Side Streets ~ Neighborhood people and issues

Archive for July, 2011

OLD VS. NEW PITS VILLA DE MESA AND GOLD HILL

July 24th, 2011, 11:30 am by

This is an early architect's drawing of the Gold Hill Mesa residential and retail development.

Notice the rectangular white hole in the middle of the drawing for Gold Hill Mesa? 

 That is Villa de Mesa, a 25-unit townhome complex built in 1970-71 by developer George Shiner as part of a sprawling community of 500-plus townhomes surrounded by apartment buildings and a shopping center. 

But the project ended after the first 25 units were built. And tiny Villa de Mesa has been an island ever since. 

That is until developer Bob Willard came along and conceived his Gold Hill Mesa on the 210 acres surrounding Villa de Mesa. 

Developers have long eyed the former Golden Cycle gold and silver milling site at 21st Street and U.S. Highway 24. On the left is a blueprint for Villa de Mesa, a townhome community launched by developer George F. Stiner around 1970. Only one small 25-unit section was built. On the right is an early architect's drawing of Bob Willard's Gold Hill Mesa project. It broke ground in 2005 with plans for 1,800 homes and 800,000 square feet of retail space. Today, it has 107 occupied homes.

Actually, the plans for both projects are similar. While Shiner concentrated on townhomes and apartments, Willard conceived a broader mix of single-family houses, townhomes as well as commercial and retail space. 

He broke ground in 2005 and today has 107 occupied homes on the 167 acres zoned residential. Initial plans called for upwards of 1,800 homes. 

Today, after the crushing real estate collapse that hit in 2007, Willard said about 700 homes is a more realistic target. 

Actually, the disaster hit Willard in February 2008 when his partner, California-based builder John Laing Homes, pulled out of the project. A year later, it declared bankruptcy. 

Here's a current drawing of plans for Gold Hill Mesa. The areas along the north stretch of 21st Street will be commercial/retail development while residential areas dominate the southern portion.

The Laing bankruptcy nearly caused Gold Hill Mesa to fail, as well. Willard said his line of credit was based on his contract with Laing and the builder’s agreement to buy 36 lots every three months. 

When Laing failed, it abandoned three unfinished home foundations, one three-unit condominium foundation, and four partially completed homes. 

Willard said he spent the last 18 months or so buying the abandoned buildings, as well as about 40 Laing lots, out of foreclosure. 

In the meantime, he needed to develop new lots for other home builders to buy and build on. All without easy access to funds which dried up in the national mortgage meltdown. 

Willard said his efforts to salvage his project left him with no money to complete a $300,000 concrete wall he promised to build around the existing Villa de Mesa neighborhood. 

The wall is about half finished. A chainlink fence, wrapped in tarps, shields the other half of the boundary. 

Willard said he intends to complete the wall when the economy improves and homebuilding takes off. But he’s not selling nearly enough lots yet to allow him to finish the wall. Willard said he expects to sell about 50 lots this year or less than half during his peak years. 

Villa de Mesa is an island of 25 townhome units amid the construction of Gold Hill Mesa.

 Villa de Mesa residents are angry and want written guarantees that the wall will be built.

 Last week, they asked the Colorado Springs Planning Commission to enforce a contract Willard and the neighborhood signed in 2005 regarding the wall. Or they want Willard to post a bond to guarantee it’s construction if his project fails.

They also want their views of the mountains protected from homes built along the wall. And they want drainage completed, as the 2005 contract promised.

The planning commission approved Willard’s plans to develop 20 new lots adjacent to the south wall, despite Villa de Mesa neighbors’ objections. The commissioners urged Willard to finish the wall, but they said the project was too important to stop based on the wall. 

This photo shows where Gold Hill Mesa Drive would be extended to 21st Street on the west. The new lots would be built along the drive with 16 backing up to the wall and four on the south side.

Plans approved Thursday by the Colorado Springs Planning Commission call for Gold Hill Mesa Drive to be extended west to 21st Street and 20 home sites created, backing up Villa de Mesa's perimeter wall, visible on the right.

Here is a look at the $30,000 gate and part of the wall Willard built for Villa de Mesa. The smokestack visible is a landmark from the old Golden Cycle gold and silver mill that operated on the property from 1906-49. 

The Villa de Mesa sits behind a concrete wall and gate. Behind its stands an old smokestack, a landmark and reminder of the Golden Cycle Mill, which operated from 1906-49 on the site.

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A view of some of the 107 occupied homes at Gold Hill Mesa.

This photo shows the eastern edge of the wall that runs about 700 feet along the southern boundary of Villa de Mesa. Neighbors want the east wall built.

 But Willard said he doesn’t have the money now to do it and says it would be premature to build it before construction of adjoining streets and homes is done.

The 25 homeowners of Villa de Mesa are angry the wall separating their 40-year-old community from the new Gold Hill Mesa is not completed. They are demanding developer Bob Willard complete the $300,000 concrete wall.

Villa de Mesa residents are tired of looking at the tarp-wrapped chainlink fence installed as a temporary barrier during construction. It has grown tattered and has failed to keep out homeless people who have been discovered in the pool area of the neighborhood. It also flaps in the wind. 

On the north and east boundaries of Villa de Mesa are marked by a chainlink fence wrapped in tarps.

To read more about Gold Hill Mesa, check out these stories:

– An Oct. 25, 2006, story by Gazette business writer Rich Laden

– A Jan. 8, 2006, profile of the property by the Gazette’s Dave Philipps. It has some excellent history with great photos.

– A March 31, 2007, piece by Debbie Kelley of the Gazette.

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HOW ABOUT “NEIGHBORS CAN GET ALONG PARK”

July 20th, 2011, 1:11 pm by

It’s called the Margery Reed Memorial Park in honor of a long-dead heiress and ex-nursing student whose mother gave large sums to the predecessor of Penrose Hospital.  

The park is a symbol of efforts by the hospital’s owners, Penrose-St. Francis Health Services, to get along with the Old North End Neighborhood.  

Wildflowers are a highlight of the Margery Reed Memorial Park, built by Penrose Health Systems on the corner of Cascade Avenue and Jackson Street for its patients, staff, visitors and the neighborhood to use.

Personally, I’d call it “Amity Park” as a tribute to the positive relationship it represents.  

It sits at the corner of Cascade Avenue and Jackson Street.  

 The park isn’t huge. It’s a “pocket” park, actually. But it’s a nice little oasis amid the east and west towers, the parking structure and asphalt lots of the Penrose Hospital campus.  

It is seeded with wildflowers and landscaped with trees and shrubs and lined with walkways that function beyond aesthetics.  

Jamie Smith, chief operating officer of Penrose-St. Francis, tells me they were designed in a variety of surfaces — concrete, brick, wood, gravel — for use in therapy by rehabilitation patients.  

  

Penrose Hospital has restored and put on display a tuberculosis hut at Margery Reed Memorial Park. It is furnished to the period at the turn of the 20th century when Colorado Springs was a center for treatment of the lung disease. Penrose traces its roots to 1890 when the Glockner Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened.

I really like the restored tuberculosis hut on the corner of the park, which is furnished with a bed, dresser, trunk, nightstand and chair from the period in the early 20th century when Colorado Springs was a center for treatment of tuberculosis.  

The interior of the tuberculosis hut contains historically accurate furnishings. The huts were common in Colorado Springs in the earlh 20th century.

Tuberculosis patients lived in the one-room huts which lined the lawns of the Modern Woodmen of America sanatorium grounds from 1909 to 1947.

 The TB huts were lined up by the dozens outside the Modern Woodmen of America sanatorium north of town deep in the Woodmen Valley.

Today we know the area as Peregrine!

 

The Modern Woodmen is a fraternal organization and insurance company and it provided free treatment to its members at the sanatorium. The huts are visible around Colorado Springs in backyards, as businesses, country lane bus stops and other uses. 

The park and TB hut are just one of many efforts by Penrose to be a good neighbor. It has tried to soften the appearance of its buildings by heavily landscaping around its borders. 

It has adopted historic street lamps to blend with those installed in the neighborhood. 

It even reached out to the neighborhood in 2010 and conducted a health wellness program over 10 months. 

Penrose Hospital is located in the Old North End Neighborhood and residents give the hospital credit for working hard to address neighbors' concerns on issues such as appearance, traffic, noise and smooking.

 When neighbors saw the drawings for its east tower, built in 2005, they asked the hospital to enhance the appearance with curves and other design touches. Voila’ the building became more graceful!  

The East Tower of Penrose Hospital, built in 2005, is an example of the cooperation between the hospital and the Old North End Neighborhood. The building was redesigned, at the neighborhood's request, to give it a curved appearance and other design touches to better blend with nearby residences.

A painting of Margery Reed.

As for the park’s namesake, Margery Reed, I found some interesting history from Penrose spokesman Chris Valentine. 

Margery was the daughter of Mary and Verner Reed who moved to Colorado Springs in 1893. Verner made his fortune in mining, banking, ranching and irrigation. Margery was born in 1894. They also had two sons. 

Verner died in 1919, leaving Mary a fortune which she used in charitable and philanthropic projects. 

Margery, meanwhile, studied nursing student at Glockner before ultimately graduating from the University of Denver in 1919 with a degree in English and took a position as an assistant professor of English. That’s where she met her future husband, Paul Mayo, who also taught English. 

A painting of Mary Reed, Colorado Springs philanthropist.

In 1924 Paul and Margery traveled to Peru, where he joined the diplomatic service. Margery became ill in Peru and returned to the U.S., where she died at age 30. 

To honor her daughter,  She died young and her family donated $100,000 toward construction of Margery Reed Mayo Hall at DU, which opened in 1929. 

Then Mary Reed presented DU with $350,000 in cash and an additional $180,000 trust fund income to erect a new library that would bear her name. 

In April 1941, Glockner celebrated the opening of a new $250,000 addition to its nurses’ home. It was named the Margery Reed building and was a gift from Mary Reed. 

Old photos of Margery Reed Hall at the University of Denver

Within the Margery Reed Nurses Home was placed some of her most cherished possessions. In the wood-paneled library was a large oil portrait of Margery and her entire library of 1,000 volumes. 

Margery Reed’s ashes also remain at Penrose Hospital in two urns. 

Here’s a link to a good story written in 2007 by my colleague, Scott Rappold, about Colorado Springs’ history as a tuberculosis treatment center. 

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MESA SPRINGS WILL BE DOING THE PARKER STREET SHUFFLE

July 17th, 2011, 11:00 am by

I feel sorry for the folks in the modest Mesa Springs neighborhood. It’s boundaries, generally, are Fillmore Street on the north, Interstate 25 on the east, Uintah Street on the south and, eventually, Centennial Boulevard will be its western border once the extension is completed.

And that’s the problem. Mesa Springs has lived with construction turmoil all around it for years.

Mesa Springs is a small neighborhood west of Interstate 25, south of Fillmore Street and north of Uintah Street.

It was at Ground Zero for the COSMIX expansion of I-25 and erection of a massive sound barrier wall. That project brought tons of extra traffic down its main drag, Chestnut Street, as commuters seeking to dodge construction went racing back and forth.

Then the neighborhood’s character was changed with the addition of a major furniture store, which also added traffic volume to the area.

On its western edge, it watched as bulldozers began carving in the extension of Centennial and construction of new homes. But that project lurched to a halt leaving the road unfinished and many empty houses.

Now, it’s staring down the barrel of another major project. I call it the Parker Street Shuffle. The city is planning to close Chestnut at Fillmore. If you look at this aerial photo, you see why.

It’s not a simple intersection. It’s a convoluted mess thanks to the entrance and exit ramps of I-25 which converage at the spot.

Further complicating the dangerous intersection is the traffic trying to get in and out of two gas stations and the impact of motorists roaring down the steep incline of Fillmore from the west.

The intersection has long needed to be rebuilt. The entire Fillmore bridge needs to come down, for that matter, and the ramps widened and lengthened.

Anybody have a spare $50 million? Here’s a look at the entire mess from FlashEarth.com.

Didn’t think so.

And the city doesn’t have the $14.5 million it would take to bury Chestnut under Fillmore and keep it open.

But thanks to the one-cent sales and use tax that funds the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, an extra $6.5 million exists to make changes at Chestnut.

Here’s the preliminary plan: close Chestnut at Fillmore and build a bypass west around the nasty intersection via Parker, which becomes a long cul de sac. It will require buying a couple houses on Parker but the rest of the route will cross vacant land.

This is the tentative design for the plan to close Chestnut Street at Fillmore Street and reroute it west via Parker Street.

The Colorado Department of Transportation bought five houses on Chestnut a few years ago anticipating the eventual reconstruction of the Fillmore bridge.

And today CDOT is negotiating to buy the two gas stations to clear the intersection altogether.

The city expects to announce the date this week of a public meeting on the Parker Street Shuffle. If all goes well, construction could begin in the summer of 2012.

Follow this link to a May 21, 2011, story by Debbie Kelley about the project.

For the Oct. 3, 2010, paper, I wrote this column on Mesa Springs.

Here’s a blog I wrote in October 2010 on the project.

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PLAYING THROUGH! I’M GONNA BURY THIS PUTT!

July 13th, 2011, 1:16 pm by

Andrea Brown, former Gazette columnist

My former colleague, Andrea Brown, wrote a piece in 2007 about how her family kept the ashes of her mother-in-law, Grandma Brown, in a cardboard urn in a linen closet.

It was a funny piece. Read it here. Of course, Andrea often made me laugh. Even when she didn’t mean to.

Anyway, I thought of Andrea and Grandma Brown when I learned what other folks do with the cremated remains of their relatives.

Turns out, lots of folks spread ashes around Colorado Springs parks, trails and even golf courses.

Playing through!

In fact, back in 1995, maintenance crews at Patty Jewett Golf Course, found a strange-looking substance spread on the 17th green.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Patty Jewett Golf Course boasts spectacular views.

Dal Lockwood, manager of the city’s golf enterprise, tells the story:

“There was a fair amount of stuff spread all over the greens. One of our old guys, an old sage, tasted it. He said it tasted salty. We had it tested. It was cremated remains.”

Wonder if it tasted like chicken?

Anyway, it’s a pretty common practice, as I learned. City parks, trails and golf courses get used for a lot of things besides the obvious.

Of course, weddings are a common activity especially during spring and summer. Some places must be reserved for a fee. Learn more here.

Garden of the Gods Park

 Topping the list are the Garden of the Gods and Grandview Overlook in Palmer Park, says Kurt Schroeder, parks, trails and open space manager for the city parks department.

Both parks offer inspiring views and spectacular backdrops for ceremonies and photos.

Some prefer getting hitched atop Pikes Peak with the panorama of the city as their backdrop.

Others like the American Mothers Chapel at Rock Ledge Ranch or the

Heritage Garden in Monument Valley Park.

 The gazebo and pond at Nancy Lewis Park is a favorite spot for tying the knot. The splashing waters of Helen Hunt Falls in Cheyenne Cañon attract some for their nuptials while others exchange vows at the Red Rock Canyon Open Space pavilion.

And there have been plenty of wedding receptions of Patty Jewett.

But I was surprised how often the same venues are used to spread cremated remains.

“The Garden of the Gods is probably the place the most ashes are scattered,” said Paul Butcher, retired parks department director. “We’ve always had hearsay stories that people scatter ashes in Garden of the Gods, Palmer Park and from the top of Pikes Peak. It happens. We never encouraged it. But I’m 100 percent sure people have done it.”

In fact, Native American groups tried unsuccessfully to stop construction of the visitors center in 1994 by claiming the garden was a sacred burial ground of the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

Here’s a link to a video about Patty Jewett Golf Course.

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