Memories needed!
Do you remember the community in “The Bottoms” in Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood? In 1960, more than 240 families and businesses were displaced from the area to allow for the construction of the highway-style cloverleaf interchange of Colfax Avenue and Federal Boulevard.
Now, Denver Streets Partnership, in partnership with History Colorado, is undertaking an oral history project to collect testimony from residents and business owners who were impacted by the displacement, along the boundaries of 14th and 17th Avenues between Irving and Decauter Streets.
“We would like to connect with people who remember what the area was like before and after the cloverleaf was built,” says Jill Locantore, executive director of Denver Streets Partnership.
The cloverleaf refers to the shape of the interchange.
Many of the businesses that were located where the Cloverleaf is today, she says, were owned by Jewish families.
“We would love to connect with any surviving members of these families to participate in the oral history project and share their stories,” says Locantore.
One of the goals of the project is to create intergenerational dialogue, so the project teams up youth historians to collect oral histories from adults (age 50-plus) who either experienced the construction firsthand or who lived nearby when the cloverleaf was constructed.
The oral histories will become part of History Colorado’s permanent collection.
The Colorado Dept. of Transportation recently received a $2 million grant to plan for the removal of the cloverleaf and reconstruction of the street network in this area. The Cloverleaf Oral History Project aims for its collection of first-person memories to help inform the redevelopment of the land in ways that better serve the community.
Information: Jill Locantore, jill@denverstreetspartnership.org or 720-443-3793.