The Whittier Neighborhood, 1991

A piece pulled from the archives. So much has changed since 1991: we’re far from the only whites on the block, people don’t stop their cars in the street to visit anymore and there may not be a single boarded up, vacant house in the entire neighborhood. And Andrea? She lives in St. Louis, stopped by with her two children last year, thirty-something and still beautiful.

I live in Northeast Denver. Some people say they live in Northeast Denver and when you visit, the streets are lined with tall, well-pruned elms and maples, beautifully restored Victorians and bungalows with lush lawns. That’s Park Hill. That’s not what I mean.

I mean old houses sagging at the porch line, peeling paint at the eaves, next to a row of crowded apartments with bare dirt yards, Spanish and rap music; and on the other side a tall Denver square, boarded up, its yard choked with weeds. I mean the sections of Five Points, Cole, and Whittier in which Denver’s District 2 cops call people like us urban pioneers, as if we were homesteading in the wilderness.

The cops have their reasons. They see the hard stuff, and so think the neighborhood is rife with crime. We’ve had a taste of that, so they aren’t totally wrong. We were burglarized our first year, and again the third. A drug dealer was shot in the corner apartment the fourth year, and the burglaries stopped. There were domestic violence situations with renters. The cops were here for all of that. But I don’t want to focus on such things, seductive though they are. They are rare events, punctuations to otherwise placid days, weeks, and months in the seven years of our Whittier residency.

Our house had been vandalized during its long early 1980s vacancy. The signs of that abuse were like scars on skin—shattered windows and light fixtures, kicked in bedroom doors, cigarette burns in old shag carpets. We reclaimed this house, made it radiate calm and care, made it ours. It was twice the house we could’ve afforded elsewhere. That’s why we were here—defying conventional wisdom, house was more important to us than location. Self-conscious as if stage-lit, we moved into this basically black area, an area that, despite our many years in Denver, we’d never even had reason to drive through before.

In the weeks we spent painting and repairing and hacking through the jungle in our yard prior to moving in, not a neighbor glanced at us. It was daunting. We had second thoughts, moments of sheer panic. One day we walked past the apartments and a group of small children stopped playing to stare. “Them’s the only white folks we got,” one child proclaimed to the rest.

Months later, as I sprinkled grass seed on the bare dirt of the back yard, Mz. Evelyn waved over her fence two yards away. “Hello!” she called. “You’re doing a wonderful job with the yard.” It was the crack in the ice, the beginning of the thaw. After that we met Jo Bunton-Keel, the tirelessly dedicated director of Eulipions Center for the Arts, and missed her sorely some years later when she moved. We came to know the lovely Frida three houses down, and her two equally lovely daughters. Andrea was eight that year, all legs, and took to running full tilt to greet us when we came home from work, as if she were our child. When that happened we knew we’d made the right decision.

Years ago, I saw Maya Angelou’s magnificent one-woman performance and her advice to the largely white audience was: if you don’t have any black friends, go make some. The unspoken premise of that directive is that cultural diversity is cultural enrichment. Don’t we all agree? Apparently not, in view of the way so many wonderful old houses here remain empty, priced at a fraction of the same houses in Wash Park.

We are still the only white people on our block, seven years later, but now I’m a bit smug about my status. I’d almost resent someone else white moving in, destroying my uniqueness. Now I know the best places to get barbeque, have attended Juneteenth parades and seen “Black Orpheus” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at Eulipions in Five Points. I’ve resurrected my rusty Spanish to say, “Baja la música, por favor.” We have the occasional loud night, but usually quiet fills our mornings and sifts into our evenings. Visiting friends remark on the tranquility with surprise, and I feel gratified to deflate one more little stereotype bubble. I’ve re-learned the habit of stopping the car in the middle of the street to chat with a friend sitting on her porch, something I remember from my small town childhood. There, when you did that, other cars waited patiently behind you, or eased around, if there was room. Here, if the cars behind you are from “the hood,” they do the same. Here, Mz. Evelyn is absolutely Mz. Evelyn to everybody, the respect due her 78 years, and belonging to the neighborhood association is like being a member of a crusade.

I’ve watched Frida’s two girls grow up, the oldest going off to college. Andrea, now a poised fifteen-year-old, said to me, “You moved here when I was just a little girl.” Stunned, I realized it was true. In her young life, I’ve always been a neighbor, and this has always been home. And that’s what living here is like for us.

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5 Responses to The Whittier Neighborhood, 1991

  1. Jana Clark says:

    Well worth the resurection. Why is it so hard to move out of routine? Even something so simple as what we eat all the time! When we do try something new we are almost always pleasantly surprised. I grew up in a blue collar family. My dad a teamster. When Joe had to buy white shirts to go to work, I cried. I wasn’t comfortable about that!!

  2. Bob Jaeger says:

    Beautiful, Pat! It’s so comforting to live in an actual neighborhood, where folks recognize each other, stop to chat, share stories, bring cookies from a new recipe.

  3. Gregg Painter says:

    I helped a couple of white friends move into a place around 24th and Lafayette 25 years ago and an old black woman told me that “When we moved in here a long time ago, the Jewish were moving out. Now they moving in again.” Whites, Jews, whatever, to her, I guess.

    I saw Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at Eulipions, too. The second play of August Wilson’s ten-play cycle. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Y’know, that’s something else about theater. I love going to the movies, but when my wife brings up a movie we saw a year or two ago, I sift through my memories and lie “Oh yeah, I kinda remember that.” But plays, those I remember. And that one had actors who could play music (or musicians who could act), quite a difficult kind of artist to find, especially in this small city.

  4. Jean Queneau says:

    This is wonderful.

    Jean Queneau

  5. Carol says:

    Again, nice! Thank you!!

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