WALKING THE LINE: Day 5

A big sky with vistas west to the Hogback and the great mountains beyond greeted us as we started Day 5 of our walk from Denver to Golden along the coming West Corridor light rail line.

We'd just spent two days on the segment of the route that courses along old trolley tracks through Lakewood neighborhoods. In some places, the path is so tightly wedged against residential properties that it feels almost claustrophobic.

Certainly, back yards, gardens, decks and bedroom windows all along the way are going to take on a different character when the new train service begins. And many people who live there have strong, even emotional, opinions about it.

As we stood at Oak Street, preparing to leave the old trolley line and follow the new corridor's route south toward the Denver Federal Center, we talked about what we'd seen and heard the previous two days.

We agreed there were two main camps among those we'd met.

The first was that the closer people lived to the tracks, the more they objected to how RTD was handling things. The second was that longtime residents seem more opposed than newcomers, no matter where they lived.

Yet stepping off into the fifth segment of our walk to Golden, all that was gone.

Less than a thousand feet west, we came to the location where the old trolley continued to Golden while freight trains headed toward the federal center.

Even though the last scheduled trolley service here stopped June 3, 1950, freight trains kept lumbering along, twice a day at first, then three times a week, then finally one round trip a week on Sundays before it stopped in 1988.

Next to us was the small running stream of the Wight Lateral, carrying its irrigating waters into old Lakewood. RTD must figure out how to keep this ditch operating as it fits its double-tracked rail system into the right of way.

Building up

Lakewood plans to make the most of the West Corridor's Oak Street station. In the area between Oak and Simms, it already has the Lakewood Technology Center, sprinkled with companies and the Jefferson County School District shops. Colfax, with its retail potential, sits to the north.

The plan is to develop a Main Street pedestrian-friendly promenade from the station to north of Colfax midway between Oak and Quail streets. The city hopes for a mixed-use development of street-level shops, multi-family housing, stores and offices ranging from three stories to six stories.

We took the track bed to the southwest and crossed Quail, where the largest employer on Collins Avenue is Gambro BCT, which has about 1,600 workers in the blood collection and processing business. It's been in Lakewood since 1967, when it was Cobe Laboratories.

North of the tracks is a small commercial building with several businesses in it. Garage-style doors opened up toward the tracks, and inside one we spotted two guys working at sewing machines. That's not something you see every day, so we checked it out.

That's when we saw something else you don't see every day. Dan Ballard, the owner of the business called Bitchn Stichn, was busily making a motorcycle seat out of what he said was a hippopotamus hide.

Of the dozens of business cards we collected on the walk, Dan's was the easiest to pull out of the stack. It was the only one that was black with a skull on it.

It turns out there is quite a market for motorcycle seats and accessories made of exotic materials. Ballard makes them here. And he's jazzed enough about light rail passing by the back of his place that he may hang a sign for his business there in addition to the front.

If he'd lived in the area in 2004, he would have voted for FasTracks, he said.

"I'd have been all for it," said Ballard, offering us some pop and water. "The more people that take light rail, the more gas I got for my Harley."

Dealing with RTD

The light rail will head southwest from here, going over Lakewood Gulch again where an old trestle was taken out many years ago, crossing Collins Avenue and swinging around the Gambro buildings on a big man-made hill, still on the old freight track bed.

High up in the air, it will cross Jackrabbit Gulch and then go over Eighth Avenue at another set of crossing gates. South of Eighth, the tracks will squeeze through the old right-of-way between an office park on the west and Windish RV Center.

Just around the bend before we hit the Sixth Avenue frontage road, we saw that more than half the parking for Kacey Fine Furniture is on the right-of-way. Owners Jack Barton and his daughter, Leslie Fishbein, knew it was railroad property but thought it had been abandoned.

The West Corridor project will reclaim it and erect an embankment for the Sixth Avenue bridge. That will make it impossible to operate the store, Barton and Fishbein said.

They'd like to compromise with RTD on a design change to add one more open span to the bridge instead of an embankment, which would allow them to continue parking underneath the bridge.

Barton said RTD told him it would cost him $2 million, more than the building is worth.

"We're eager to be good citizens," Fishbein said, "but they've been very difficult to deal with."

Jim Humble, general manager of Windish, is bullish on the light rail coming next to his RV lot. RTD needs to buy a small piece of his land, and he's happy to oblige.

"We welcome it," he said. "It's a huge opportunity for us. It gives us a lot of exposure."

What business wouldn't like up to 30,000 people a day traveling by its lot?

Signature span

Standing at the CDOT fence lining the Sixth Avenue Freeway, we could see across to the federal center and the gates in the fence where the Associated Railroads freights once entered the property.

Sixth Avenue grew into a major highway because of the federal center, but the train traffic across the road wasn't enough to justify a bridge.

Light rail, running every five minutes in each direction, will justify a bridge.

RTD will build a signature style span here for the trains. Designers call it a "basket handle tied arch." It will have no center pier in the median of the highway, so it must have a center span of 280 feet across. The two curving arches look like basket handles, hence the name, and they tilt inward toward each other to join at the apex, hence "tied."

Dennis Cole, RTD's project manager for the West Corridor, promised it will be a fun bridge to watch being built. The deck will be assembled on the federal center ground. Then, in an overnight operation, crews will "launch" it, said Cole, across the highway with rolling jacks.

That's how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

We couldn't cross the freeway here, so we walked up to the Simms-Union Boulevard bridge to get to the south side. Going through RTD's Cold Spring park-n-Ride, we checked in at the federal center security gate.

The way the freeway and housing developments now surround this single square mile of federal property, it's hard to imagine that it was once a much broader expanse of open land, part of one of the largest cattle ranches and farms in the metro area on the eve of World War II.

The stretch of land from Garrison Street west up the slope of Green Mountain and beyond was settled in the 1860s by Maj. Jacob Downing, a name that stirs memories of one of Colorado's darkest moments.

Downing, a Denver pioneer, was directly under the command of Col. John Chivington at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. Downing acted as Chivington's counsel during the trial at which Chivington was acquitted of the killings that occurred when his soldiers overran a peaceful encampment of Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek.

Downing returned to Denver and established the ranch where he spent his summers. The pond on Kipling Street south of Sixth Avenue still bears his name.

Although most accounts say his ranch totaled something less, old maps at the Denver Public Library's Western History Collection show that shortly before Downing's death in 1907, his holdings stretched over most of nine sections of land, or more than 5,700 acres.

After Downing died, the Hayden family bought much of the ranch and continued working it into the 1930s.

Bullets for WWII

In 1940, with war raging in Europe and Asia, the federal government bought about 2,000 acres, almost all of it from the former Downing ranch, to set up a munitions plant. Part of the attraction was its relative isolation from saboteurs. Photos of the site at the time show nothing but empty space for miles around it. Sixth Avenue was a dirt road.

Called the Denver Ordnance Plant, many of the buildings went up in record time and opened by fall 1941. The Remington Co. was contracted to produce bullets and small arms.

The government ordered a 1.4-mile rail spur to tap into the Denver & Intermountain trolley and freight line at 13th Avenue. The tracks fanned out all over the site to deliver supplies and pick up products for shipment overseas. The site took up much more than the single square mile of the federal center today. On Green Mountain, bunkers were built to test and store the munitions.

Men and women came from all over to work there. The tourist hotels on Colfax booked double and triple sleeping shifts to accommodate the demand. Kaiser was hired to produce mortar shells and General Mills set up a shop to can K-rations.

President Roosevelt paid a surprise visit in April 1943. The plant brought explosive growth — pun intended — to Lakewood.

But just as quickly as it went up, the plant shut down after the Allied victory in Europe. Where 20,000 people once worked around the clock for the war effort, producing up to 6 million bullets a day that were then shipped out on the little rail line along 13th, the force was down to 600 within two months of the war's end.

Renamed the Denver Federal Center, the site was pared down through sales and donations of land to Jefferson County for schools, a stadium and the health department east of Kipling, the county fairgrounds west of the site, and for private development from Union Street westward.

Although surrounded by Lakewood, it was only annexed into the city this year, as part of an ambitious plan by the federal landlord, the General Services Administration, to invite redevelopment.

We met Lisa Dorsey Wild, GSA's project manager for the redevelopment study, at the North Avenue Gate at RTD's park-n-Ride.

"One of the biggest myths to dispel is that the federal center is going through a shutdown like Lowry or Fitzsimons," Wild said.

It's the exact opposite, she said. The federal center is poised to grow while retaining its concentration of 6,000 federal workers from 26 different agencies.

Cold Spring park-n-Ride will close as RTD builds a new station deeper into the site, with a 1,000-car parking facility. That will make transit more accessible to the workers there.

South of the new station, St. Anthony Hospital has broken ground for a facility that will be a principal anchor for the center's growth.

The master plan includes private development north and east of the station.

Car 25

But as much as we saw here that promises to be new, we found something old, too.

Inside an old train engine shed at the end of a now-disconnected rail spur, dedicated rail fans have worked for years on a surprise for the West Corridor's opening in 2012.

The original Car 25 of the Denver-to-Golden interurban trolley line is parked inside the shed. Darrell Arndt, a member of the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club, came out to meet us and to pull the car into the sunshine.

Arndt heads the club's restoration efforts for Car 25. Since 1988, club members and a charitable foundation they formed have brought this workhorse back to life.

It is a beautiful thing to see.

Adorned in the original Denver & Intermountain color scheme of green and gold, rather than the Denver Tramway's yellow, the car looks much like it must have in February 1911, when it came out of the Woeber Car Co. plant on Colorado Avenue west of Broadway in the city's Overland neighborhood.

Its seats of woven rattan are clean and comfortable. The bell clangs and the air horn bellows. Lacking overhead wires, the electric motors over each of four axles are powered by a diesel-run generator on a separate trailer that follows behind.

As Arndt, dressed in authentic motorman's garb with hat, led us slowly down the track, it brought back the stories of some of those we met on the walk, such as Nettie Moore down on Utica Street and Norma Reivitt on Holland Street. As young girls, they sat in these very seats riding the Route 84 trolley. Nettie met her future husband on the line; Norma rode it to Golden High School.

Car 25 is the only surviving intact trolley from the Denver Tramway's fleet. Arndt's hope is that the club can somehow get the car back onto the South Platte Trolley line that until this summer still used the old trolley tracks from Confluence Park in Denver to near Sheridan Boulevard.

When the West Corridor reintroduces intercity rail transit to Lakewood and Golden, Arndt said, wouldn't it be a kick to have Car 25 be part of it?

"The best way to preserve this car is for it to be used, for people to ride on it and appreciate it."

Friday, we'll walk from here to the Jefferson County Government Center, the end of line.

About the series

FasTracks kicks off in earnest next year when crews start building the 12-mile light-rail West Corridor line through diverse and history-rich neighborhoods from downtown to Golden.

All eyes are on this first line, as it will set the tone for the nine other corridors to be built in the massive $6 billion transit system approved by voters in 2004.

To begin telling this story, the Rocky's team of reporter Kevin Flynn, above center, photographer Darin McGregor and videographer Laressa Bachelor trekked the length of the West Corridor. We invite you to come along, and experience our amazing urban journey of discovery.

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