Gov. Jared Polis on Friday announced a proposal for two new pedestrian bridges over Broadway and Lincoln Street to more safely connect the state Capitol to Civic Center Park.
Upper Downtown Denver has a few skyways. The rest of the city is full of pedestrian bridges over freeways, railroad tracks and waterways. Bridges over surface streets are much rarer, but the city’s built and destroyed at least one before.
In March 1966, a 43-year-old driver traveling 30 mph hit two Gove Junior High students who were crossing Colorado Boulevard at East 14th Avenue to attend a gym class. They were both “dragged or knocked nearly 80 feet by the impact” and died within days.
At the time, Denver traffic engineers were encouraging faster and more traffic by widening roads like Colorado Boulevard as the city and country buried its one-expansive streetcar networks and embraced the automobile.
So rather than install traffic-calming measures the city tends to favor today near schools (and that many urbanist-minded Denverites suggested on social media Friday for Broadway and Lincoln), officials pushed for a pedestrian overpass for the school.
“We can’t wait for studies or a bond issue to build another school,” one school board member said. “These kids are on the street right now.”
Within a few months, then-Mayor Bill McNichols announced Gove, a stately Italian Renaissance Revival-style building dating to 1911, and Morey Junior High in Capitol Hill would both get pedestrian overpasses.
The Morey bridge still connects the middle school to its athletic fields over busy East 13th Avenue.
But the metal Gove bridge, which the Denver Planning Board reportedly once described as “ugly” and “awful,” is long gone. The historic school burned and was demolished in the mid-1970s. The school building that replaced it was closed in 2005 after enrollment and academic performance dropped.
The building and the bridge were demolished in 2012. National Jewish Health had purchased the land to expand its parking lot.
