Left at Home: The Postwar Segregation of Denver’s Mountain Hinterland
Like most American cities, Denver's environmental and urban history is deeply entwined with its history of racial formation. Particularly after World War II, access to Denver’s mountain hinterland became an important resource and cultural marker for the city’s expanding middle class. Mountain recreation became a primary vector of Denver's evolving urban imperialism, as middle and upper class Denverites made expansive new claims on the nearby mountain landscape. Ski slopes and hiking trails became weekend destinations for upwardly mobile professionals and their families. Markets for condos and vacation homes flourished in brand new mountain resort communities. In the early 1960s, Denver-based mountain sports clubs gave rise to a powerful local environmental movement, which fought successfully to establish recreation and ecology as legitimate land uses in Denver’s expanding mountain hinterland.
At the same time, Denverites of color, concentrated by various forms of housing segregation into failing neighborhoods in the city’s core, found themselves written out that mountain landscape. Highways replaced the trams that had once conveyed Denverites of all class and racial backgrounds to the city’s foothills. Postwar urban planning prioritized automobile transit to the exclusion of other modes of travel, and gave no thought to preserving the access of core neighborhood residents to the mountains. As a result, over a relatively short period, Denver’s mountains became almost wholly defined as white suburban space; forbidding and distant enough from Denverites of color to prevent any significant incursion. Meanwhile, the lived habitats of Hispanic and Black Denverites remained largely geographically static.
The causes and effects of this exclusion are potentially among the most important and understudied strands in the postwar history of the urban American West. What was the relationship between the segregation of Denver's suburbs, and the segregation of its tourism and leisure-oriented mountain hinterland? How did these two forms of segregation combine to harm racial minorities in Denver? How do we measure that harm? And how, finally, did Denverites of color fight back against that exclusion?
This poster, together with the work that it presents, will explore these important questions through the visual presentation of statistical evidence, maps and photographs. I hope it will spark conversation with audience members and other poster presenters about how urban and environmental historians conceive of urban hinterlands in the American West.