Walking along this road toward the train station, I came across slim sidewalks rolling straight up from the street. I’d first run into these sidewalks near my hotel, which was plopped out in a cobbled-together area of the city where swathes of big-box stores sat plumply next to a fast, dangerous four-lane boulevard. Trees are integral both to understanding walking’s complex benefits for our minds and bodies, and to realizing cities that are once again truly walkable. Built up during the 1950s and 1960s, these areas are characterized by a feature I’d never seen before: those “Hollywood sidewalks.” The Hollywood sidewalk, or Hollywood curb as it’s also called, combines the gutter, sidewalk, and curb into one unit, but because the sidewalk portion is only about 32 inches wide (less than three feet), its uselessness as a functional sidewalk is obvious to anyone who wants to walk safely from one place to another. Problems plaguing either very old or very new neighborhoods, like heaving side- walks and signs placed right in the middle of a wheelchair or stroller route, are easier to x than some of the odder infrastructure embedded in Denver’s midcentury neighborhoods. Sidewalk maintenance and repair are only two of the challenges faced by a community interested in promoting walkability. Forget a wheelchair or walker that was impossible. There were long stretches where even desire lines (natural paths created by erosion from foot traffic) were absent and I was shoved onto the busy road, wondering how a person with even moderately impaired mobility, or vision or hearing, could safely get from here to there on foot. The route that Google Maps gave me was a mostly straight shot down East 13th Avenue through the full spectrum of Denver’s sidewalks, pseudo-sidewalks, and utter lack of sidewalks. On a Tuesday morning, after walking about an hour from my hotel in search of hot coffee and something to eat, I set out to tramp six miles from Aurora to downtown Denver, where I was meeting with Paul Kashmann, the city councilman who chaired the mayor’s sidewalks working group aimed at identifying the problems and roadblocks that prevented Denver from being a completely walking-friendly city.ĭepending on your pace, it takes nearly three hours to walk from where I was in Aurora to the City and County Building in downtown Denver. I went to Denver to find how at least one lesser-discussed city was reshaping itself around the pedestrian. A slow, step-by-step comeback, as might be expected of such an endeavor, but with the strength one would also expect of a movement seeking to reclaim our free-striding bodies’ rights to our public spaces. From health initiatives like the Walk with a Doc program to the surprising removals of Futurama-inspired freeways in cities like Dallas, Texas, and Rochester, New York, to Atlanta’s one- billion-dollar commitment to walking and biking infrastructure over 25 years, walking is making a comeback. Yet all over the United States, towns and cities are quietly regaining their right to walk. It’s so easy to turn to New York City and its fellow high-profile cities and ignore the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Sometimes they’d bring up Chicago, every now and then Boston. “What about New York?” people invariably asked me when I talked about the lack of walkability in the United States. I went to Denver partly because all the books I’d read about walking tended to orbit around either these world-renowned cities or hiking and mountain climbing. I’ve walked for days, even months and years, in Boston, New York City, London, Paris, Moscow, Vienna, Rome, Sydney-all beautiful, unique cities with varying grades of walkability.
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