Jane Jacobs meets the Denver Broncos - Saving the soul of Santa Fe

 

The latest video about the Denver Art Society - a third place in peril.
Click here to view.

By Gregory Saville

If you have read this blog over the years, or anything about urban planning and cities, you know the name Jane Jacobs. If you have no idea about Jacobs and you are an urbanist, planner, planning student, or CPTED practitioner, then you must resign, drop out, change careers, and abandon your studies. Maybe learn a new skill.

I recommend conga.

I play conga with my band Moosgh in our recording studio at the wonderful Denver Art Society (DAS). 

Fellow musician, and keyboard virtuoso, Tim Johnson and I unveil our latest music and videos during Denver’s famous First Friday Art Walks. Along with a hundred others in our DAS creative family, including artists, musicians, sculptors, writers, poets, and digital creators, we make art, music, and test out new ideas.

A unique volunteer art co-op, 18 years of creative art,
music, performance, learning and activating the street

Up and down Santa Fe Drive, galleries, studios, food trucks, street musicians, and thousands of Denverites join the Art Walks. DAS has been part of this bubbling creative hub for 18 years. The Art District on Santa Fe is a certified Creative District with over 100 galleries and studios, hundreds of working artists, restaurants, shops, and institutions like Colorado Ballet Academy and MSU Denver’s Center for Visual Art.

For us, naturally, the heartbeat of it all is DAS. Our three floors percolate with creative energy, classes, and performances. Based on our own calculations, we are one of the three largest volunteer-run, art cooperatives in the country. We checked!

SO WHAT?

Who cares? Jane Jacobs would!

Santa Fe wasn't always this lively. For decades, it was a working-class corridor with deep Mexican American and Chicano roots, family businesses, and a history of cultural organizing. By the 1980s, parts struggled with vacant storefronts, declining investment, and crime.

Artists like Macy Dorf, the Art District’s first president, moved into affordable spaces, followed by artists displaced from Denver’s LoDo neighborhood during the Coors Baseball Field redevelopment in the 1990s. One arts community died, another come to life.

In 2003, seventeen galleries, museums, and theaters established the Art District on Santa Fe. Grassroots organizing transformed a struggling corridor into one of Denver’s most vibrant cultural neighborhoods.

The former red-brick home of Jacobs in Greenwich Village, now a realty office

Decades before the Santa Fe Drive story, the visionary journalist Jane Jacobs, wrote one of the most important books about urban planning, walkable neighborhoods and, arguably, crime prevention: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). 

She probably wrote much of it from her red-brick home in the vibrant West Village neighborhood of New York’s famous Greenwich Village - a lively place of families and bohemian culture.

Sixty-five years is a long time to remain relevant. Yet her book still is today.

HISTORY REPEATS

Just after completing Death and Life in 1961, Jacobs discovered that urban renewal was coming to her own West Village neighborhood. She mobilized residents, challenged the people paying for the bulldozers, and accused the city of top-down planning devoid of those who actually lived there.

Then came another battle against a mega expressway project promising to speed yet more cars across Manhattan. Kill our neighborhood for that? Not on her watch!

She got arrested, wrote articles, brought hundreds of residents to city hall, and fought Robert Moses, one of the most powerful builders of his era.

Eventually, she won. Her beloved West Village was saved. Kinda. The death and life of cities is a tricky business.

New York's Greenwich Village today.
Photo by Felix Stahlberg, via Wiki Creative Commons

Ironically, Jacobs saved Greenwich Village from bulldozers, but not rising property values that eventually displaced much of its bohemian culture. Nearby SoHo suffered a similar fate. Artists transformed abandoned industrial buildings into a thriving cultural district, only to discover their success attracted wealthy investors.

Death and life of cities? Life and death?

WAKE UP

Last fall, DAS got a Jacobs-like wake-up. A new $4 billion Denver Broncos football stadium was announced just five blocks east, next to the residential neighborhoods of La Alma and Lincoln Park. Our neighbors!

Whoa! We already knew our lease would expire in less than two years. Now, with massive redevelopment coming our way, our future morphed into even greater uncertainty. What about us?

We attended the public meeting announcing the new Bronco stadium
moving to the neighborhood 

DAS is one of those places that breathes soul into a neighborhood. Ray Oldenburg coined the term Third Place, arguing that cities need such places to remain vibrant. DAS is a Third Place on steroids: a working artists' cooperative, creative production space, and cultural institution. In SafeGrowth, we argue these places also build neighborhood capacity, improve walkability, stabilize communities, and resist crime.

The Broncos development promises substantial investment. Maybe even a Superbowl! That would be cool. But if it displaces the artists and institutions that made the Art District in the first place, what have we gained? Displacement already happened near Coors Field. It once happened in Denver’s now-defunct Navajo Art District.

Could Santa Fe Drive be next?

ORGANIZING

We are organizing to save our home. I serve on the Save DAS committee with volunteers knocking on doors, attending meetings, and doing the kinds of things Jacobs once did.

For the first time in my career, I am no longer a planning and crime prevention advisor helping a community protect itself. I am on the ground with our DAS family, and we have real skin in the game. We stand to lose our home.

I am discovering firsthand just how exhausting and uncertain this process is. Luckily, I am not alone. My compatriots are a wonderful group committed to keeping DAS in the District. Life and death, indeed!

We face forces much bigger and stronger than us. Like Jacobs, we cannot be certain of the outcome. Unlike Jacobs, I don’t plan to get arrested!

Surprisingly, the road that Jacobs built, the road to grassroots change, neighborhood-driven and balanced planning, has already paid some early dividends. We just won the Denver Business Journal's 2026 Partners in Philanthropy Award in the nonprofit category.

And this week we published a new Save DAS video. 

Small wins.