A decade ago, Westwood resident Norma Brambila set out to convince the city to finally bring a recreation center to her neighborhood in southwest Denver.
She never expected anyone to listen, even though she and her community showed up to countless public meetings and stayed on message for years.
And yet there she was on Friday, writing her name in marker on the last steel beam in the skeleton of the future Westwood Recreation Center. She was one of a crowd of neighbors and city leaders to join a “topping out” ceremony for the project.
The new rec center, which broke ground in April, includes a gym, a basketball court and an indoor pool — something Brambila and her neighbors wanted badly.
The place was still a raw construction site when Brambila walked in, but she said she was overcome with joy nonetheless.
“I'm very emotional to come into this building for the first time and to know that the community voices were actually heard,” she said in Spanish, beaming to a crowd gathered for the occasion. “This center is going to be really badass.”
The rec center is set to open in 2027 at Morrison Road and West Walsh Place.
Westwood will soon have an indoor water slide and lazy river.
Gordon Robertson, the director of planning, design and construction for Denver’s parks department, said he’ll never forget when he met Brambila. He was leading meetings across the city about how the city should spend the 2017 Elevate Denver Bond. No matter where, Brambila and her neighbors showed up to advocate for a rec center in Westwood.
“They were there at every meeting. They were demanding — not asking — demanding that ‘We deserve this and we need this.’ And that's why it happened and that's how it happened,” he said. “I want to thank every resident who showed up to meetings, pushed for this investment and helped shape every detail. And I want to specifically call out Norma. Thank you.”
The Westwood Rec Center will cost about $56 million, covering a sizable lot at Morrison Road and Walsh Place that was once home to a laundromat. Renderings of the project show a vibrant entranceway studded with art, a bright yellow doorway beneath the main structure’s curving blue facade.
The construction site suggested what was to come inside: a large room for the basketball court; a deep rectangular pit where the pool would go; square holes in the wall where a waterslide will eventually curve outside and then back into the building; a snaking tract that will become the lazy river. There are plans for classrooms and community spaces, too.
Brambila, dressed in a hard hat and safety vest, was joyous as she toured the work-in-progress, her eyes wide with delight.
This will be a neighborhood rec center, parks spokesperson Jesus Orrantia said, which are usually smaller and don’t get pools and water features. But the community advocacy from Brambila and her neighbors was hard to ignore, he said.
“It was a higher level and more extensive of a community outreach process than we do in a lot of projects,” he said, “because of the neighborhood, because of the project we were doing.”
The rec center is partially an atonement, but it also presents some risk.
Brambila carried so much conviction that Westwood deserved this investment because the city has historically ignored this neighborhood, which stretches from Federal Boulevard west to Sheridan Boulevard, just south of Alameda Avenue.
It’s a fact that’s spelled out on Parks and Rec’s website for the project.
Westwood, it says, “has been a historically underserved community, with some of the highest youth and adult obesity rates in the city and a lack of access to recreation facilities and green space.” Building a safe place to gather, where people can keep fit, is a measure to close “this service gap.”
But Robertson told the crowd gathered on Friday that the rec center is just the beginning, part of a broader reshaping of Morrison Road.
“It's going to be a beautiful building in this neighborhood,” he said. “This block is going to help begin that process.”
Denver City Council member Jamie Torres, who also attended the ceremony, said residents have been asking for a revamp. Denver earmarked an additional $15 million from bonds passed in 2017 and 2021 to improve Morrison Road.
“There are other things in other bond projects that are going to help transform the actual street itself. They want it to feel safer to walk down. And so those sidewalks are going to be widened. There's going to be curb lawns built in. There's going to be plazas built in along the way,” she said. “People have said that they want it.”
But improvements in historically underinvested neighborhoods like Westwood tend to also raise concerns about displacement. Torres told the crowd on Friday that is at play with Morrison Road’s improvements.
“‘Will I even be here when it opens? Will I even be a resident of the Westwood neighborhood?’” she remembered people asking. “We have worked really hard to make sure that those who fought for this are still around to be able to enjoy it, because displacement is super real. A gem like this does attract more folks who want to make Westwood their new home.”
Torres said citywide work to crack down on wage theft, to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units and to promote more affordable housing has helped Westwood residents remain in their neighborhood. She added that the city’s budget crisis and federal cuts are new headwinds to that work.
“It's going to be harder and harder,” she said. “But one thing that this neighborhood does demonstrate is its resiliency. Its ability to come up and help each other out. And we see that happen every day.”
That grit is what propelled Brambila and her neighbors to their successful push for the new Westwood Rec Center. And, now, her signature will grace a steel beam inside its structure, a small reflection of the mark she made on her community.
“We came together. It was because we believed we had the voice and the right,” she told us. “A united Hispanic community makes a big difference. It's a Hispanic and Latino neighborhood — and I'm very proud to see it represented.”
