Out of the city, to the burbs

Lakewood neighbors uneasy about huge light-rail project

By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 23, 2007 at 2:43 p.m.
Updated November 19, 2007 at 2:43 p.m.

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WALKING THE LINE: Day 3

We looked west across Sheridan Boulevard toward Lakewood with some puzzlement to begin Day 3 of the Rocky's downtown-to-Golden walk of the 12-mile West Corridor light-rail project.

We were leaving the inner city of Denver for the suburbs, at the point where 75 years ago trolley riders had to dig for more coins if they wanted to go farther west into the hinterlands.

Yet, a more urbanized Lakewood was ahead of us, while behind us the Denver experience was a surprisingly bucolic stretch where the light-rail line will go through a broad expanse of parkland.

We knew from planning this walk that we would encounter a lot of juxtapositions in Lakewood. The maps showed small residential lots sandwiched around multi-acre horse properties, industrial yards across from babbling streams.

Lakewood is a living and breathing contradiction of a suburb. And from the conversations we'd had with folks who knew we were coming, the opinions we expected to encounter would be as diverse as the landscape.

But first things first.

We had to avoid becoming road kill on Sheridan.

Dry Gulch has cut a huge valley between West 10th and West 13th avenues. And traffic through it is a constant roar. Nearly 40,000 cars daily go across the ravine. There are no sidewalks or places to cross.

We walked south to 10th Avenue to the traffic light.

Across the street we saw an old shopping center anchored on one end by a Mexican restaurant, El Torito, home of tasty lunches.

Owner Manuel Mercado has been at this location for seven years, and he's looking favorably on the changes light rail might bring. "It could be dangerous; traffic is going to be heavy. But it's going to be booming. It's going to be a nice improvement."

RTD will build a park-n-Ride across 10th from his restaurant - at 800 spaces, the fourth-largest station on the project.

Mercado plans to sell take-out lunches to the construction workers.

Activist gets his bridge

Terry Smith lives near 10th and Ames Street and is a familiar face at West Corridor meetings.

When RTD considered saving money by not raising Sheridan over the gulch on a big bridge, but instead just having the light rail go over existing Sheridan, Smith was one of the residents who strongly objected.

Eventually, Denver got together with RTD and Lakewood and came up with some cash and a way to restore the original plan.

"I'm pretty happy," he said as we chatted at a picnic table under a tree in his front yard. "We got our bridge and that was the big one; not to have that bridge would have made the neighborhood pretty miserable."

Smith's plan was to demolish his house and build a four-plex rental unit next to the station. But shortly after our walk was done, we found out that RTD had sent him notice that it is acquiring it for the park-n-Ride.

We walked back down to the old track bed and pressed westward. Houses and businesses were much closer to the future tracks here. Think of threading a needle, and you get some idea of how it will be to snake two tracks and the overhead wires through some of the openings in old Lakewood.

Only a few hundred feet west from Sheridan, we found a business owner who will soon be hurting.

Dave Crespin and his wife, Brenda Perkovich, have run BJ's Used Jeep Parts out of a warehouse and junkyard on the south side of the old track since 1989. He figures he has 10,000 parts big and small there, with people coming from far and wide for hard-to-find replacement parts on Wranglers and other Jeeps.

But to get to his front door, you have to walk from 12th Avenue over the old tracks. It's not a public driveway and as of Jan. 25, RTD has revoked Crespin's permission to cross the track bed.

He has no other way to get in. The property is landlocked. Dry Gulch, a misnomer since it's always flowing, cuts him off on the south.

On paper, the 11th Avenue right-of-way stubs into the back side from the west. But it doesn't exist. Instead, it bends to follow the gulch toward Sheridan.

"When we first started hearing about light rail nine years ago, RTD said to just keep operating the way we are," Crespin said. "They said, 'We'll give you plenty of time to get rid of your inventory.' "

Crespin is up against it thinking of where he can go. As for RTD, since it doesn't need any of Crespin's property; it has no obligation to help him relocate. It isn't RTD's problem that Crespin and Perkovich bought a lot with access only over a "revocable easement."

Big names from the past

Back on the old tracks, and past a snarling Rottweiler on a thin tether, the right of way bent north and west again, sandwiched between weeded lots and some small industrial properties, and behind Mountair Park.

We broke out of the weeds at Harlan Street, where the old tracks used to run right into 13th Avenue. We looked south on Harlan and briefly considered a side trip.

A few folks had told us that beat author Jack Kerouac had owned a home about two miles south, near Alameda Avenue. Kerouac in Lakewood? Larimer Street skid row, Denargo Market, that's Kerouac in Denver.

But for sure, Kerouac bought a bungalow here in 1949 with a book advance, and lived there for about six weeks before going bonkers and leaving.

RTD considered using Alameda as well as Colfax Avenue for the light-rail path, along with this old rail line we were hiking. RTD already owned the line, so some critics thought the selection was preordained.

The line, an old trolley route, has now brought us into the historic heart of old Lakewood. Both were laid out by wealthy railroad magnate and developer William A.H. Loveland.

Loveland was an entrepreneur who started or ran numerous businesses in pioneer Colorado. He helped establish the Colorado Central Railroad up Clear Creek Canyon to Central City.

In 1888, he built a huge home in the grass and farmlands between Denver and Golden, on what became the 1400 block of Harlan Street. The next year he filed a plat laying out the streets of a new town around his land holdings. He named it Lakewood.

There actually was a lake on Loveland's plan from which Lakewood took its name. It was to be in a swale on the north side of 10th between Pierce and Reed streets, along Lakewood Gulch, where townhouses stand today.

Along present-day 13th Avenue, Loveland planned a railroad to connect Denver and Golden, with his new town straddling it. The avenue was named Mountain View. The train would help populate the new town.

He laid out the railroad in 1890, and it soon opened. But Loveland died in 1894 in that house on Harlan, which still stands, one of the oldest in the city. Today, it's a boarding house.

Apprehensive neighbors

We resumed walking down 13th and simply stopped to chat with anyone who passed by. We also knocked on doors. The neighborhood here is named Two Creeks, for Lakewood Gulch on the south and Dry Gulch on the north.

Lakewood residents have actively followed the West Corridor's planning, much more so than the folks on the Denver side, and we discovered some are none too happy about how it's coming along.

Robert Haldeman was watching TV when we knocked on his door at 13th and Reed Street, where he's lived for 28 years. He used to watch slow freight trains go up and down the tracks in front of his house.

He doesn't plan to ride light rail though, even though there will be a station two blocks down at Pierce. He's mostly concerned with how it will affect the value of his house, built on a small corner lot in 1933.

"We don't know whether it's going to enhance our property or not," he said. "But it's going to happen." He wasn't the first to express a sense of resignation that not only can you not fight City Hall, but you can't fight the transit agency, either.

At our next stop, a block up at Saulsbury Street, Deb Jones reinforced the impression we were starting to get that there is a lot of apprehension out here in Lakewood over this big project landing at their doorsteps.

She's concerned whether RTD will seriously consider the mounting concern in the neighborhood over how the light rail will split the community.

"A lot of us have worked very hard on this," said Jones, a community activist who is a founder of Historic Northeast Lakewood. "This will split our neighborhood in half like Sixth Avenue did.

"RTD listened, but I'm not sure they heard."

Sue Schelgunov lives a block west in a cute bungalow she bought only last year. We heard more nervousness and apprehension about what's coming.

"They tell you it's going to add to the property values, but I'm waiting to see," she said. "I'm a little worried. This house was built in 1928 and I'm worried about the vibrations."

She thinks a noise wall might help. There is one planned in front of her house. RTD and Lakewood are working on a plan to allow residents to opt out of having the walls and instead putting up privacy fences on their own property lines or taking a one-time cash payment in lieu of any noise mitigation.

The kicker is that a certain number of neighbors must all agree first. That seems a tall order when this RTD project is starting to pit neighbor against neighbor, each wanting something different.

Tracks seen as barrier

On the corner at Vance Street, Sara Farrar-Nagy lives in a 1927 arts and crafts style house that she and her husband bought two years ago, in part because it will be close to the Wadsworth light- rail station.

But now they have second thoughts. Lakewood is targeting this area for redevelopment with higher densities and multifamily housing, precisely because of that same station.

"Now, maybe home improvements make no sense," she said.

Farrar-Nagy is part of a group called the Lakewood Collaborative that recently began pushing RTD for more input on the project.

RTD has told them it's late in the game for significant input. West Corridor is in final design, and the broad outline is already nailed down.

But the biggest thing many folks on this stretch told us they fear is light rail acting as a barrier. They want to minimize walls and maximize crossings.

"We want absolutely no chain link or wire fences, and ultimately we want no fences," she said. "There is plenty of mixed incomes and diversity in the neighborhoods, and the West Corridor project absolutely cleaves them in half.

"The more barriers that go up, the fewer pedestrian crossings there are, the more likely you are to create not just another side of the tracks but a wrong side of the tracks."

Acquisition riles lot owner

Just another two blocks up, at Wadsworth, Galen Foster and his wife, Kim Snyder, found themselves on the wrong side of the tracks when RTD targeted their combination home and window- tinting shop of 23 years, at 14th Avenue and Wadsworth, to be part of a 1,000-car park-n-Ride.

"I feel like we're sitting on Boardwalk," Snyder said about being on high-traffic Wadsworth. "And they want to use it to store lumber and cranes."

RTD says it needs this whole block not only for the garage but also for holding construction materials and a parking area for work crews. It's possible that after all is built, the land where Pro-Tint sits today could be sold off to a developer.

That reeks of a land grab to Foster, a former hell-raiser who built a successful business and found inner peace through fly-fishing. But he still has some of that hell-raiser in him. He's planning rallies and protests.

He's even started a Web site, LandGrabColorado.com.

Inside, their property is two older houses joined together. The couple completely remodeled it after a fire a few years ago. The interior is beautifully furnished. Juxtaposed with Foster's appearance - with his long, straight gray beard with streaks of black, he looks like a stand-in for ZZ Top - is the melodious sound of classical music streaming from his sound system.

But that peacefulness belies the couple's determination to fight RTD. They had planned to redevelop their property themselves, and even have an artist's rendering.

After our walk took us past their place, Foster called to say he'd received a letter from RTD saying it intended to acquire his property.

"It felt so bad this morning," he said, "that I had tears in my eyes. They're taking me away from what I built and loved, and want to put me down somewhere else and say it's the same? It's not.

"We're going to fight it to the bitter end."

We left their business behind and walked past a fortune teller's place, also on RTD's acquisition list. Hmm. Wonder why they didn't know not to set up shop here? We made Wadsworth the stopping point for our third day. Once we got into Lakewood, it was taking us much longer than we thought to make distance.

It dawned on us why that was. At least up until now, every person we had approached with camera, notebook and video was willing to talk. Not a single turndown, once they realized what we were there for.

Someone was listening to them.

Problem was, it was taking three hours to go five blocks, and Golden was still a long way off.

About the series

FasTracks kicks off in earnest next year when crews start building the 12-mile light-rail West Corridor line through diverse and history-rich neighborhoods from downtown to Golden.

All eyes are on this first line, as it will set the tone for the nine other corridors to be built in the massive $6 billion transit system approved by voters in 2004.

To begin telling this story, the Rocky's team of reporter Kevin Flynn, above center, photographer Darin McGregor and videographer Laressa Bachelor trekked the length of the West Corridor. We invite you to come along, and experience our amazing urban journey of discovery.

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