Is There a Parks Desert in Park Hill?
This year, the Stapleton Transportation Management Association (TMA) and Walk2Connect are organizing a new event, the NE Walk Fest, scheduled for Saturday, August 24 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
A preliminary notice describes the event as “a unique, fun, informative and community driven walking event … an inspiring and engaging day of walking three East Denver neighborhoods (Park Hill, Stapleton and Montclair) promoting community health and connection, neighborhood walkability and everyday wayfinding.”
Three parks – Skyland Park (33rd & Holly), McNichols Park (17th & Syracuse), and The Green at Stapleton (29th & Roslyn) are “home bases” for the event.
Within the geographic area where there would be interest in NE Walk Fest, focus on a smaller portion. Look at the area bounded by Colorado Boulevard, Monaco Parkway, Martin Luther King Boulevard, and Colfax Avenue. Consider parkways and parks in this focus area, then watersheds.
Four parkways (17th Avenue, Monaco Parkway, Forest Parkway, MLK Parkway) serve as treasured assets for those of us who live there, and for visitors. In addition to those parkways, there is one very small park, Ferguson Park at 23rd and Dexter. When you look at neighborhoods to the west and to the south – at Stapleton and at Lowry – our focus area is a “Park Desert” by comparison.
In Stapleton and Lowry, planning and design of open space and recreation facilities and interconnections between them were integrated with principles of storm drainage and floodplain management. There’s a lot of well-connected open space. In Park Hill, storm drainage and floodplain issues were addressed through a combination of drainage engineering practices from the 1950’s and earlier, and also, frankly, benign neglect. In this area, parks and parkways were designed and constructed in a separate process. In addition, flooding issues were framed as “engineering problems”, which, therefore, need to be addressed by qualified engineers.
So let’s just imagine a different scenario for a moment, using watersheds as a helpful framework. The focus area is divided diagonally between two watersheds. The portion southwest of a line roughly from Colfax and Monaco to MLK and Colorado is in the Montclair Creek watershed. The portion northeast of that line is in the North Park Hill watershed.
Put the following in the back of your mind as you visualize walking between the three parks on August 24:
Consider only the North Park Hill watershed for August 24; one of the two major branches of that drainage-way flows through Skyland Park and parts of Holly Square.
The major branches or their tributaries flow through portions of Monaco Parkway, 22nd & Kearney Commercial District, Smiley Middle School, Hallett Elementary, Stedman Elementary, and the Odyssey School (just outside the focus area).
A pedestrian connection is needed between Smiley and Stapleton; new connections can be as valuable as new parks.
What can you come up with? The hope of the NE Walk Fest is to work with the city to complement the event with at least one or two permanent pedestrian/walkability features.
If the idea of pedestrian improvements and/or more parks and mini-parkways in Park Hill is interesting to you, let your elected officials and Denver city staff know. A reliable source said that more will be done to accommodate pedestrians (and bicyclists) only when enough of us speak up. So SPEAK UP.
An expert in floodplain management, Brian Hyde can be reached at westerly_connect_brian@comcast.net or 720-939-6039. To volunteer for or learn more about the NE Walk Fest, email Jonathon Stalls of Walk2Connect at jonathon@walk2connect.com.