Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Why is Northeast Park Hill Still a Dump?

Expending much energy citing "economic racism," it's common for leftist activists to cry about how businesses do not often establish themselves in the black community. Crying racism is the usual band-aid excuse to avoid a deeper look at the real reasons of what is going on. The nationwide pattern of crime-blighted black communities plays out in Denver, Colorado as well. Why? Because anywhere blacks settle in numbers, crime escalates and gangs are always present. Neither of these are conducive to business growth. Indeed, the only economic growth the Northeast Park Hill Area has seen in decades is the redevelopment of the land of the former Stapleton International Airport, and even this had to be done with a massive infusion of public dollars because the area is so gross that nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Results at Stapleton are mixed, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the whites who have moved in this area are relocated out-of-staters (much like you see around the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant) because locals know better than to go anywhere near the place. More on Stapleton later, for now we'll focus on Northeast Park Hill.

The "jewel" of Northeast Park Hill was a strip-mall style shopping center which was once probably decades ago a thriving economic center with room for a full-sized grocery store as an anchor. By 1990, when I first began taking the bus through there on the way to work near the old airport, however, the shopping center, Holly Square, was already a decrepit dump with few tenants. The back wall of the Square always seemed to be coated in gang graffiti, Crips and Bloods taunting each other back and forth. In the late 1990s, the "anchor" of the mall, as it were, was the local Nation of Islam mosque #51 with it's adjoining NOI-owned seafood restaurant. Old gang graffiti would be painted over only to be sprayed on again within a short time. The eastern side of the Holly Square lot featured an electronic switch box of some kind adorned with Crip death threats toward neighborhood Blood gang members in prominent blue paint.

In spite of this, the city kept pushing to develop the Holly Square. Some time in the 2000s, how I do not know but probably with government funding of some sort, Holly Square was quite extensively remodeled and updated. Efforts were made to bring in a few small local businesses, and things seemed okay. One problem. Holly Square was a longtime Bloods gang hangout and when the founder of the Rollin 30s Crips was gunned down by the Bloods, it didn't take long for the Crips to decide that a good way of exacting revenge was to burn down the favored hangout of the Bloods.. So, early one morning...



The Crip arsonists, being the intelligent lot they are, not only sloppily torched Holly Square but did it so that a nearby security camera caught the whole thing. I'm sure the Denver Police enjoyed watching as "one of the Molotov cocktails rolled off the roof and hit the head of the person who threw it, causing his head to catch fire." Being even stupider, they drove a truck full of molotov cocktail-making materials with a broken tail light away from the scene and were shortly pulled over for a broken light violation and very quickly found themselves in jail and charged with arson. (Source)

In the end, another liberal lift-you-up scheme goes up in ashes.

UPDATE: Last 2 of the 10 Crip arsonists have been sentenced to prison. See their downtrodden mugshots here.