Audio By Carbonatix
City work crews are unearthing hundreds of century-old paving stones as part of street resurfacing projects in booming lower downtown. They’re also digging up trouble.
Area merchants and residents accuse the city of going back on a promise to save the “pavers,” which advocates say were handcut by stonemasons in the 1800s. City officials acknowledge that hundreds of the historic stones were ground to dust last month in what they describe as an overreaction to rumors that the materials were radioactive. But they say they remain committed to preserving the pavers–even if they can’t figure out what to do with them.
“We’ve just been racking our brains to find some way you can use this material in a way that’s worth doing,” says Mark Leese, senior architect for the public works department. In the meantime, Leese says, contractors are trucking stones to a storage pile behind Union Station.
Developer and stones fan Dana Crawford wants the city to keep the pavers right where they are–in the street. “We wanted the [original] streets kept as part of the historic fabric,” she says. “The city has to decide: Is this a historic district or a loading ramp for baseball and basketball?” Oxford Hotel owner Charles Calloway also has pushed for a return to the stone age. “The city just uses every excuse they can why not to do it,” he complains.
The stones being trucked to the storage heap are considered city property, says Leese. But while officials have mulled over possible uses for them, streetwise citizens have been raiding the pile in search of free brick-a-brac. So far, the scavengers have met with little resistance. “Apparently, to salvage collectors and patio people, this stuff is gold,” shrugs Leese. He says the city is now considering building a fence around its makeshift rockpile.
One of the people picking through the city’s leftovers is north Denver photographer Mark Sink. “I pulled out a huge stack just for our community gardens,” says Sink, who launched a letter-writing crusade after he saw workers feeding perfectly good pavers into a grinding machine last month.
“We went over and investigated it, and sure enough, stuff out of 23rd Street was being ground up and being used for fill,” says Leese. “We stopped it immediately.”
Roger Johnson, assistant director for design in the city engineer’s office, says the stones dug up along 23rd Street were contaminated with radium, an intensely radioactive element he says was traced to tailings from a long-defunct processing plant. But Leese says the reports of hot rocks were unfounded. “We know on that job they had to test for radium,” he says. “It was a suspicion, but they didn’t find anything.”
The incident on 23rd Street did little to allay suspicions among LoDo merchants that the city would rather destroy the stones than find a use for them. Public Works agreed to save the materials two years ago after a group of businesspeople protested plans to dump them. But developer Crawford says she “can’t get a straight answer” from officials on the latest city plans for the pavers.
Leese says Crawford and Calloway’s vision of stone streets would be prohibitively expensive. “To install a street with these cobblestones, you have to first build a concrete sub-slab and then put the stones over it,” he says. “So, basically, you’re building a street twice.” Stone roads would cost $145 per square yard, Leese says. That compares to $41 per square yard for concrete and $15 per square yard for asphalt.
“I think the biggest question for the city is, do you want to spend $145 per square yard just because you’re in lower downtown?” Leese adds. “It would be unthinkable to spend that kind of money on a street anywhere else.”
It would cost much less to use the stones in decorative crosswalks or as design elements in a trolley run that may one day stretch down Wynkoop Street to the new Coors Field. Sink notes that even as old pavers sit behind Union Station, the city is using “a much cheaper-fired brick you can buy at Home Base” for decorative inlays at downtown intersections.
Leese says crosswalks are among the possible uses being considered by the city. By storing the stones, he notes, Public Works has at least bought itself two or three years to come up with a plan. But when construction begins on a new street planned behind the train station, the stones will have to go–somewhere.
“We’re all trying to work with the various people who really care about saving these and putting them to good use,” says Leese. “But we really do not know what to do with them.
