Denver Emphasizes Downtown in Economic Recovery

DENVER _ From the very beginning, when its fortunes depended almost exclusively on gold, silver, oil and real estate, Denver has been a boom-and-bust town, riding a Wild West economic roller coaster, now soaring, now crashing.

Good times and bad, they always seem to hit harder in Denver.

Throughout the 1970s, no American city boomed more than this one, as high-rolling oilmen, land speculators and savings and loans bet it all. At one point, a dozen office high-rises were going up downtown, enough to double existing rental space.

Then, poof!

Recession struck in the early 1980s, bursting the boom balloon, and the city tumbled as far down as it had been up.

Things were so bad at one point that a desperate office developer, stuck with a brand-new but ghostly empty high-rise, put an ad in national publications that offered "a whole building" for what it would cost to rent "a closet" in Manhattan or "a shelf" in Tokyo's Ginza.

Now the economic worm has turned again.

Now much of that building is rented. Denver is thriving, its newly opened $4.9 billion airport the most visible, but hardly the only, example of another impressive economic comeback.

Fueled by a new building boom _ a good part of it paid for, Great Depression-style, with public works money _ the city's downtown pulsates with new stores, new restaurants, new cultural attractions, even a new ball park.

"Somehow Denver always manages to fight back, only to go down again later and then fight back still again," said Tom Noel, a history professor on the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, who is the author of a dozen books on the city and the state.

"We'll just have to wait and see if this particular boom lasts."

Why so many wrenching ups and downs for Denver?

Some people say the problem is greed. They contend that beginning with its founding by gold prospectors in 1858, the city has always tried to make a living by hungrily exploiting every last thing that nature has to offer, from the gold, silver, oil and other resources that lie beneath the ground to the rain, snow and bright sunshine that come down from the sky above.

Others postulate that Denver's problem is municipal schizophrenia: that the city is of two minds about itself and thus is prone to setting economic goals in conflict with one another.

They argue that one moment Denver is reveling in its way-out-West status as the nation's most geographically isolated major metropolis, and the next moment trying to slip out of its cowboy boots and into the tasseled loafers and sophistication of New York and San Francisco.

Still others say that Denver is just snake-bit, a victim of a long string of bad breaks.

Whatever the case, the city's optimism is once again soaring as high as the mighty Rockies that rise in snowy grandeur on the western horizon.

It has captured worldwide attention with the opening of its shiny new international airport _ never mind the sticker-shock cost and the infamously balky baggage system.

But equally impressive, if less noted, its downtown is no longer just another struggling business district, mostly known in the rest of the country, if at all, for the 1890s elegance of the lobby of the venerable Brown Palace Hotel.

The rejuvenated downtown now boasts not only a new baseball stadium but also a new library, a new rail system and a soon-to-be-completed amusement park.

Whole blocks of decrepit old inner-city office buildings and factories have been transformed into restaurants, clothing boutiques, art galleries and microbreweries.

"Denver is on a very good roll these days," said former Gov. Dick Lamm, a Coloradan not known for effusive praise of growth and expansion.

But what of tomorrow, always a fair question given some of the city's yesterdays? Are old mistakes being repeated?

The proud promoters of the new airport continue to insist that within a few years at least 50 million passengers a year will be passing through the stunning new terminal. But aviation experts say a more realistic figure is 30 million at best, which could mean serious trouble when it comes to paying off the construction bonds.

Housing developers are once again rushing headlong with speculative tracts, relentlessly chewing up huge chunks of the great American prairie stretching eastward from Denver.

Only a year or so removed from the latest bout with hard times, most Denverites are in no mood to entertain the cautionary warnings of growth-control advocates.

And there are even some stirrings among office developers about putting up new high-rise projects.

True enough, the huge surplus of office space left from the last collapse is being steadily whittled down. But by just about any business measure, the city is still very much a renter's market.

Denver's economic bounce-back means there are jobs to be had here now. And every week sees the arrival of 2,000 people, a migration that has pushed the population of the metropolitan area above 2 million.

In earlier days, the Denver economy was narrowly balanced, heavily dependent on a few major job sources like mining, agriculture and defense.

But now, at the start of the latest growth era, the job mix is much broader and better balanced.

While the old employers are still around, other industries are of increasing importance _ tourism, higher education, transportation, computers, communications.

"We've got a much bigger cushion now to catch us if we stumble, and that's a very significant change," said the city's chief cheerleader, John Lay, president of the Metro Chamber of Commerce. "We've become a genuine world-class city. Now if we can

Copyright 1995
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