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The Century-Long Battle for Parking Continues

The Hested's Department Store stood vacant at 13th and Washington from 1977-2006 - Click to enlarge

For the past few days I’ve been musing about how automobiles have changed the shape of our built-before-cars downtown. On Sunday, I talked about the 1920s through the early ’50’s and our quest to provide ever-more parking spots on our streets. On Monday, I covered the rise of parking lots, 1950-1970. Yesterday‘s post reviewed some of the buildings we lost in the quest to build parking lots.

After more than half a century of scrambling to provide enough parking for their customers, downtown business owners got some unwanted relief in the 1980s. Shoppers’ tastes were changing. They didn’t want to shop in a traditional downtown anymore–they wanted to go to shopping malls. One by one, our downtown stores closed. By some counts, half of our storefronts were empty by 1990. Our downtown hotel–the Holland House–closed and stood empty. There were few restaurants, few stores, and few reasons to visit downtown. This was happening to small towns all over the country.

Golden fought back.

  • We voted to form a Golden Urban Renewal Authority, which used tax incentive deals to finance visual and infrastructure upgrades.
  • The Golden Civic Foundation bought some of the empty buildings and selected developers to refurbish and reopen them as viable businesses.
  • The Golden Chamber began hosting downtown events almost every weekend.
  • The merchants agreed to fund a tourism program (Visit Golden).
  • Community leaders raised funds to build a Visitors Center.
  • The City developed the Creek and built a golf course to help attract tourists.
  • Many, many citizens undertook all sorts of volunteer efforts aimed at making Golden a vibrant, viable city again.

It all worked: Golden is as viable as all get-out. Our downtown has never been as crowded as it is today. Our population is climbing steadily, Mines is growing rapidly; Coors in on a growth spurt, and we attract thousands of tourists every month. Most of them arrive in cars and most of them need places to park. For the first time since the 1950s, people are circling, looking for parking spaces.

The City finally installed the parking meters that we’ve been discussing since the 1930s (only now we call them kiosks). Then they hired a company to write parking tickets. Suddenly our long-fought-for stock of downtown parking is a cash cow.

In 2021, the city made $57,738 from the parking pay stations and $0 from parking violation fines.

In 2024, they made approximately $180,000 from the pay stations and $270,000 from parking violation fines.

Despite the ongoing demand for parking and the profit it brings into the City coffers, the City Planners are working to reduce the number of available parking spots. They want to discourage people from driving downtown by removing parking spaces and adding bike racks and wider sidewalks.

Left - Current (diagonal) parking Arapahoe Street | Right - Reversion to parallel parking as shown in the City's West Downtown Plan.

Strong pushback from the merchants (who still want their customers to be able to park) has made the planners reconsider the Arapahoe Street plan, and it is now rumored that they plan to keep the diagonal parking.

However, they are redesigning Jackson Street, and their current plan is to eliminate 52 parking spaces on the east side of downtown. They're also considering a plan to convert some or all of the Astor House/Miners Alley parking lot into a seating area.

Will bike racks and parking tickets encourage more people to go car-less? Maybe. Can we start to give up our hard-won parking spaces? I have my doubts, but we’ll see. Even after a century, we haven’t fully solved the parking conundrum.

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