Part Three: Our House
St Cajetan's was the last building at auraria to get historic designation. The church was the focal point of the westside community. |
Prologue: The Experiment Continues
By Carson
Reed ('83)
Reprinted from Metropolitan Magazine, Summer, 1987
In July of 1974, the Denver
Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) began phase two of its
demolition of the Auraria neighborhood. Among the first
buildings to come down was the old Hungarian Flour Mill
at Eighth and Wazee. For some, the unceremonious progress
was a sign that controversy over the Auraria campus would
finally come to an end.
But even as
the wrecking ball swung, debate was rising to its most
fevered pitch. In the legislature, even supporters of
the education complex worried that the proposed $40 million
budget for construction could rise as high as $105 million
or even $140 million before it was complete. The Auraria
board of directors, seeking to expedite the negotiation
process among the three Auraria institutions, pled for
more power over non-academic areas of the center. DURA
faced two lawsuits from groups of displaced Auraria businesses
and merger proposals seemed to breed like rabbits. The
controversy was not restricted to Colorado. All across
America, funding shortages combined with double-digit
inflation were creating serious problems for colleges
and universities. Many state systems were seeking ways
to share facilities and resources with sister colleges,
with varying degrees of success. All eyes were focused
on the experiment at Auraria.
That same July, the Society for College and University
Planning (SCUP) held its annual conference at the Brown
Palace Hotel in Denver. Not surprisingly, Auraria was
a hot topic of conversation. On Tuesday, July 17, SCUP
director H. Gilbert Nicol praised Auraria as "the
best example in the nation of inter-institutional cooperation
as far as the sharing of facilities is concerned.”
On Wednesday, education planner James Farmer countered
that he found "no rational reason" for Auraria.
In fact, he said, it would combine all the worst aspects
of higher education into one big, expensive failure. "It's
just too bulky to work," he said.
On Thursday, lines of dump trucks cleared away the rubble
of the old Hungarian Flour Mill.
Construction was completed on a "fast track" schedule designed to keep the project ahead of inflation. "We moved out of a warehouse district into a construction site," remembers move coordinator Nancy Sturgill. |
Westside's Story
St. Cajetan's Church was the focal
point (Of the Hispanic Westside neighborhood, of which Auraria
formed the northwest corner. Finished in 1926, the church
provided emotional, spiritual, cultural, and even financial
and medical resources to Denver's oldest continually occupied
community.
Among Denver's minority communities, Westside has always
been among the most settled with a high percentage of residents
owning their homes. But in the years following World War
II, the part of Westside known as Auraria had declined into
a predominantly warehouse/industrial area with scattered
pockets of deteriorating housing.
Urban renewal studies, including Metropolitan State's investigation
of possible campus sites, showed that Auraria was far and
away the best possible site for a large urban renewal project.
But surveys of the neighborhood, it seems, rarely included
surveys of the neighbors. It wasn't until demolition had
already begun on the Auraria site in 1973 that the University
of Denver surveyed Auraria's 400-plus residents. The findings:
more than 70 percent of the people living there would have
preferred to stay.
Many, if not most, of Auraria's residents were satisfied
with their financial settlements from DURA. These included
home replacement grants of up to $15,000 (in addition to
the cost of the home) for owners and rent subsidies of up
to $1,000 a year for four years for renters. But whatever
the financial fairness of the urban renewal project, there
were emotional costs to be counted that DURA could never
hope to replace.
Particularly for long-time residents, the move was a traumatic
breakup of an extended family. As Waldo Bienavidez of the
Committee to Preserve Westside said: "The people displaced
by the construction may find a home, but not a community."
It became a controversy within Denver's Catholic community
after Archbishop James Casey lent his support to the Auraria
Higher Education Center. To St. Cajetan's Father Peter Garcia,
Casey's announcement seemed hopelessly divisive.
"I think our people are forced to vote 'no' on the
bond issue," he said. “They have no choice. It
is they who will have to move."
For many Auraria businesses, the issue was more financial
than emotional. Of the 249 firms relocated from Auraria,
51 were out of business by 1979, and many blamed the increased
costs of a new location. Among the most vocal was Moses
Katz, who formed the Auraria Businessmen Against Confiscation
and led many of the legal battles against DURA. "The
whole thing stank," Katz said. "It practically
put me out of business and made an old man out of me. 1
had 14 pieces of property in Auraria and (DURA) confiscated
it all."
Ironically, St. Cajetan's was the last of Auraria's historic
buildings to be saved from the wrecking ball. Largely due
to community pressure, St. Cajetan's was preserved as an
historic monument to Denver's Hispanic community and is
unquestionably one of the most recognizable and beautiful
buildings on campus.
In 1975, as the Community College of Denver became the first
collegiate resident of Auraria, a new St. Cajetan's opened
on West Alameda, and most of the community moved with it.
In the years to come, some of the former residents of Auraria
returned as students, both the beneficiaries and victims
of the bittersweet sweep of progress.
Our House
A section of 9th street before rehabilitation. |
It was an unseasonably warm Friday afternoon, December 10,
1976. Christmas lights hung on the City and County Building.
The plaster faces of Mary and Joseph and little baby Jesus
watched from the comer of Colfax and Bannock as movers worked
side by side with nervous faculty, pulling the guts out
of anonymous buildings.
Moving vans lined the streets of the Civic Center, accepting
a constant stream of desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and
all the accumulated bric--a-brac of Metropolitan State College.
A huge crane blocked three lanes of traffic along Colfax
as it hoisted a two-ton flight simulator from 1222 Glenarm.
The administration had been moving slowly onto the new campus
throughout the summer, but the long- awaited (and for some,
long-dreaded) faculty move hadn't begun until the first
day of Christmas break. In most ways, the sunshine and warm
weather were a blessing, but the snowmelt had turned the
Auraria campus into a sea of mud. Moving men, 100-pound
crates on their backs, sucked one heavy foot at a time out
of the ankle -deep muck. There were few sidewalks, no trees,
no grass, and no directions for getting around. "It
was an odd situation," remembers move coordinator Nancy
Sturgill. "We were moving the college out of a warehouse
district and in to a construction site."
The brick (what color is that? Red? Purple?) buildings rose
from the ground like something organic, lowslung, a color
not unlike the mud itself. This much-heralded "unique
urban campus" had, for the moment at least, a distinctly
suburban feeling, smelling like any new tract division of
paint, wood, gypsum dust, and, of course, the ubiquitous
mud.
For all the inconveniences (and all the confusion), there
was a tangible excitement in the air, a sense of new adventure,
an unspoken hope that Auraria spelled permanence, and, yes,
a much-hoped-for visibility and respectability. The campus
was at least not intimidating. Its designers had labored
hard to keep a human scale to the design. And one day, trees
might line this corridor; ivy might cover these walls. Like
the college itself, the new campus held a promise of hope
for a bright future. The lifeblood of Metropolitan State
College-its people-would hopefully turn this new house into
a home.
New sidewalks for Ninth Street. |
Mega-Campus
The original designs for the Auraria campus called for a
l4-story (or taller), nine-acre, terraced "mega--structure"
-a self-contained city of 30,000 looming like an Aztec pyramid
above the blank face of hundreds of acres of parking. Jacques
Brownson, Auraria's final master- planner, scrapped the
"mega-campus" concept in favor of a more modest
community of modular buildings, clustered on the site's
only 16 acres above the flood plain of the Platte.
From Bauhaus to
Our House
In designing the layout of Auraria, Brownson incorporated
a number of elements of modem architecture that he believed
would create an. economical, flexible environment suited
to the changing needs of the three colleges. There are no
supporting walls, interior or exterior, among the buildings
of Auraria. Although many of the buildings were designed
by different architects, all the designs incorporated a
basic plan of 30-square-foot "bays" (the distance
between supporting pillars), so that the buildings could
later be expanded or connected to one another in an almost
endless variety of ways.
Integral to Brownson's plan were pre-manufactured metal
"skins" for the buildings, which could be bolted
or unbolted easily. But only the library would ever get
such a flexible facade. After the basic planning had been
completed, the Auraria board opted for brick "skins,"
sacrificing flexibility and innovation for a stronger sense
of permanence. . (Brownson adds that a strong desire among
board members to "build!" local" may also
have played a part in the decision.) Not surprisingly, the
library, also the only building designed by an out-of-state
architectural firm, became the most controversial of all
of Auraria's buildings (see sidebar).
A House Divided
Vets against merger–from 1973 to 1983 Metroploitan state faced almost yearly merger proposals. |
Metropolitan State College has always thrived under the
threat or promise of change, but during the years of the
move to Auraria, change seemed ready to swallow up every
aspect of the college.
President Jim Palmer inherited a college in flux, and his
seven-year tenure at Metropolitan State reflected the inherent
controversies of the college's condition.
The low ebb came in 1973 when, under pressure from the legislature
to cut costs while strengthening the business and technical
departments in the school, Palmer made a series of faculty
cuts in the Liberal Arts Department, permanently affecting
his working relationship with the faculty.
During those years, faculty programs, as well as positions,
were often threatened. Because of legislative concerns over
program duplication, the move to Auraria required a lot
of horse trading between the three schools. From 1974 to
1976, the presidents of the three schools met on a weekly
basis to iron out problems that literally had no models.
Among the hardest to swallow at Metropolitan State was an
agreement to relinquish its two-year programs to CCD. Many
of the faculty running those programs had helped create
them, and proprietary feelings ran high.
"It was a hard loss," remembers engineering professor
Harry Temmer. "We watched a number of excellent programs
die because CCD wasn't prepared to take them all on."
Jim Palmer had to deal with moving, merging and faculty cuts during his tenure as president of the college. |
During the process of negotiation,
it was also decided that UCD would control the Auraria
library,
on the premise that universities have larger book budgets
than state colleges. But Metropolitan State had by
far the
largest book collection of the three schools, and head
librarian Charlene Alexis says flatly: "We were
used as a bargaining tool at Auraria."
The trustees supported
Palmer throughout the fray: "We were definitely under
pressure from the legislature," says former trustee
Betty Naugle. "I'm sure that some of the faculty
looked on [Palmer] as an autocrat, but we needed somebody
who could
be tough in order to survive. Tough leaders aren't always
popular. "
Whatever else may be argued, Naugle's interpretation of
the times was right on target. Palmer survived the flak
until August of 1978, when he took a job with the Department
of Transportation in Washington, D.C. Without leadership,
Metropolitan State was vulnerable, and by September UCD
Chancellor Harold Haak had once again proposed a merger
at Auraria. By October Senator Hugh Fowler had publicly
promised to introduce a bill placing Metropolitan State
under the University of Colorado system. For the next six
years, the faculty and students would hardly think or talk
about anything else.