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Posted 08.01.2010

Who owns Colorado: Taking flight in a down economy

FasTracks, passenger traffic, spur DIA developers' optimism

By David Lewis

"That's a crackerjack idea to put the new airport terminal under a tent. I like the ‘big top' symbolism. You can almost hear the circus band playing ‘Entrance of the Gladiators' and see the parade of trapeze artists, tumblers and wild animals."
- Gene Amole in the Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 7, 1990

Back in 1990, when the great Gene Amole wrote the preceding passage about the then-new Denver International Airport, the economy was recovering from close to a decade of recession, and it was still in a shambles characterized by financial scandal, gyrating energy markets, and the near-collapse of lending, banking and real estate values.

Today, by contrast, we live in an era characterized by financial scandal, gyrating energy markets, and the near-collapse of lending, banking and real estate values.

Yet things are different this recession, mostly.

The first chapter in the life of Denver International Airport was noted for its savings and loans scandals, over-ambitious pols and thirsting business interests.

This time around our wallow in the depths of recession appears to have brought about an era splicing together a Carter-like malaise combined curiously with a Reagan-like sunny optimism for the long term - sometimes the long, long term - based on DIA's passenger traffic, employment needs (30,000 workers today with the potential to double) and the singular significance of extending RTD's FasTracks rail service from downtown to the airport.

What has not changed over the past 20-some years is the sheer huge-ossity, the enormousness or enormity, of most everything associated with Denver International Airport.
Giga-normous TOD (transportation-oriented development) projects on the drawing board or otherwise in early stages include Mortenson Construction's $200 million, 500-room DIA Westin, comprising a hotel and a FasTracks station at the terminal's south end.

The gargantuan plan's piece de resistance, of course, is DIA's agreement with famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to design the integrated hotel-FasTracks train station.
Calatrava once was described by the Chicago Tribune as a magician whose "buildings and bridges make steel and concrete fly through the air with the greatest of ease."
Calatrava's designs indeed arouse.

"This is my passion," Denver aviation manager Kim Day recently told  the Denver Post. "It's just the most magnificent example of how public infrastructure can be designed to be beautiful, utilitarian, efficient and  intuitive to use."

The High Point development, too,  is huge.

But it, too, has suffered.

Through the downturn, "Our plan has remained largely the same, but obviously the economic climate has impacted some timing issues," says Gardner Hammond, vice president of Newport Beach, Calif.-based LNR Property Corp., developer of 1,600-acre High Point, along Tower Road.