Planning PUEBLO

COURTESY PHOTOS Smelter smokestacks darken the air near Tenderfoot Hill where a playground was proposed in 1916, in this historic photo taken from First Street.

Denverite's vision called for more parks, playgrounds

By MARY JEAN PORTER
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

Pueblo city fathers long have flirted with improvement and beautification schemes.

As early as 1915, they commissioned a survey by Denver landscape architect Irvin J. McCrary that would provide recommendations for a city plan. Members of the Pueblo Commerce Club recognized that something should be done to guarantee employment for Pueblo working men in case of "dull times," and the improvements called for in a comprehensive city plan would do just that.

McCrary's report on The Pueblo Improvement Plan was given to Pueblo city commissioners in 1916. It also was published in a 38-page booklet containing a fold-out map, two drawings, 24 photos and two full-page ads for the Sunville Baking Co., which appears to have paid for the publishing and distribution. A note on the back cover urged property owners to save the report because the improvements "will necessarily take years to complete" and the report would serve as a handy voting guide for public projects.

Puebloan August Kaiser found a copy of The Pueblo Improvement Plan booklet in 1976 beneath an older house on 10th Street. He was working for Culligan Water Conditioning at the time; it was February, the pipes had frozen, and he had gone to the house to make repairs. The booklet was with other old papers and newspapers that no longer were legible, and the resident of the house had nothing to do with them, Kaiser said.

"The shape it's in now, it's not bad," he said. "The cover is a little torn. I put it between two books to protect it."

The original McClelland Library is surrounded by trees in this early photo taken from Abriendo Avenue.

Kaiser said he thought the booklet was fascinating, especially the map that shows Pueblo in 1916 - a Pueblo with four smelters, Colorado Fuel and Iron Co., the State Insane Asylum, the State Fairgrounds, the treed expanses of Mineral Palace and City parks, and the neighborhood of serpentine streets and tiny parks between Abriendo Avenue and the bluffs above the rail yards.

Kaiser said he loves memorabilia like the improvement plan document. He recently lent it to Jim Koncilja, another local history enthusiast, who brought it to the attention of The Pueblo Chieftain Publisher Robert H. Rawlings.

In his introduction to the improvement plan, McCrary predicted that Pueblo was entering a period of "greater growth and prosperity" and there could be no better time to prepare for growth. He stated that cities compete with each other, just as people do. "To attract, a city must be attractive, or its competitors will walk away with the prize."

This stretch of Fountain Creek, looking upstream from Eighth Street, was proposed as a river parkway in 1916.

McCrary's report briefly reviewed Pueblo's geography, climate, topography, population and physical boundaries, and concluded: Pueblo was mostly industrial and commercial; the city's workforce should be given every opportunity for healthful recreation; health-seekers and tourists drawn to the nearby mountains might become citizens of Pueblo if the city were made attractive; and city betterment would benefit all classes by fostering public spirit, pride in one's home city, and correspondingly higher standards of living and citizenship.

McCrary suggested improvements to existing parks and proposed new parks, including an extension of City Park north to the Rio Grande tracks beneath the bluffs; a new park in the area then known as Hartford Highlands which appears to be today's Big Hill on the North Side; a Fountain Valley Parkway, which would follow Fountain Creek from Eighth Street north for 1.8 miles; an extension of Mineral Palace Park to the south, covering an area bounded by Santa Fe Avenue on the west, the Rio Grande tracks on the east and 11th or 10th Street on the south; a public park around Lake Minnequa; and an "outside reservation" a few miles up the Arkansas River from the city, in "scenic country . . . too rough for cultivation."

The Wet Mountains stand on the horizon, beyond Lake Minnequa, in this historic photo published in The Pueblo Improvement Plan booklet.

McCrary also proposed several boulevards, among them "a broad, sweeping, curved boulevard" between Lake Minnequa and City Park that would depart from the usual straight streets. And he suggested that the Bessemer Ditch be made "an ornamental feature" of Adams Avenue, "carried in a central parkway with a roadway on either side."

He recommended changes in public buildings like McClelland Library and the courthouse; in school grounds; in the layout and width of city and county streets; in bridges and viaducts - including the need for a viaduct over the tracks at Eighth Street and Fountain Creek, and a viaduct over the Arkansas River on Santa Fe Avenue. And he suggested planting trees, posting street-name signs, eliminating advertising signs on trash cans, and removing overhanging business signs - "Nothing so smacks of village days," he opined.

Trees and grasses grow in the area proposed as an extension of Mineral Palace Park in 1916.

McCrary was eerily prescient in some of his recommendations - or else what he wrote made such good sense that the ideas were carried forward and put into action decades later.

Pueblo Boulevard is an example; it roughly follows the route suggested by McCrary, though it's located farther south and west. The proposed parks along Fountain Creek and around Lake Minnequa, the city-owned open space and playing fields near Big Hill, and Lake Pueblo State Park surrounding the reservoir west of town are others.

story from the Pueblo Chieftain