(The following article by Traci Watson was posted on the USA Today website on November 24.)
DENVER — A decade ago, the only buildings in Denver’s Central Platte Valley were crumbling, and the only residents were homeless people. Railroads that once kept their trains in the area fled in the 1980s. Left behind were empty box cars and rows of train tracks.
Today, the former rail yard is one of Denver’s hippest neighborhoods. A new park along the South Platte River draws dog walkers from around the city. Empty-nesters and young singles are moving into thousands of new loft-style apartments. Coffee shops and restaurants have opened.
“I got a lot of skepticism – a lot,” Denver real estate agent Jan Nelsen says of her decision to move to a loft in the valley two years ago. “Now when I have (friends) down, they say, ‘This is so much fun!’ ”
The rebirth of the Central Platte Valley is an example of a type of urban renewal playing out throughout the nation. Across the USA, developers and government officials are bringing new life to abandoned rail yards, the lots where railroads once maintained their train cars and locomotives. And that’s bringing new residents, shoppers and businesses to faded downtowns.
City officials in Trenton, N.J., are working to turn a rail yard there into a park. A museum and homes may someday replace an abandoned rail yard in Sacramento In Kansas City, Mo., developers hope to build condos, apartments, shops and a hotel in a rail yard.
Other rail-yard projects are underway in Las Vegas, New York, Portland and Dallas.
“There are so many sites I can’t remember them all,” says Tony Love, Union Pacific’s general manager for real estate. “It’s all over the country.”
Rail yards make perfect targets for redevelopment, urban planners say. Yards usually include at least 10 acres of land, and some are twice as big as the city’s downtown. They’re located in the city center. And they often sit next to rivers because laying train tracks in river valleys was easy.
But lead, petroleum byproducts and other chemicals contaminate many yards. The pollution helped scare away developers – until now.
Today, government officials from the city level to the Environmental Protection Agency (news – web sites ) have changed their policies to make cleaning and redeveloping polluted sites easier. Railroads are more likely to sell the yards because they need bigger, more modern facilities than the yards they built in the 1800s. And Americans have rediscovered their cities. More people are willing to live downtown, or at least drive there for a night out.
Those changes help explain why the former rail yards have become so enticing.
Any list of rail-yard resurrections must include Denver.
There, the rail yards sprouted in the Central Platte Valley in the late 1800s. Rail traffic in the United States withered after World War II. But the Denver rail yards – though less and less busy – remained, and the city grew up around them.
In 1986, Burlington Northern Railroad moved its operations out of the downtown yards to a less congested area where land is less expensive. The Central Platte Valley lay unused for almost a decade.
But Denver officials and residents worked to make something of the neighborhood. An economic boom helped pique the interest of developers. Construction in the Central Platte Valley started in 1992 and continues today.
Denver’s local amusement park relocated there. The city’s baseball stadium, Coors Field, was built in an abandoned yard. So was the Pepsi Center, a sports and entertainment arena.
The area now boasts thousands of new residents, and a company moved three weeks ago into the neighborhood’s first new office building. The signature brew at a nearby pub owned by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is Railyard Ale.
The street life in the Central Platte Valley may not compare with New York’s or San Francisco’s. But people such as Nelsen love the neighborhood- as much for what they have as for what they don’t have to worry about.
“We don’t want to take care of a yard,” says Nelsen, who used to work for a company that developed many of the neighborhood’s new buildings. “We don’t want to take care of a furnace.”
Now, she dashes to the local coffee shop without getting into her car. From the gym in her building, she watches the trains roll by on the two tracks that still run through her neighborhood.
Denver’s leaders are as delighted as area residents by the changes. The rehabilitation will “lead to the continued vitality of downtown,” says Cindy Christensen of the Downtown Denver Partnership.
But there are naysayers.
Local historian Phil Goodstein, author of Denver In Our Time , laments that there’s little housing for poor people in the valley. He also worries that floods – which often struck the valley until dams were built in the 1970s – could someday wipe out everything.
“Building in the floodplain was insane,” Goodstein says.
Critics of how some rail yards have been redeveloped are more vocal in other cities. In Salt Lake City, for instance, the mall built on the old rail yard has drawn shoppers from the suburbs to the city. But it has also sucked customers and businesses away from other city businesses.
Downtown business owners in Sacramento also are concerned. A deal to develop the rail yard there is nearly done. At 240 acres, it would be among the largest such projects in the nation.
Michael Ault of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership calls the project a “wonderful opportunity” but worries that it will harm the city’s historic downtown. “You’re talking some folks and businesses that have been here 30 years,” he says. “We shouldn’t be creating a new downtown.”