Eugene Elliott caught his first glimpse of the ravaged Gates Rubber Company complex three years ago. He was driving in Denver one day, and here was this huge, hulking factory, a sprawling labyrinth of brick and concrete stretching across blocks of South Broadway. The empty plant was imposing yet desolate and silent, seemingly from another time and place.
Anthony Camera
The Gates Rubber factory
Eugene Elliott, a University of Colorado student, wants to halt the demolition of remaining buildings at the Gates plant on South Broadway.
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"I don't think I'd ever seen a building so big," he says. "Or so dilapidated, for that matter. It made me curious about what it used to be and why it's still there."
See also: Slide show: Inside the Gates Rubber Factory
Elliott had recently moved to Boulder from Iowa to study at the University of Colorado. He didn't know much about Denver history, and even less about the Gates company and its lasting impact on the city. But his curiosity became the starting point of a singular education about the Gates plant and its troubled afterlife.
The place had certainly seen better days. When Elliott came across it, what remained of the plant was a warren of broken windows, graffiti, stripped and shuttered machinery and dank pits containing traces of toxic chemicals; many of the smaller structures were already gutted or gone. But in its heyday, more than half a century ago, Gates Rubber was the largest employer in the city, a manufacturing dynamo that occupied 25 square blocks, from the east side of Broadway over to Santa Fe Drive, and produced thousands of products, from tires and fan belts to gaskets and batteries. In the 1980s, the company shifted the bulk of its manufacturing jobs to plants in other states and countries. In 1996, the Gates family sold its interest in the company to a British conglomerate, Tomkins PLC, which moved its administrative headquarters downtown and closed the plant on Broadway for good.
Since that time, redevelopment plans for the site have crept forward in fits and starts. One parcel east of Broadway has been transformed into offices and a parking garage, and construction is now under way on a four-story apartment house. Another parcel south of Mississippi Avenue has also been turned into apartments. But the economic downturn of the past few years has left in limbo efforts to redevelop the main factory and surrounding buildings. Cherokee Denver, which had purchased the property from the Gates Corporation in 2001 with the aim of erecting a "world-class urban village," boasting 3,000 residential units and 1.75 million square feet of office and retail space, ran into financial difficulties five years ago, just as it was about to break ground on the first phase of the project.
Gates took back the forty-acre site from Cherokee and its lenders. Hoping to woo other developers, the company has continued with the environmental cleanup that Cherokee began of the extensive industrial contamination around the factory. It's also beefed up security around the abandoned buildings, which have become a magnet for vandals, copper thieves and urban explorers, despite a series of injuries and the death of one 23-year-old adventurer ("Gone," December 20, 2007). But company officials say they can only do so much to clean up the site as long as the main buildings remain standing.
"The only economically viable way of redeveloping the property and completing the environmental remediation," says Gates executive vice president Tom Reeve, "is to move forward with taking the buildings down."
In late June, Elliott, now a 21-year-old senior at CU, learned that Gates was planning to raze the remaining buildings, including the manufacturing plant itself. A friend e-mailed a picture of a notice posted on the fence along the property stating that the owner was seeking a demolition permit. The notice also said that the property had potential for landmark designation, and that anyone seeking such designation needed to file an application with the city within 21 days.
With the clock ticking, Elliott spent hours at the Denver Public Library and city offices researching the history of Gates, tracking down old blueprints and fire-marshal maps. He spoke to people at Historic Denver, who seemed nonplussed by his interest, and actively solicited donations online to cover the $250 fee for a landmark-designation application. At one point he even stood outside the property with a sign, trying to bum contributions from Broadway motorists.
"That didn't work out very well," he says. "I don't know how the homeless do it. The donations were infrequent and very small. In two or three hours, I made maybe ten bucks."
At the eleventh hour, he presented the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission with the fee and a detailed plea to grant historic protection to the three oldest remaining structures: the manufacturing plant, known as Unit 10, and the power plant and warehouse to the north of it. "The former Gates Rubber Company is a huge piece of Colorado and more relevantly Denver history," Elliott wrote. "By not accepting the landmark-designation application, the owner will proceed to demolish the last remaining physical reminder of what Gates Rubber Company did and was for this city and its citizens."
Elliott didn't consult with Gates management before filing his application; he says he made attempts but couldn't reach anyone in authority. He didn't contact any members of the five neighborhood associations that have worked for years on cleanup and redevelopment plans for the site. His request caught city officials by surprise, too. City councilman Chris Nevitt, who'd spent countless hours in discussions with Gates and Cherokee, community groups and health officials about the property, was particularly outraged about the application — enough to call Elliott and try to persuade him to withdraw it.
