A Farewell and a Welcome
By Erin Vanderberg
Outgoing GPHN Editor
When I landed the sweet gig of editing the Greater Park Hill Newspaper two years ago, I’d had quite a week landing a couple of other sweet gigs – one working full-time for the nonpartisan staff of the Colorado General Assembly, and the other becoming pregnant with my first child. Having just moved back to my home state of Colorado from the East Coast, I felt like everything had come together beautifully. Two years later, I am quite thrilled I managed to pull it off for this long, but I’ve decided that one job plus motherhood is enough.
Park Hill is a proud community and rightfully so. We all know that the American Planning Association named us as one of the Ten Great Neighborhoods in America five years back. They credited us for all the obvious planning-related things – tree-lined streets in close proximity to downtown, City Park and, soon, rapid transit – but they also tapped into the other reasons we all live here – great neighbors and powerful history.
One of my favorite interviews for this paper was sitting down with Tom Jensen to write a Blockworker Beat column – a place in the newspaper where I highlight the wonderful people who hand-deliver the GPHN. Tom lives on Forest Parkway and spearheads a multi-block street party with a band, a great potluck and none other than the Denver Cupcake Truck (the Moores live on his block). It’s the kind of event you walk by and think, “Gosh, I love this neighborhood.” In fact, I saw just such a comment on the Park Hill Neighborhood Facebook page the same evening of this year’s event.
The massive block party, a tradition now years in the making, catalyzed from Tom’s time as a Blockworker. He felt it was important to know his neighbors’ names just in case he ran into them while dropping their paper on their porch. This turned into a spreadsheet, and then an e-mail distribution list. It was the 90s, and the streets around him were erupting with violence, so he started organizing his neighbors and participating in the Elm Street marches that took place regularly on Wednesdays. “No Guns, No Drugs in Park Hill,” read their signs. Neighbors wanting the best for their Greater Park Hill community, it seems that it was always thus here.
Shortly after I came aboard in 2012, the Park Hill giant Art Branscombe passed away. I spoke to his daughter Merredith, who like her father is a voice of wisdom and reason, and we decided that she should write the piece about his life for the cover. In the story, she discussed her parent’s move to a house on Bellaire Street. When Art and his wife Bea moved to Park Hill in 1959 (and bought their house for $13,500!), like most of their neighbors they began receiving leaflets urging them out of their home while they could still get a decent price. The flyers were a direct response to the influx of African-Americans to the neighborhood, who were also finding a happily ever after in the tree-lined streets of Park Hill.
Art and Bea joined with their friends and neighbors to take a stand against these fear tactics. They asserted that everyone stood to gain more by promoting the neighborhood than by tearing it down. They got people together through block parties, progressive parties, wine and cheese parties, and once people knew each other and knew what they stood to lose, they mobilized. These folks became the Park Hill Action Committee, which morphed over the years into the Registered Neighborhood Organization for Park Hill, the GPHC. Their work was nationally recognized, earning our neighborhood a visit from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964, and also earning Art a firebomb on his front doorstep – and it changed the course of this neighborhood’s history.
For two years, I’ve attended nearly every meeting of the Greater Park Hill Community, Inc. What I hear time and time again from outsiders is how powerful this neighborhood is. This isn’t said lightly. Just look at the Keyes v. School District 1 case, which emerged out of Park Hill as the only case for desegregation from “a major city outside of the South.” Or the Park Hill Airport Lawsuit, with predominantly Park Hill-based plaintiffs, which brought about the relocation of the city’s airport and the end of life under the flight path for North Park Hill residents. Or the mobilization of the Park Hill Babysitting Coop members that successfully urged Kaiser to keep its Franklin location instead of moving to the border of the city. Or, recently, the GPHC’s work in helping the Holly Square community defeat a liquor store application at the site in order to make room for the new development.
In my time as editor, I see again and again that Park Hill’s character transpires from great neighbors upholding proud histories – block party traditions several decades old; time-honored GPHC events and new traditions like the 4th of July Parade and perhaps the revival of Viva Streets next year; long-standing Park Hill businesses and the new ones we can’t wait to flock to.
Thank you for the excellent stories, neighbors. It’s been an honor telling them.
Now to introduce you to the new GPHN editor, Cara DeGette. Serving on the new editor hiring committee, I can tell you that we had some stellar candidates and it was a very difficult decision to make. In the end, we chose Cara for her 25 years of journalism experience, her affable inquisitiveness, her Denver nativeness and her Park Hill address.
A graduate of Colorado State University, Cara worked for several years at the Vail Daily before helping to launch the weekly Colorado Springs Independent in 1993. At the Colorado Springs Independent she served as news editor, chief investigator, columnist and the newspaper’s longtime editor-in-chief. In 2006, Cara helped launch ColoradoConfidential, an online news organization and pilot project of the Washington-based Center for Independent Media; the following year she became the first state editor of the site, which is now the ColoradoIndependent.com. In addition to GPHN, Cara also serves as editor-in-chief at Colorado Public News, the start-up news service and website of PBS member station Colorado Public Television Channel 12. A recipient of numerous national and regional journalism awards, Cara is the immediate past president of the Society of Professional Journalists/Colorado Pro Chapter.
Cara comes aboard on December 1, and January will mark her first issue. She can be reached at editor@greaterparkhill.org. Please join me in welcoming her to the GPHN.