Last spring and summer, more than three miles of Broadway and Welton Street went car-free for a handful of Sundays, opening the space up to cyclists and pedestrians. It was part of a program called ¡Viva! Streets Denver, modeled off "ciclovía," an event started in Bogota, Colombia in the 1970s.
But ¡Viva! Streets won't return in 2024 due to permitting and traffic control issues with the city. Instead, organizers are setting their sights on 2025.
"This event is so big and it really takes takes a lot of resources, staff, time, money, all that stuff from a lot of our partners, and just sort of kind of came to came to a point where we really decided, if we could take this energy and direct it into putting on an equally or even greater impact event in 2025, that's kind of a better move for us," said Andrew Iltis, Vice President of Planning and Community Impact with the event's organizer, Downtown Denver Partnership.
Jill Locantore, Executive Director of Denver Streets Partnership, helped organize the event. She said the issues facing 2024 involve logistics with traffic control and closing down roads -- something she thinks could be surmounted to bring back ¡Viva! Streets this year.
"It really would be a shame to lose the momentum that was started in 2023," Locantore said. "Really it's just the logistics of making the permitting work with the city and we feel like that's eminently doable. If there's just the will from the top, from the mayor's office to make that happen."
Locantore said that organizers have already raised $250,000 in a grant from the Denver Regional Council of Governments and connected with hundreds of volunteers to pull the event off again in 2024.
"This is such an easily solvable problem," she said about the logistical issues. In response to the 2024 cancellation, Denver Streets Partnership started an email campaign to Mayor Mike Johnston's office pushing for the event to continue this year.
Alex Renteria, Director of Communications for the Mayor's Office, said organizers made the call.
"The Downtown Denver Partnership's decision to focus on 2025 for the next ¡Viva! Streets was their own and we support their decision," Renteria said in a statement Thursday. "They have shared with us that they are focused on pulling together the needed resources to host a wonderful event in 2025, and we look forward to enjoying it alongside them and the community."
According to the Denver Streets Partnership, last year's event brought out more than 40,000 people over four Sundays to downtown streets known for fast moving cars.
Pop-up tents from local businesses and organizations lined street as pedestrians, cyclists, skaters and dogs made their way through the route. But the event also faced unfortunate weather, with a number of the chosen Sundays seeing heavy rain and gloomy clouds.
Iltis said that the weather was not a factor in future planning. He said organizers plan to continue ¡Viva! Streets for years, and the in the long term people will not remember the early rain.
Looking to 2025, Iltis said organizers will focus on Broadway and Welton Streets again, but that he hopes ¡Viva! Streets will grow long term.
"I really believe that there's an opportunity to bring in more people into this conversation to really show with the intention, that goal, that vision of connecting neighborhoods, how can we make that bigger?" he said. "How can we bring in neighborhoods that maybe aren't feeling like they're connected to downtown?"
Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the Mayor's office, and to correct the number of people who attended ¡Viva! in 2023.
