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An Urban Explorer Gone

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For months, Adams waged a one-man campaign to warn the contractors and property owners of a dangerous, open shaft at Gates. The fifty-year-old Adams has no connection with Gates or the Polzin family. In a videotaped statement that Adams gave police, he said he first became aware of the "hazardous" shaft in March, when he decided to take an impromptu tour around the exterior of the site with his eight-year-old daughter, who's always had a thing for what she calls the "rubber band" factory.

Adams parked in a lot at the corner of South Broadway and West Mississippi, where a gate in the chain-link fence was wide open. It led to the alley that separates the huge Unit 10 from the smaller Unit 41, a four-story red-brick building originally constructed in 1971 as the administrative headquarters but shifted to engineering and product development in the '80s. Lifting his daughter so that she could peek in the windows, Adams saw a single-frame metal door to Unit 41 that was wide open. Telling his daughter to stay outside, he went through the door and nearly fell into the shaft himself.

Because the door led to a corridor that ended in a bank of windows on the far end, in low light the space looked like a long, continuous hallway. There was no visual suggestion that the walkway contained a pit — a large pit, since the shaft had been designed for a freight lift that was significantly bigger than a regular passenger elevator, with both a front and rear door. Alarmed by what he'd found, Adams took his daughter home and returned, alone, with a high-powered flashlight. He aimed it at the pit, and realized that a fall into that hole could be deadly.

Adams told police that he called any number he could find for contractors who might be responsible for the site, among them Alpine Demolition, which was in the process of tearing down adjacent buildings, including a 400,000-square-foot four-story warehouse south of Mississippi known as the Creamery Building.

Over the next few months, Adams returned to the site twice more. Each time, the gate was still unlocked, the door still open and the shaft still unsecured. After each visit, he left messages at Alpine, and after his third trip, he also called the DPD.

Adams went back to Gates again on September 2, and was furious when he saw that the shaft still wasn't secured. He called Alpine again, but no one answered over Labor Day weekend. The DPD did answer his call, though, and Officer Michael Samuels responded. After he surveyed the scene, Samuels was able to reach Alpine's owner, Jim Gochis, who then called Adams on his cell phone.

Gochis told Adams that units 10 and 41 were not Alpine job sites and were undergoing asbestos abatement by Misers Asbestos. While neither he nor any of his employees could legally enter that part of the property to secure the shaft, Gochis told Adams that he'd send some of his workers to lock the gate. Adams considered boarding up the shaft himself, but thought it was too dangerous and decided to leave it to professionals.

On September 4, Gochis met with John Allen, Misers' owner, and relayed Adams's concerns about the shaft.

Five days later, Adams was at home when a TV newscast reported that there'd been an accident at the old Gates plant and that someone had fallen into a hole in one of the buildings.

"Isn't that the elevator shaft you were always talking about?" his wife asked.

Adams ran out the door, headed for Denver Health Medical Center.

Until 2001, the Gates Corporation owned the entire 85-acre campus straddling two busy roads and a swath of heavy and light rail tracks. That December, the company sold fifty acres of the property west of Broadway to Cherokee Denver, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cherokee Investment Partners. The North Carolina company is the world's largest equity firm specializing in cleaning up and developing so-called brownfields, or sites with high levels of contamination, including former power plants, Superfund sites and landfills. The deal indemnified Gates from any future responsibility for the significant soil contamination caused by eight decades of industrial use, as well as for the buildings it left behind on the site.

For a time, Gates retained ownership of the 35 acres east of Broadway, which had housed the company's headquarters and also a Samsonite factory, but in 2005 it sold the majority of that land to the Lionstone Group. The Texas-based real-estate firm demolished the 300,000 square feet of existing buildings and did some environmental cleanup; it plans to construct 2.7 million square feet of apartments and offices.

Cherokee Denver's plans are even more ambitious. Its property lies at the intersection of three light-rail lines and a major RTD bus station, and a successful buildout has the potential to emerge as one of the most important Transit-Oriented Developments in the region. A TOD is a dense, anti-sprawl development centered around a mass-transit hub, a style that re-emerged out of the new-urbanist push for walkable, urban neighborhoods with a mix of residential, retail and work space. With the passage of FasTracks, TOD has become the new buzzword for developers and real-estate companies that want to cash in on the fifty light-rail stations slated to be built through the metro area. But few of those stations are surrounded by so much open, if pre-used, space.

Cherokee Denver estimates that the environmental cleanup of the entire site will cost $24.5 million, with demolition running about $10.5 million. But then it envisions creating a $1 billion development that will function as a new mini-downtown. To accomplish this, it was granted a special "Transit Mixed-Use" zoning by the Denver City Council in 2003. According to design guidelines published for the site, this zoning designation allows for multiple buildings as tall as twelve stories surrounded by public walkways and parks. To finance the project, including necessary remediation work and then installation of the infrastructure, Cherokee was also granted $126 million in tax-increment financing subsidies by the city: The Denver Urban Renewal Authority is issuing bonds that it will repay from sales and property taxes generated by the development in future years.

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