Thursday, 1 p.m.: 186 whites, 1 black, 4 Latinos, 4 Asians. Friday, 6 p.m.:647 whites, 6 blacks, 6 Latinos, 7 Asians Saturday, 11 p.m.:693 whites, 4 blacks, 2 Latinos, 7 Asians.
It's dangerous to assign race to people simply by glancing at their faces. Some people don't look at all like their race. Many people are a mix.
But if my recent counts of people in the restaurants, bars and shops in and around Denver's rehabbed, reopened Union Stationare even close, it's an overwhelmingly white place. How can the new cultural jewel of our city — where 47 percent of the population is minority — draw a crowd that is 98.2 percent Caucasian on a bustling, buzzed Saturday night?
The station's owner, the Regional Transportation District, worked long and hard to develop a city center that would reflect and showcase Denver's particular personality. None of the eateries are chains; the beers are Colorado-brewed. The architects, builders and programmers who turned the original 1914 building into a contemporary social hub are nearly all local.
But walking through the station, it doesn't look at all like Denver in 2014. More like Denver in 1950. More like Boise, Idaho, or Billings, Mont. This is a public place, owned by all of us, open to all, but the invitation to visit was declined by many, and it's obvious who isn't showing up.
Three months in, the place hums early and late.The Crawford Hotel on the top floors is a hit, and the best 8 p.m. restaurant tables are gone weeks in advance. A few years ago, the station was a ghost town. Now it is wildly popular, and in many ways, a smashing success.
If, that is, you are white and not paying attention. Or if you think diversity doesn't matter. If you do, you can't help but feel like something is off amidst all the clinking of martini glasses in the swank Cooper Lounge on the mezzanine, or the low hum of pucks sliding across shuffleboard tables in the Great Hall.
If you are a tourist — and there is hope the station will impress out-of-towners with our farm-to-table menus, craft cocktails and trendy gift shops — you might get the idea that Denver doesn't have people of color. Or worse, you might think it's one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. That's not the case.
We're not perfect, certainly, and the city has its share of streets where only one sort of family lives, bars where people hang out with their own kind. Sometimes that's segregation; sometimes it's just folks being themselves among themselves, celebrating common stories.
But we're no St. Louis, a city where decades of inequality has the good citizens at a boiling point. Our two biggest gathering places, the indoor shopping mall in Cherry Creek and the outdoor mall on 16th Street, are a sea of faces, cutting across skin color and social class. They can get gritty, and good for that; this is an American city after all, with all of the pleasures and problems of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago.
Architecture of exclusivity
It's easy to speculate why things are different at Union Station, though it requires some less elegant thinking about the way people of different ethnicities behave, some stereotyping. That's more dangerous than going room-to-room at the station, divvying up faces by the way they look, and keeping tallies on my iPhone.
Let's start with the building itself, the actual architecture. Union Station is a neo-classical mix of styles — European styles. The symmetry, arched windows, ornate cornice and stacked, stone walls have their roots in the glory days of France, England, Greece and Rome, in empires that were nearly absent of ethnic minorities and who felt fully at ease invading, exploiting and actually enslaving the people of Africa, subcontinent Asia and South America.
Yes, that's all in the past; things have changed. But the $54 million renovation of Union Station doesn't take that into account. It restores the symbols of an old world with no updates. The gilded chandeliers have been rewired, the marble polished, but there's no nod to the present, no interior walls in the bright colors of Mexico, no Asian simplicity is in the remix. There are no giant sculptures by African-American artists bonused into the lobby, no murals on the basement walls.
Would any of those updates have made Union Station more welcoming, made it "Ready for the Next 100 years," as its marketing proclaims ? Could they still?
A preservationist might object to physical updates. Restoration is about the exact, the original. History has its ups and downs, the thinking goes, and you can't blame buildings for the good or bad that happened. But a preservationist just might end up with a building that draws mostly white people — with a Union Station.
The present restoration harkens back to Union Station at its height, in the first half of a 20th century when many Americans suffered the social indignity and economic disadvantage of a segregated America. Denver's neighborhoods, parks, schools and social amenities were divided sharply by race. Denver's branch of the Ku Klux Klan, one mayor a member, kept things in their place.
The trains themselves were not officially segregated here, but you can bet many people on them boarded or disembarked in stations where blacks entered in separate doors and rode in restricted cars.
Denver's bigshot bigots are gone, schools and workplaces desegregated. But the structures of back then look the same — are they to be honored or altered to make the past palatable for everyone?
The programming does little to mitigate the obstacles. The local restaurants and chefs that made it onto Union Station were the city's highest-profile operators whose establishments serve mostly white clientele, and their fans have followed along. Minority businesses were part of the station's redevelopment, but many of the key players were white, too. These people are not racists. They are our among our best, most creative thinkers.
Still, something is missing. There's no traditional Mexican restaurant, no soul-food restaurant, no sushi bar, as if no one noticed that the Mexican-American, African-American and Asian-American families that own and operate those places across the city are also our best food purveyors.
This country is full of union stations, old train depots, once the center of civic life, that fell out of use in the auto era. St. Louis fixed up its station by adding a mall. It's not as successful, but it's diversified. Kansas City filled its hall with a science center, and kids from across the city's neighborhoods are regulars there.
Washington, D.C.'s train station now has swank shops, but also a food court. It has, notably, a B. Smith's restaurant, part of a small, African-American-owned chain that is a touchstone in the black community.
Where's a Subway?
A dangerous discussion? Yes, and surely faulty because the whole idea of race is fluid. My own counts, made on multiple visits, were based on appearance, not DNA, though I would argue that appearance matters.
Economics inevitably play a role here. Whites have more money in this city and, as a group, can better afford the hefty dining and drinking bills that often come with spending an evening in Union Station. A person could hang out in either of the above-mentioned malls for hours, strolling and shopping, grab a sandwich at Subway and not drop a lot of cash.
Union Station is programmed toward wallets. You need a password to use the Wi-Fi. Its product is elegance, even exclusivity. You can't even find the Cooper Lounge unless you know where you are going; it's set up for insiders. Exclusivity has its own historic baggage. Whether it's about keeping Jewish people out of a subdivision or gay people out of the military, it historically benefits the majority.
That's only part of it, of course. Because today's Denver has a growing middle-class of minorities. Plenty of blacks and Latinos could afford to play at Union Station. The surrounding neighborhoods are diversified with residents who could simply bike over or take the light rail or downtown shuttle. There is no one at the door looking folks over. The workforce is mixed. There's no open policy of exclusion.
But there may be an institutional one. RTD had a thousand choices when it was rehabbing the station. It could have put in a farmer's market or a suite of micro-offices. It could have let its imagination run wild and installed a basketball court or a rec center, day-care facility, museum, a theater that any group could rent, an indoor playground, or yes, a Subway.
But it chose a different path. RTD, whose buses and trains are the most diverse places in Denver, created a monster of separation. You can't keep private enterprise from doing this sort of deed, but a public entity, a common asset, might have more democratic obligations.
Union Station will make plenty of money and that will help keep our transportation system solvent. But how much is lost?
This really was a chance to define today's Denver, to show off to the world, to say we are as interesting and relevant as anywhere you can name. But this project has defined us narrowly, darkly, negligently. There is danger in that, too.
Poster Comment:
Now, did you make it to the end of the article with your blood pressure at a safe level??? :-o