In April 2024, Gloria, a community activist and longtime Globeville resident, took me on a tour of the neighborhood.[1] Globeville is one of two neighborhoods that make up Denver, Colorado’s 80216 zip code, which was listed as one of the most polluted zip codes in the United States by The Denver Business Journal in 2017. The tour included a litany of projects tied to pollution: the region’s former smelters, interstates I-25 and I-70 which bisected Globeville in the 1950s and 1960s, the site of the former public housing project which closed in 1990 due to contamination from a smelter, and the nearby petroleum refinery which has been operating for the past 100 years, all within close proximity. At the end of the tour, Gloria asked if she could show me her favorite location in Globeville. She explained that it was connected to Globeville’s history of smelting and pollution and had since been transformed into a community asset—Platte Farm Open Space.
Platte Farm Open Space is a 5.5-acre brownfield site with a shortgrass prairie, native trees, wildflowers, walking trails, and bike paths, designed by and for the community.[2] It is also an important case study to examine both the legacy of industrial pollution and an environmental justice community’s agency in repairing their environment. The Open Space exposes the juxtaposition of promises and tensions that co-exist through the efforts to remediate land scarred by industrial harm. In doing so, this landscape demonstrates the complexity and paradoxes of green spaces and environmental recovery, illustrating that not all urban greening is inherently more just or sustainable, and how environmental historians can better attend to power and privilege in our assessment of toxic communities.
Whereas my tour in Globeville with Gloria was not technically a “toxic tour,” it did meet several of the intentions of one. Toxic tours have been an important method for environmental justice communities to share their lived experience, highlighting their proximity to hazardous waste, extractive industries, and polluting facilities. They can serve as a powerful educational tool both for community members and those living outside the community. However, like much social science research in environmental justice communities and communities of color more broadly, they can overemphasize stories of pain and oppression.[3] “Desire-based research,” as theorized by Indigenous Studies scholar Eve Tuck, aims to counteract such stories of damage within disenfranchised communities to focus on the community’s capacity for agency.[4]
Gloria’s inclusion of Platte Farm Open Space as an important place within her predominantly Latine community—a place of respite, recreation, and nature in an otherwise largely industrial area—added a desire-based component to our tour. It enabled us to imagine what a green and sustainable Globeville could look like.[5]
To understand the significance of Platte Farm Open Space to the community, it is important to understand not only how this area became damaged but also how residents have fought for accountability from The American Smelting and Refining Company (ARASCO) and the government. Globeville’s history of environmental injustice dates back to early industrial development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, Globeville and neighboring Elyria-Swansea developed as company-owned towns for the region’s industries, including smelters, stockyards, meatpacking plants, and railyards. Globeville was home to the Argo, Omaha-Grant, and Globe smelters, for which the neighborhood was named. The Omaha-Grant and Globe smelters were acquired by ASARCO in 1899 and continued to pollute the area with lead, cadmium, and arsenic until 2005, when ASARCO declared bankruptcy.[6]
Beginning in the mid-1970s, state health officials started connecting an increased number of cancer deaths among workers to cadmium levels at the ASARCO Globe Plant.[7] Community environmental justice concerns in Globeville escalated when it finally became public knowledge that ASARCO’s legacy of emitting hazardous materials and waste—in particular arsenic, cadmium, and lead—was not only negatively impacting the health of its workers, but also the land, air, water, and residential neighborhoods contiguous to the smelter site. In August 1991, nine residents of Globeville filed a class-action lawsuit, Escamilla et al. v. Asarco, alleging that ASARCO had contaminated soil, lowered property values, and endangered public health.[8]
The 567 North Denver families who were represented in the case were ultimately awarded a settlement in the amount of USD 28 million.[9]
These lawsuits led to soil mitigation efforts and the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) designation of two former smelters as a Superfund site, forcing the parties responsible for pollution to be responsible for performing or funding cleanup.
The parcel of land that is now Platte Farm Open Space was part of a former smelter and a industrial waste dumping ground and was therefore within the ASARCO Superfund site boundaries. Rather than see this history as a linear narrative of events—from pollution, to demanding legal accountability, to soil mitigation—it is important for environmental historians to think critically about what remediation means, and who benefits from it. The EPA deemed the implemented remediation efforts satisfactory in 2004. Remediation, however, does not lead to an uncontaminated landscape. The only requirement necessary for a site to be considered successfully cleaned is that the federal risk threshold is met, not when toxins are removed. Therefore, state and federal remediation efforts are not a panacea for recreating a toxic-free environment. Despite such constraints, with the hope of a remediated open space in their backyard, a small group of Globeville residents came up with the idea for Platte Farm Open Space. The residents formed a steering committee in 2006 and collaborated with Groundwork Denver, a non-profit that works to create green spaces in underserved communities, landscape architects, and Denver Parks and Recreation, to turn the residents’ vision into reality. By tracing Globeville’s history from a smelter town through decades of pollution, litigation, and clean-up, to recent community-led restoration efforts, sites like Platte Farm Open Space demonstrate how urban spaces once defined by of industrial contamination can be transformed into healthy, sustainable environments. Platte Farm Open Space was designed to promote recreational activities as part of repairing the community’s relationship to the land. At the same time, this site illustrates how recovery itself can remain paradoxical.
Scholars have coined the terms “ecological gentrification,” “environmental gentrification,” and “green gentrification” to describe the paradoxical process of how environmental remediation can be a driver of gentrification.[10] When revitalized areas grow more attractive to wealthier people, the original residents who long fought for the environmental improvements are often at risk of displacement. In urban areas, environmental pollution can depress property values by as much as 45 percent, which may rebound sharply following a major cleanup.[11]
Between 2013 and 2017, longitudinal census data showed that Denver experienced more gentrification than any other US city with the exception of San Francisco. Data from the Urban Displacement Project (University of California, Berkeley) found that Globeville is “susceptible to displacement.” With more modern and expensive housing now on the perimeter of Platte Farm Open Space, the demographics of who gets to benefit from such areas may shift, making it harder for long-time residents to enjoy the green space they worked to create.[12]
As Globeville navigates its neighborhood transformation, desire-based research is important for highlighting the everyday places where residents find leisure, inspiration, and hope, and for envisioning forms of environmental progress that do not come at the expense of the community that fought for it, but instead embrace and sustain them.
[1] Name has been anonymized.
[2] “Platte Farm Open Space,” Groundwork Denver.
[3] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-words: Refusing research,” in D. Paris & M. T. Winn (eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2014), 223–248.
[4] Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage:A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79 no. 3 (September 2009): 409–428, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15.
[5] There are community groups, such as The Green House Connection Center, within Denver’s 80216 zip code that aim to blend toxic tours with desire-based outcomes called “Pollution and Solutions” tours in which resident-activists bring local decision makers on a tour of the neighborhood with the hope of creating policy change.
[6] “Smelters Are Cleaning Up,” The Denver Times, April 17, 1899.
[7] “Effects of cadmium to be researched,” Rocky Mountain News, June 6, 1976.
[8] Bill Scanlon, “Globeville residents sue ASARCO over pollution,”Rocky Mountain News, August 21, 1991; Mark Eddy, “Suit seeks to close Globeville plant,” The Denver Post, August 22, 1991.
[9] “Asarco Agrees to Pay Neighbors, Clean Up Denver Smelter Site,” The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1993, C26; F. Paul Bland, Jr. Testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Class Action Litigation, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, July 31, 2002.
[10] Sarah Dooling, “Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (September 2009): 621–639; Melissa Checker, “Wiped Out by the ‘Greenwave’: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability,” City & Society 23 (2011): 210–229; Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis, Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice (London: Routledge, 2016).
[11]Jeremy Bryson, “The Nature of Gentrification” Geography Compass 7 (2013): 578-587; Hamil Pearsall and Isabella Anguelovski, “Contesting and Resisting Environmental Gentrification: Responses to New Paradoxes and Challenges for Urban Environmental Justice,” Sociological Research Online 21 Issue 3 (2016): 121–127.
[12] Kevin Beaty, “Brighton Boulevard is home to one of the largest polluters in the state. As hipsters move in, Suncor may see more pressure to clean up its act,” Denverite, October 5, 2019, 1; Michael Roberts, “How Gentrification Has Changed the Globeville Neighborhood,” Westword, July 31, 2020.
*Cover image: Photo by Scott Dressel-Martinon American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Colorado, 2023.
[Cover image description: A green park with a cityscape in the background. There is a winding walking path through the center, cottonwood trees, and native flowers growing.]
Edited by Amelia Diehl, reviewed by Adrienne Brown.
