Portland's Forest Park or Chicago's Art Institute, I still call Denver, derisively, "the 'void." But things are changing here: the population is more diverse than it was in the '80s and '90s, and now it's common to hear several different languages being spoken around town; Mayor Hickenlooper and his planning czar, Peter Park, are investing in making Denver "liveable" and asking what that means to different people; the city seems to have matured in the culture department, and there are lots of interesting people around; and it's still really close to some beautiful natural places to play in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
I came home, but I did not fail. There is much to learn about this city of my youth, from those experiencing it as adolescents now and from those who migrated here in adulthood as I did to the Pacific Northwest. There is something tethering us to Denver, and I want to know what it is.