Teaching Colorado history at various schools since the 1960s, I have leaned heavily on the Colorado History Museum. It is a tremendous resource for students, teachers and anyone else interested in our state's past.

Denver now has an opportunity to put history at the heart of the city. The cramped state Judicial Department wants the entire block it now shares with the museum. After long and careful consideration of many sites, the Colorado Historical Society (where I am honored to serve on the board) has proposed a win-win solution for the museum and for its hoped-for new site, Civic Center.

The museum, Colorado's oldest, wants its new home to be in this prominent site where the city would provide the land. This partnership between often feuding, turf-guarding city and state agencies is a tribute to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Gov. Bill Ritter.

This museum, which explains what it means to be a Coloradan, deserves center stage, and, by sunny coincidence, city planners of the City Beautiful era a century ago envisioned a museum for Civic Center. With their passion for neoclassical harmony, these dreamers envisioned a museum to balance the 1910 public library (now the McNichols Building). A new twin could be a carefully designed extension of the curved, outreaching arms of the City and County Building. This proposal for a balancing building was also revived by the most recent master plan for Civic Center.

Like many fellow lovers of Civic Center's marvelous open space, I do not take lightly the loss of greenspace. Yet with the removal of surface parking lots on the south side of the McNichols Building and other pavement, and placing most of the museum underground, the far from finalized museum plan may even add grassy green space to Civic Center park. The history museum, which is open seven days a week to accommodate the public, would also enhance public and festival use of this great urban park by providing now badly lacking clean, unthreatening toilets, refreshments and shelter from inclement weather.

Despite an incredibly rich past, Denver has shortchanged its history. We have no city museum, not even a historic marker, commemorating the town's gold rush origins. The museum plan would put Denver history as well as those wonderful WPA dioramas of 2-year-old Denver, of Native Americans and Colorado's puppy days, into the city's heart.

This proposal would also restore the 1910 Carnegie library as - imagine this - a library. That library would be the museum's fabulous resource library, the oldest in the state. With almost a million images, the best collection of the state's newspapers and a vast catalog of unique treasures, the museum library is a haven for digging into your family, neighborhood and community past.

Tentatively, the new museum complex will also include Denver's Commission of Cultural Affairs, a public restaurant, a gift and book shop, and public meeting space.

Cultural affairs, museums and restaurants happily grace great urban parks. Think of New York's Central Park and San Francisco's Golden Gate and Denver's own City Park to see that parks are appropriate settings for our civic museums.

The largest users of the Colorado History Museum are fourth-graders studying Colorado history, college students, tourists and the prototypical little old ladies (and men) in tennis shoes. Thousands of people troop into the museum from all corners of Colorado and the globe. They deserve a safe, green, clean welcome that would also introduce them to Civic Center's other great institutions.

Denver needs greater, straighter use of Civic Center, which, let's face it, is now mostly the turf of leisured indigents. The best way to preserve and enhance Civic Center is to give it higher and better use. A Civic Center home for the Colorado History Museum would play up our history, and vastly improve the experience of Colorado students, history buffs and visitors, while also completing a century-old City Beautiful dream.