Six months after town officers fenced off a part of Los angeles Alma-Lincoln Park on account of drug use and violence, it’s getting a makeover.
The Denver Town Council licensed a two-year, $1.3 million contract Monday that may pay for architectural and engineering design for adjustments deliberate on the park, positioned southwest of downtown alongside Mariposa Boulevard between west thirteenth and eleventh avenues. It handed in a block vote.
The redesigned inexperienced house will come with a brand new strolling loop, expanded skate and playground spaces, a brand new curler loop, a “rhythm skate plaza” and added picnic groves, in step with town paperwork. The venture will even relocate the basketball and tennis courts.
In an outline in their deliberate services and products, Livable Towns Studio, the corporate that may design the venture, mentioned the park “holds many important community recollections for the group.”
“The prerequisites of the prevailing options on the park are significantly deteriorated and the to be had programming isn’t assembly present leisure needs,” in step with the record.
The deliberate redesign comes after town solicited group comments and created a imaginative and prescient plan for the 15-acre park in July 2023.
“That is excellent timing, I believe, for this community and this group,” mentioned Councilwoman Jamie Torres, who represents District 3, the place the park is positioned. “It’s a in point of fact excellent alternative for the group to reimagine what the park will seem like for the longer term.”
Final August, town closed portions of the park as officers tried to curb emerging drug gross sales, violence and vandalism within the space. Parkgoers and a close-by constitution faculty complained about human waste, syringes and bodily fights within the park.
The park was once additionally closed for classes in 2021 and 2022 after a number of shootings, together with a deadly one through which Gary Arellano, 63, was once killed whilst seeking to get a divorce a combat within the park.
Final yr, Torres mentioned the inflow of drug use was once associated with Mayor Mike Johnston’s All in Mile Top homelessness initiative, which closed off parts of downtown identified for homeless encampments.
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