Avery Bixby was asked to croon a song at an unusual celebration last weekend: A new gate was being unlocked for the first time.
Bixby, a student at the New Cottage Arts center, had the perfect tune for the long-awaited moment.
“All your life,” she sang, “you were only waiting for this moment to arise.”
They hadn’t been waiting that long. But it had been years.
York Street Yards, the old army medical depot in Denver’s Clayton neighborhood, began a transformation into a commercial district in 2014. It’s since brought a brewery, coffee shop, e-bike dealer, dog bar — and more — to the mostly residential area.
Its lawns and patios were a major attraction for people who live nearby. But getting inside wasn’t as easy as neighbors would have liked.
Bixby’s performance marked a little milestone for the community: the christening of a gate that would allow easier access from Schafer Park into York Street Yards, cementing it as a center of gravity for the neighborhood.
“You were only waiting for this moment to be free.”
The opening was a long time coming.
York Street Yards is a sprawling property, 20 acres stretching from Steele to York Street, just south of the new-ish 38th Avenue Greenway.
There was once a gate that gave people another way into its long footprint. But Fred Glick, a developer who has invested in a housing project on the site and who lives nearby, said that had to be closed permanently when businesses there started applying for liquor licenses. The International Academy of Denver at Harrington elementary school sits just outside the fence, and the gate created a too-short pathway between students and booze sellers.
“Over years, we had back and forth with the city,” said Hans Gustafson, an executive with the SKB real estate company that owns York Street Yards. “It was just kind of doing it the right way.”
Gustafson said the company needed proof that it owned the fence and that it could be allowed to create a new opening farther away from the school.
It probably didn’t hurt the developer’s case that the school is going to be closed due to low enrollment.
It was a small development, but meaningful.
About a dozen people gathered for the opening ceremony, cheering as a lock was removed from the door in the fence after Bixby finished a few songs. Glick and Greg Pauley, real estate manager for SKB, led the ceremony.
It’s a pretty normal chain-link gate in a chain-link fence. Now that residents don’t need to walk all the way around to York or Steele to get inside, they might save up to a half mile of extra walking.
Glick told the small crowd that this is part of a bigger psychic shift for the area.
“There was this thought, that somehow this wasn’t part of the neighborhood,” he told the crowd. “It’s starting to recognize that a neighborhood is not just a bunch of single-family houses. It’s also places that people want to come and be together. It’s places where people can get services they want, where they can bring their dogs to play, have a beer with their friends. So it’s really exciting to me to see the old army medical depot site, York Street Yards, now being really linked to the neighborhood that it’s a part of.”
Jes Driscoll, a neighbor and board member of the Clayton United registered neighborhood association, said she was thrilled when the gate finally opened, giving her neighborhood quicker access to local businesses.
“We’ve been advocating for this to open for what feels like forever,” she said.
For now, the gate will be open from 7 a.m. to dusk. Pauly said they may amend that as they see how it’s used.
