He cut a swaggering figure against tall pines and the dawn sky.
A man wearing a cowboy hat. Cowboy boots. Sleeping bundle. Camp stove.
His covered wagon was overflowing with goods and ready to move.
An image of the West perhaps worthy of Charlie Russell’s brushes and palate.
But this was not the windswept plains of eastern Montana. It was Cheesman Park on a Sunday morning in September.
The man was homeless. His wagon was a stolen King Soopers shopping cart covered with a blue tarp. His camp stove was a Weber kettle grill scavenged from a dumpster.
He was standing just north of the rose garden next to the park’s Greek revival pavilion. Once the pride of a city looking to shed its cowtown roots, the pavilion is a gathering point for homeless campers.
The homeless are gradually trashing this landmark; they flock to it because they can use its electric outlet to charge their cellphones for free. A good Samaritan walking a small white dog comes out each morning and picks up some of the mess.
Up one of Cheesman Park’s asphalt paths that day drove a park ranger in a brand new white pickup truck. The bar of lights atop the cab flashed bright blue. The homeless man and the ranger glared at each other and both moved on — after 5 a.m., hanging out in the park is not a crime.
Such is life in Denver in the 21st century. We have arrived as a major city on the national scene. We have found ourselves in the midst of a boom, our identity wrapped up in ugly new buildings, and Uber drivers who drive customers to their destinations for a living but whose lives have no direction.
From the mayor to the lowly park ranger, our bureaucrats have plenty of expensive new gadgets, but they can’t seem to figure out the right way to deploy their power tools in ways that respect the quality of life that defines our neighborhoods. Our leadership rolls over for powerful development interests while we live vicariously through the success of our beloved Broncos. But what kind of life to we make for ourselves?
In a 2010 book called “Saving the West,” author Peter R. Decker, who divides his time between Denver and Ridgway, wrote about experts who come out from New York and try to apply Wall Street metrics to turn around a ranch on the Western Slope. They learn the hard way that the West has its own way of doing things.
Decker, who served in former Gov. Roy Romer’s cabinet, sees the accelerating pace of change in the Mile High City as an assault on the Western values that give the city its character. Across Denver, he observed, small, friendly neighborhoods are being replaced by something different and less personal. A prime example is Cherry Creek North, which “is now a place to avoid rather than to visit. Greed has come to replace rational planning and preservation,” he wrote me in an e-mail.
In late August, I was sitting in a Capitol Hill United historic preservation committee meeting when the transformation of Denver’s great green spaces into cash generators came up. One member observed that the city is starting to treat its best assets the way a hedge fund manager would treat an underperforming junk bond. “They just see the parks as cheap real estate,” she said.
The frustration we’re feeling as citizens and neighbors is hard to define, but it’s real. We are losing the sense of community, the identity of our neighborhoods and amid prosperity there is a sense that something essential is slipping away.
The frustration hasn’t yet reached the surface, but it’s there and it is growing. You can hear it in the voices of the homeless man my wife found sleeping under a tarp in our alley on the morning of Oct. 12. “It’s raining and I just don’t have any place to go,” he told her apologetically.
The city’s leadership needs a much firmer grasp on the problems of homelessness and the disruption that’s taking place across our neighborhoods. It needs a timeout before cool places like Baker or Highlands are transformed by greedy developers into blocks of flats — and the informal, friendly connections that define Denver and the West disappear forever. This is a turning point — if we don’t act now, there’s no going back.
Entrepreneur Henry Dubroff splits his time between California and Colorado.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.