8. The Trauma of Displacement

Rachel Gross: Stand at the iron fence looking down the grassy center of historic Ninth Street Park.

In the aftermath of the 1969 bond measure, the process of displacement started. It was slow at first. As Tony Garcia remembers:

Tony Garcia: And there was rumors and then there were conversations. And then there were meetings and then there was referendums. And each of those was a step and the families started to sell their houses and leave or rent their houses someplace else because they knew the inevitable was going to happen. And we moved out of the neighborhood.

Rachel Gross: This trickle of people leaving the neighborhood increased as the final deadline approached.

Rita Gomez Delgado’s home had already been sold to the Auraria Higher Education Center, known by its acronym AHEC, when moving day came. On that day, strangers entered their home even as her family was still trying to pack up their belongings.

Rita Gomez Delgado: It was chaotic. It was people that we didn’t know that were in our house just taking things…. And they said they had gotten permission from the owners of the Duplex.

Frances Torres: Yeah, because, because everything had been sold already to AHEC.

Rita Gomez Delgado: So people were going into our house while we were still living there…. My mom had nobody to help her move, and she ended up losing our major furniture, you know, sofas and chairs…. We had a really pretty gold French provincial sofa that my mom couldn’t get anybody to help her move it. And she said, I’ll be darned if I’m going to let them take that. And she she broke it. She broke it into pieces.

She said, I’m not going to let them take this.

Rachel Gross: Displacement was not just about the physical loss of homes or belongings. It was about the loss of community. For many, there was no time to say goodbye to neighbors and friends who were soon scattered to the winds. Some sought to stay on Denver’s Westside, moving south across Colfax or west across Federal. Others went further afield, to Denver’s Northside neighborhood or surrounding suburbs in Lakewood or Littleton.

Sheila Perez-Kindle recalled how hard it was to piece those friendships back together.

Sheila Perez-Kindle: We had to regain that relationship. We had to find out where they were or run into them in a different place because some went north, some went east, some went west. I mean, they were dispersed.

Rachel Gross: The neighborhood was gone, and the deep ties that once bound families and neighbors began to fade.

Decades later, Rita Gomez Delgado reflected on the lasting impact of that day:

Rita Gomez Delgado: And so people complain why are we still crying about an issue that happened 50 years ago? Well, they should have been there that day. They should have been there that day and watched their world fall apart.

Rachel Gross: If you look down on the other side of the iron fence, you might see a small rock on the ground in front of you. This rock is the only physical reminder anywhere on 9th street of the community that was displaced. Its hard-to-read text only gives a small hint of what they lost.

Sheila Perez-Kindle: In tribute to the several hundred families whose lives,

memories and sacrifices were offered so future

generations of students could attend the Auraria Campus

and enrich the greater Denver community.

Rachel Gross: The rock in front of you can’t possibly do justice to the deeper story of the neighborhood, the one about furniture destroyed out of despair, about lives disrupted, families scattered, and a neighborhood’s spirit torn from the ground.

This rock and its inscription illustrates how even after residents were forced to leave, some of them fought to preserve the memory of the old Westside. To hear more about these efforts, turn to your right and walk twenty feet to the next stop, the iron plaque along the sidewalk at the entrance to Ninth Street.