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Golden History Moment
Originally Published February 5, 2020
Summer Reruns: Parking – The End. Or maybe not.
For the past few days I’ve been musing about how automobiles have changed the shape of our built-before-cars downtown. On Friday, I talked about the 1920s through the early ’50’s and our quest to provide ever-more parking spots on our streets. On Saturday, I covered the rise of parking lots, 1950-1970. Yesterday‘s post reviewed some of the buildings we lost in the quest to build parking lots.
After more than half a century of scrambling to provide enough parking for their customers, downtown business owners got some unwanted relief in the 1980s. Shoppers’ tastes were changing. They didn’t want to shop in a traditional downtown anymore–they wanted to go to shopping malls. One by one, our downtown stores closed. By some counts, half of our storefronts were empty by 1990. Our downtown hotel–the Holland House–closed and stood empty. There were few restaurants, few stores, and few reasons to visit downtown. This was happening to small towns all over the country.
Golden fought back. We voted to form a Golden Urban Renewal Authority, which was able to use tax incentive deals to finance visual and infrastructure upgrades. The Golden Civic Foundation bought some of the empty buildings and carefully selected developers to refurbish and reopen them as viable businesses. The Golden Chamber began hosting downtown events almost every weekend. The merchants funded a tourism program, administered by the city. Community leaders raised funds to build a Visitors Center. The City developed the Creek and built a golf course to help attract tourists. And many, many citizens undertook all sorts of volunteer efforts aimed at making Golden a vibrant, viable city again.
It all worked: Golden is as viable as all get-out. Our downtown has never been as crowded as it is today. Our population is climbing steadily and Mines is growing rapidly and we attract thousands of tourists every month. Most of them arrive in cars and most of them need places to park. GURA built not one but two parking garages.
To discourage Mines students from parking downtown all day, the City finally installed the parking meters that we’ve been discussing since the 1930s (only now we call them kiosks).
While the student-deterring kiosks probably freed up spots in the parking lots, another recent change has reduced spots on the streets: downtown businesses can now fence off the parking lanes to provide additional seating.
There has also been a philosophical change: city planners are now convinced that someday soon, people will give up driving in favor of riding bikes, walking, or taking public transit. For that reason, they’re starting to build less parking into their plans. Compare today’s parking with the West Downtown Plan for Arapahoe Street.
Will better bike lanes and bigger sidewalks entice more people to leave their cars at home? Maybe. Can we start to give up our hard-won parking spaces? I have my doubts, but we’ll see. Even after a century, we haven’t fully solved the parking conundrum.
