Yet the landmark commission staff who reviewed the application readily agreed that the buildings did meet criteria for geographical and historical significance. After all, the factory has been a prominent visual feature — especially its iconic water tower, since disassembled — to motorists along I-25 for decades. And there's no denying that the plant and the family that ran it have a "direct association" with the historical development of Denver going back more than a hundred years.
Last year the Gates Corporation celebrated the centennial anniversary of the day in 1911 when its founder, Charles Gates, shelled out $3,500 for a small Denver company that made leather-studded tire covers. A former mine superintendent, Gates had ideas about improving the product and expanding the line to include other leather goods, such as horse halters. (Buffalo Bill Cody was an early endorser of the halters.) Many of his innovations, though, had to do with replacing leather automobile components, such as fan belts, with superior rubber versions.
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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By 1919 the company was calling itself Gates Rubber and had broken ground on what is now Unit 10. The product line kept expanding: balloon tires, garden hoses, radiator hoses. Even in the depths of the Great Depression, Gates reported annual sales of $13 million, employed 2,500 people, and was ranked as the nation's sixth-largest rubber company.
During World War II, with rubber shortages spreading across the globe, Gates became one of the pioneers of synthetic rubber. The company's sizable presence in Denver reached its zenith in the late 1950s. It had built up its campus all the way to Broadway and leaped across, acquiring the old Ford building on the east side; it turned out 2,500 tires a day and employed 5,500 workers at the Denver plant, many of whom lived in the bungalows that had sprung up in surrounding neighborhoods; and it boasted its own rooftop garden and health center. Charles Gates and successor Charles Jr. — who took over in 1961, shortly after his father's death — were among the city's best-known moguls and philanthropists.
Yet even in those glory days, Gates management was already diversifying and opening plants elsewhere, seeking to address union pressures and the accelerating pace of global competition. Its Denver manufacturing divisions were closed down in phases in the 1970s and 1980s. The company still maintains some research and development operations in Denver, as well as its corporate headquarters — although, following Charles Sr.'s mantra about "throwing your hat across the creek," Gates moved its executive offices from South Broadway to lower downtown in 2003, after the acquisition by Tomkins.
As with any large manufacturing concern, Gates's legacy in Denver is a complex one. It's not just a matter of jobs created, then lost, or taxes paid or foundations launched; it's also about the mess left behind from seventy-plus years of heavy industry. State assessments of environmental contamination at the site have found a wide array of chemicals and hazardous materials, from asbestos and lead paint to benzene and trichloroethylene (TCE), a solvent that was used extensively at Gates to clean machinery and is now listed by the EPA as a known carcinogen. Groundwater tests have found not only evidence of a pool of TCE under the Gates plant, but two plumes of the chemical that have traveled under homes in the West Washington Park area, leading to extensive cleanup efforts in that neighborhood.
Instead of having the property end up listed as yet another Superfund site, Gates and developers worked with state health officials to complete a voluntary cleanup program. Neighborhood groups say that Cherokee Denver, the local arm of a North Carolina company that specializes in redevelopment of brownfield sites, was particularly responsive and set high standards for the billion-dollar "village" that was going to take root in the ruins.
Cherokee officials met with dozens of local nonprofit organizations and community groups, hammering out a general development plan that limited the size and scale of the development, precluded big-box stores and made various provisions for open space and affordable housing. The company spent millions on environmental remediation efforts and at one point even studied the possibility of preserving some aspects of the remaining buildings — though the prospect of keeping even the shell of the factory was ultimately rejected as too costly.
"Their idea was to excavate down to bedrock and remove the soil to some other site," recalls Harley, a member of the voluntary cleanup advisory board. "Whether they could retain the walls remained to be seen."
Cherokee's financing collapsed before the demolition of Unit 10 could begin. Since reclaiming ownership of the site, Gates has continued to work on remediation of the TCE plume and cleanup of the property itself. But the greatest source of contamination is believed to be under Unit 10, where so many chemicals were used over so many years.
"It's important for people to know that we've been working hard to manage the property," says Gates veep Reeve. But, he adds, crucial aspects of the cleanup "can't practically be implemented until the buildings are down and we can remove the contamination that's under the slab."
"There was never a big push for preservation among the neighborhood groups," Harley notes. "A lot of the buildings are gone already."
