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Originally Posted by Denver Dweller
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I worked at the Burnham shop for 5 years starting at age 19. It was sort of my first real job. The high bay (the brick part) was about 100 years old at the time. It was a strange place to work for a kid like me.
I lived in Capitol Hill. Every afternoon (I worked 2nd shift), I took the 2 (I don't think that bus route even exists anymore) up to 16th St, then walked to the light rail and took it down to the 8th and Osage stop, then walked around the fence and across all those tracks to get to the shop. I had to make sure to do it when no RTD security was there or they'd ticket me for trespassing. (Apparently homeless people were often hit by trains in that spot so they were being vigilant.) On my way home I'd always stop at Duffy's for a beer and I'd do a little homework, bellied up to the bar. My bartender was usually Greg. I always tipped him plenty and always got plenty of free beers for it.
Walking into that shop was like entering a different world through some sort of worm-hole. I was leaving my modern, turn-of-the-21st-century, Denver world (living in Cap Hill and going to school at Metro), and entering another world -- perhaps something akin to late 19th Century Pittsburgh or Cleveland. The culture there was a hard-core, blue-collar, manly-man culture. I don't know how to explain it. The workers occasionally got into fist fights and no one would get fired for it. At the beginning of each shift, all the labor had to watch a video of some lady doing stretches. They were supposed to be stretching along with it (to prevent workplace injuries) but instead they would just stand there with their arms crossed and smoke cigarettes. Man, I don't know how to explain it.
I watched the Broncos win their first Super Bowl in that shop. Someone brought in one of those portable black-and-white TV's and there were at least a dozen of us gathered around it. No work got done that night.
That land is highly polluted I can say for sure. We kept a "fence" (long consist of locomotives and/or cars) on the west side of the property so no one could see the large pools of oil, slowly soaking into the ground.
After I left that job it became a tradition to flip off the Burnham shop every time I drove by it on the 6th Ave viaduct. But now it just feels really weird to me that it's gone. It was there for so many years, it felt like it would always be there.
Anyway... carry on.