The Denver Gazette, January 9, 2021, Denver’s Central 70 project: Digging in troubled ground
At the center of Denver’s northern boundary lie the historic Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, a community of working-class Hispanic families these days, originally settled by immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere who came to work in the dangerous and dirty smelters associated with Colorado’s gold and silver booms.
Separated from most of the city by the South Platte River and rail yards, the neighborhoods and those adjacent through the decades found themselves host to many other industrial activities that Denver’s more comfortable confines didn’t want. A rendering plant. Meatpacking. A refinery. The wastewater treatment plant. Stockyards. Metal fabricators.
The original construction of Interstate 70 tore the neighborhoods in two and resulted in the loss of hundreds of the tidy little immigrant-built homes that lined the streets there. The population of the two neighborhoods was pegged three years ago at about 11,000 residents in some 3,100 housing units by the Piton Foundation’s Shift Research Lab.
A 2020 report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found Denver to be the second most intensely gentrified city in America during 2013-17, trailing only San Francisco in the share of vulnerable neighborhoods that gentrified.
