Placemaking is Alive and Well in Denver

"We finished our first full day by driving up to Longmont's Prospect New Town, a mixed-use development built on the site of a former tree farm by owner/developer Kiki Wallace. Though this was my third visit to Colorado's first New Urbanist community, I had not previously spent as much time onsite, even though I wrote a brief case study on it for Terrain.org just before moving to Tucson. At 80 acres, Prospect is only two-thirds the size of Bradburn Village, and yet it feels larger-in many senses it feels larger than life, given the Modernist and otherwise highly eclectic architecture and mix of uses. The site plan was created by celebrated town planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, but the architecture is rarely neotraditional, especially in the second and third phases of the project, which at buildout is expected to house nearly 2,000 people.

Carolyn and I began the afternoon by having lunch at Two Dogs Diner, recommended by Petra. The diner and the broader Prospect 'downtown' did not disappoint. Located along U.S. Highway 287, Prospect's commercial area is readily accessible from the main north-south thoroughfare of the area, yet deep within the neighborhood there's also a town square, which not surprisingly is actually triangular, around which is a mix of single-family attached and detached homes and a corner restaurant reminiscent of the many corner stores and restaurants in older Denver and Boulder neighborhoods."