DENVER — A quaint enclave in Denver has garnered national recognition for its architectural significance and community spirit. The South Dahlia Lane neighborhood was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, highlighting its community-centered design and unique history of affordable housing.
The neighborhood now known as South Dahlia Lane was once called the Mile High Housing Association, and it was built to give University of Denver professors an affordable area to live. According to the Colorado chapter of Docomomo, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving modern architecture, the neighborhood represents an innovative approach to affordable housing dating back to the late 1940s.
“It’s essentially one of the first housing cooperatives in the country,” President of the Colorado chapter of Docomomo Josh Robinson said. “Everybody bought this collectively together, so you owned your own house, and your neighbor's house, which is pretty interesting.”
DU professor were unhappy with their living arrangements, and realized they could save money by creating a corporation to buy all the land in the neighborhood, and to build all the homes, under a single mortgage.
“Instead of owning your house in the neighborhood, you owned a share in that corporation that held the mortgage to the neighborhood,” Vice President of the Colorado chapter of Docomomo Atom Stevens said. “It stayed that way until the 1980s when the corporation paid off the mortgage. At that point, the neighborhood decided to then separate the neighborhood into independent lots, and everybody became individual homeowners.”
The community is home to a number of mid-century modern homes designed by Eugene Sternberg. He was a hugely influential architect who was responsible for many Colorado projects, including Arapahoe Acres, a neighborhood introduced to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.
“Sternberg was a major modern master in the big picture story of Colorado,” Robinson said. “It’s all of his ideas about community and how homes didn’t want to be on their own. They wanted to be part of a fabric.”
It wasn’t just the individual homes that Sternberg designed, but the entire structure of the neighborhood. South Dahlia Lane has one entrance to the neighborhood, on a one-way street that loops around on itself. The center of the loop holds a private, community-owned park called The Green, and a neighborhood gathering place called the South Dahlia Amphitheater.
“This was throwing everything out the window that came before it and thinking about how we could rebuild and do things in a modern way,” Robinson said. “It’s really inspiring.”
The placement of the houses on the lots, the smaller sizes of the homes themselves, and the community park were all designed to bring people in the South Dahlia Lane neighborhood together. Sternberg hoped modern designs could usher in an age of utopia, where neighbors could live in harmony.
“I think that's a big part of what we're missing in modern architecture right now,” Robinson said. “There’s a friendliness to it. It's Mom and Dad modernism.”
Robinson and Stevens believe that the neighborhood is special enough to merit a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, with the nomination becoming official in June.
The nomination for the National Register of Historic Places is currently under review and has a public comment period that ends on July 15. Results of the nomination will be announced later this year.
