Quote:
Originally Posted by mojiferous
I actually still live in the neighborhood, but I think CP Live's photo threads are great! However, they would be really boring if they were nothing but this, this, this and this.
Other than the larger houses, a vast majority of the older housing stock in those neighborhoods was built as part of developments (not as big as Highlands Ranch, but still planned as one) or from standard designs. I lived in a friend's basement for a few years on 13th and Elizabeth, and her house was a three-story brick built from a Sears design. The interior layout and structure was a carbon copy of some of the neighbor's houses. The difference was only in color. My point was not that the neighborhood looks bland, but that today's "everything looks the same and is built on the cheap" argument is not really valid. 100 years ago a good majority of those neighborhoods were built out using the same Denver square floor plan, in the same local brick, and at prices much cheaper than the nicer, more-unique mansions.
It was middle class housing much like all the new "ugly" stuff going up, and everyone then complained about how Denver was being ruined by cheap buildings and apartments. I know I have a Phil Goodstein book about Cap Hill where he specifically points out some of the first apartments in the neighborhood and has quotes from the paper about how they were going to ruin the city. Some things never change.
In another 70 years maybe Highlands Ranch will have mature trees, newer houses dotted in between surviving older stock, and people will have added on or painted differently. |
Excellent post, I think you're exactly correct. A friend of mine who lives in the Speer neighborhood mentioned that he recently noticed that a row of 4 adorable Victorian houses on his street are in fact exactly the same house, just in different colors and with slightly different patterns of ornamentation along the cornice line. You are right that these were, in fact, basically the cookie-cutter homes of the time.
The only difference is that multiple builders were working in the same geographic area, meaning several standard models of homes may appear in a given area. At the time, I believe, the platting/development of the neighborhood was separated out from the building of the homes - as opposed to today where a developer creates a business relationship with builders and allocates many contiguous blocks to build their cookie-cutter models. Stapleton attempted to mimic the old pattern by mixing several builders together on each city block, never mixing them the same way twice, which is somewhat effective if not exactly the same as the 19th century model of selling off lots first and then letting the owners find a builder.
Your point about Highlands Ranch is interesting too. I grew up in a 1970s neighborhood of ranch homes in Boulder, and you can now see this exact phenomenon occurring. People do pop tops, scrape off the living room and replace it, scrape the entire house and start over, you name it... and never the same way twice. There are now very few homes left that are quite clearly the same model (even though there were only a dozen or so models in the beginning). Of course this requires some degree of prosperity and willingness to reinvest that not all suburbs will have. But it is an interesting process to observe.
Edit: I should note that prosperity/reinvestment isn't the only thing that leads to such a change. Depression and stagnation have worked just as well in the past. I once learned in a CO History class that the addition of multi-family structures to Cap Hill actually began after the 1893 Silver Crash and subsequent local economic depression. Many in the neighborhood lost everything and had to sell their homes, which were ultimately scraped and replaced over time with apartments that now represent just about every era of Denver architecture. I bet there are plenty of other examples too of this kind of thing happening and transforming a neighborhood for the better (in the long run - people generally don't consider a neighborhood's collapse to be a good thing in the short term).
Prev
This could be the start of a great counter article. How about sending this to the Denver Post as an op-ed piece.
Linear Mode
