Stapleton International Airport
|
|
Stapleton International Airport was Denver, Colorado's primary airport from 1929 to 1995. It served as a hub for Continental Airlines and United Airlines. In 1995, Stapleton was replaced by Denver International Airport.
| Contents |
Early history
Stapleton was opened on October 17, 1929 as Denver Municipal Airport, which was later renamed to Stapleton Airfield after expansion in 1944. The renaming was in honor of Benjamin Stapleton, the city's mayor most of the time from 1923 to 1947, and the major force behind the project when it began in 1928.
No major crashes occurred there, however on November 1, 1955, United Airlines Flight 629 was bombed on the way to Portland, Oregon from Stapleton, killing everyone on board. A man named John Graham was found to have planted dynamite on the plane. He was executed 2 years after Flight 629 exploded.
Decommissioning
By the 1980s, plans were underway to replace Stapleton with a new airport. Stapleton was plagued with a number of problems, including:
- inadequate separation between runways, leading to extremely long waits in bad weather
- a lawsuit over noise, brought by residents of nearby Park Hill community
- legal threats by Adams County to block runway extension into Rocky Mountain Arsenal lands.
The Colorado General Assembly brokered a deal in 1985 to annex a plot of land in Adams County into the city of Denver, and use that land to build a new airport. Adams County voters approved the plan in 1988, and Denver voters approved the plan in a referendum in 1989.
On February 27, 1995, the last commercial flight left Stapleton, which was replaced by the new Denver International Airport. It was closed later that evening, and a massive caravan of all airport vehicles (everything from baggage carts to rental cars) headed for DIA, which opened the following morning. White "X"es were placed across all runways to keep airplanes from landing. DIA dropped DVX and KDVX as its temporary airport codes, adopting Stapleton's DEN and KDEN. Visitors to or from Denver at that time had the unusual experience of arriving at a different airport than they left the same city from.
Redevelopment
While Denver International was being constructed, planners began to decide how the Stapleton site would be redeveloped. A private group of Denver civic leaders, the Stapleton Development Foundation, convened in 1990 and produced a master plan for the site in 1995, emphasizing a pedestrian-oriented design rather than the automobile-oriented designs found in many other planned developments. Nearly a third of the airport site was slated for redevelopment as public park space.
The former airport site is now being redeveloped in one of the largest urban infill development projects in the United States. Construction began in 2001, and as of 2004, over a thousand homes have been built on the Stapleton site. The new community is zoned for residential and commercial development, including office parks and "big box" shopping centers.
External links
- Stapleton redevelopment project (http://www.stapletondenver.com)
- Airport history (http://www.stapletondenver.com/history/earlyyears.asp)de:Stapleton International Airport