Denver’s Civic Center Park: Symptom of Urban Decline

Anybody who wonders why America’s population is fleeing the cities at an unprecedented rate despite an urban renaissance and a falling crime rate only needs to look at the Tragicomedy being played out in Denver’s Civic Center Park.
Civic Center Park is the park located between Denver’s City and County Building (City Hall) and the Colorado State Capitol at the center of the Mile High City. It’s an impressive location surrounded by monumental early 20th Century Architecture especially our capitol and the towering skyscrapers put up in the oil boom of the 80s. It’s also a disgraceful blight, a beautiful Greco Roman theater filled with drug dealers and bums (okay homeless people to you politically correct types).
Civic Center Park has been declared an area of urban blight, so a group of self appointed do-gooders called the Civic Center Conservancy have gotten together and given that architectural charlatan Daniel Libskend (if you want to know about this Wunderkind look him up on the Internet) $75,000 to redesign the park. At a press conference on August 31, Libskend appeared happy (wouldn’t you be happy if somebody handed you a $75,000 check for a pretty picture and a power point presentation?) as he showed off his grandiose redesign of the park.
This basically means putting a piece of ugly statuary in the middle of the park, destroying its classical beauty, and covering the old Greek Theater with glass. There’s only one problem that’s not necessary, there’s nothing wrong with Civic Center Park it’s a beautiful old monument that ought to be preserved as it is. The Greek Theater is a wonderful civic monument, the State Capitol and City and County Building echoes of our more sensible past.
The only real problem with Civic Center Park is that it is filled with bums and drug dealers. This problem could be solved by having a couple of Denver City police officers walk the beat through the park. Okay that would be tough for Denver cops they’d have to get in their squad car and drive two blocks east from their headquarters. Once they got out they’d have to actually exercise which might be a challenge for them but I’m sure their doctor recommends they’d get some. Maybe some drunk would throw up on them and they might actually have to use their nightsticks tough luck, when their grandfathers walked the beat back in the 30s they didn’t flinch at that stuff.
Now, I’ve observed the bums and drug dealers in Civic Center Park many times they are hardly desperate characters. A couple of Boy Scouts with sticks could probably run them off if they really wanted to so some real cops ought to be able to clear the place out and make it safe for office workers to have lunch with one or two arrests. The bums are hiding in Civic Center Park because the working class Mexicans on Denver’s west side would run them off if they venture west of the Platte. The dealers who are in the park are criminal failures whom the Mexican Mafia which runs our city’s drug trade wants nothing to do with them. The Mexican Mob actually demands that its members have balls and actually work standards too high for the Civic Center Park crowd.
Cleaning out Civic Center Park could be easily be done, the Denver Police work for the fraud known as Mayor Hickenlooper geologist turned brewer turned real estate developer. Although I doubt Hickenlooper would actually order them to do anything that might offend the cops ex football jocks, whom he’s probably afraid of them. Hickenlooper looks like the kind of nerd who forked over his lunch money to the class bully in his second year of college. If Hick were really a crook he’d slip the Mexican mob a few bucks and have them come to the park someday and do a little work and presto the bums would never be seen there again but he has neither the balls or imagination for that. There might be a little blood on one of the stone steps but who’d notice? Of course the only conversation our Mayor has with a Latino male is to tell him which table to clear so this won’t happen. So Mayor Hick, won’t do a thing and Civic Center Park will be destroyed so Herr Libskend can buy a new Mercedes to drive on the Autobahn.
The new Civic Center Park will be ugly and still filled with bums and drug dealers. Meanwhile the real political leaders who built the great buildings around it the state Capitol and the City and County Building will roll over in their graves and ask why didn’t that that asshole Hickenlooper just have the cops run the trash out of the park we built? Even as Mayor Hickenlooper asks why is the Middle Class moving out of my city? Hint: you’re not doing your job and making the place ugly in the process.