Jack Unruh, a member of the Overland Park Neighborhood Association, has fond memories of working for a company that often assisted Gates with trade shows, preparing exhibits that "told the story of V-belts and hoses." He regards part of the true legacy of the company to be the cottages that sprang up in south Denver to house factory workers; while the plant itself is an impressive ghost town, he doesn't expect it will be more than mildly mourned.
"They understand that offering a developer a blank slate on that property, with its proximity to light rail and I-25, is how they're going to get their money back," he says. "The place has been so run down, so gutted and so scavenged, there's not a lot to save. I made the suggestion that the clock on the north doorway be saved — and then I drove by and realized that it had been vandalized beyond recognition."
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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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Months before Elliott filed the application for landmark status, Gates officials had already held meetings with Nevitt, representatives of Historic Denver and others to discuss how best to memorialize the factory after the buildings are gone. Suggestions included an informational kiosk about the Gates legacy at the light-rail station, with historic photos, or possibly incorporating the water tower, if it could be reconstructed, in future development at the site.
"None of this was stuff we could nail down, because we don't have a developer yet," Nevitt says.
Reeve says his company is prepared to commit resources and funding to an appropriate gesture when the time comes. "We are acutely aware of our own history here and want to maintain that history," he says. "There are a lot of ways that story could be told."
Elliott learned about the plan from Reeve shortly after he filed his application. The meeting was a tense one, Elliott says, and the kind of commemorative gesture Reeve described struck him as something far less substantial than actually preserving a piece of the existing plant. "When you don't know what's going to go up there, how can you say you're going to put the water tower back up?" he asks. "I couldn't get an affirmative commitment out of them, just that they were open to the idea."
Reeve says he was disappointed to discover that the application had been filed. "The young man is apparently entitled to file it," he notes. "I think it would be appropriate for him to voluntarily withdraw it, once he's more educated about the process this has gone through and the number of years that the property has stood idle — and all the efforts we've made."
Elliott is studying business and real estate at CU, and his education has proceeded at warp speed since he launched his Gates crusade. His real baptism of fire — and a taste of what he can probably expect when the matter reaches a public hearing next month — came in a recent sitdown with half a dozen neighborhood-group members, some of whom have been wrestling with questions about redevelopment of the plant for more than a decade.
The gathering was a cordial one, although the neighbors' frustration with the lack of action on the Gates site was quickly evident. Elliott expressed regret at not contacting the groups sooner and said he was "extremely curious to hear about your vision for the property." But when he began to speak vaguely about his own interest in the history of the plant, Harley urged him to be more direct.
"It's pretty clear where your interest in Gates comes from," he said. "I'm not here to judge it, but I don't think you should talk around it."
"You've been inside Gates at least five times," added Charlie Busch, a West Washington Park resident. "Can we just be aboveboard here?"
"That isn't the whole reason," Elliott replied. "I don't want to distract everyone from the reason why I filed the application. I didn't file it out of some motive for urban exploring."
Busch had brought with her three thick binders of documents dealing with Cherokee's development plan, environmental assessments of the site and the cleanup of the neighborhood, which had extended to her house and several blocks along Lincoln Street. "Let me summarize what we've learned," she said. "One, this is an extremely polluted space. Two, it cannot be repurposed. There's ten feet of concrete between each floor and no way to get through it. If you want West Washington Park's help to keep it up, you're not going to get it."
Other residents talked about the difficulty of eradicating the contamination under the buildings without taking the buildings apart; the possibility that the brick walls had absorbed decades of toxins; the lack of any structural or chemical analysis to support an argument for preservation of Unit 10. On occasion they referred to Elliott's "group," and he gently corrected them.
"I wish I had a group," he said. "I honestly don't."
"If you have a viable plan, I'd love to hear it," Harley said. "You have no plan. Yet what you've done is put a gear in the works. You've slowed the process."
