WALKING THE LINE: Day 2

We've crossed the South Platte River by 7 a.m., ready for the second day of our urban journey of discovery along the future West Corridor light-rail line.

There was the sound of the river spilling over a small dam for the nearby power plant. Gulls cried and wheeled, scavenging over the banks.

The morning was cool by the water, but a big sun and cloudless sky promised punishing heat on down the tracks.

The great flood of 1965 washed away the wooden bridge that once stood here. The span carried maintenance trains to and from the old Denver & Intermountain Railway shop, situated next to the Zuni power plant.

FasTracks plans a new bridge at this very spot to carry light-rail cars across the river and into the historic corridor of the long defunct railroad, right through Lakewood Gulch. RTD will build the new span on the east bank, then hoist it into place in one shot.

We hadn't walked far when we arrived at the corner of Decatur Street and Howard Place, the site of a tragedy this spring when 2-year-old Jose Matthew Jauregui was swept away from his mother's grip in a flash flood.

We paused for a quiet moment to look at the bike path below, where the mother and child sought refuge in a culvert from a stinging hailstorm.

As part of FasTrack's reconfiguration of the flood plain, about $4 million will be spent to rebuild the channel, broaden the banks and make it easier to climb out of the way of sudden torrents of water.

The West Corridor's Federal Boulevard station will be built right along the gulch on the south side of Howard Place between Federal and Decatur Street.

RTD thinks this will be the busiest station on the line and is planning a 2,000-space garage at the site. Aside from being on busy Federal and fed by RTD's bus system, this station will serve crowds at Invesco Field at Mile High.

From where we stood, we looked straight up into the north stands of the stadium.

Putting a big station here will have a significant impact on the neighborhood, where many low- income families live in subsidized housing.

"Transportation is No. 1 for us," Stacy Weathers, a Sun Valley resident, told us after we knocked on a few doors there. She is a nurse assistant in northwest Denver and attends Arapahoe Community College in Littleton. Getting around by bus takes a lot of her time. She thinks light rail will make it easier.

"It will be so important to this community. These people have got to get to work," she said.

On the old trolley line

This was a thriving community back when the Golden trolley line was running.

Just north of the Federal station site, where the sea of Invesco Field parking lots begins, there was a mishmash of businesses and homes, stone-cutting shops and power plants, meat markets and smokehouses, churches and synagogues. All were in the shadow of the old Colfax Viaduct, a spindly steel-and-concrete affair replaced in 1982 with the concrete monster that's now there.

It was an integrated neighborhood glued together with the common bond of hard work and enterprise.

Steel tracks still are embedded in the intersection of Decatur and Howard. They were part of the Denver Lakewood & Golden Railway, laid out in 1890 by former Rocky Mountain News owner William A.H. Loveland.

It was designed in part to get people out of the city and to the new town of Lakewood, which Loveland had platted the year before. It became the Denver & Intermountain and was taken over in 1914 by the Denver Tramway. It operated until the last trolley run on June 3, 1950.

The tracks' path that we followed extended up Lakewood and Dry gulches in Denver, then along West 13th Avenue in Lakewood.

Walking along those tracks west from Decatur through Rude Park, we came to the Federal Boulevard bridge. If you drive over it every day, you might not want to see what we saw.

The bridge appears to be falling apart. It was built in 1923, and great chunks of concrete are gone from the supporting piers. The abutments are starting to crumble, too. It's going to be replaced when the light-rail line is built.

We headed out into Paco Sanchez Park along the tracks and found a number of guys tossing discs. "Paco," as these guys call the park, is home to one of metro Denver's best disc golf courses.

Don't call it Frisbee, please.

The 18 "holes" of the course stretch all through Lakewood and Dry Gulch Park. It opened last year and has drawn a following who see the coming light rail as a boost to their game.

At Knox Court, we came to a housing project. There will be a small light-rail station here, no parking, just walk-up or drop-off.

A Jewish neighborhood

Continuing west up through the gulch, the houses are farther away on both the north and south sides. It's easy to feel here that you're not even in the city. Down by the water, it's tall grass, trees and stream as far as you can see at some points.

Yet a quick, two-block walk later and we were in the hustle and bustle of Colfax, a reminder that in addition to the old trolley, this street long served as the major route west out of Denver to the Rockies and beyond. The area has long been a transportation corridor.

It also is a historically Jewish neighborhood.

On Julian Street, north of Cheltenham Elementary School, a vacant lot sits next to the Boys and Girls Club. There used to be a duplex here where a runaway from Milwaukee named Golda Meir lived with her married sister in 1913 and attended North High School.

At the house, young Meir listened to debates among acquaintances on Zionism, labor and socialism. She met her future husband here. Meir later said the time she spent on West Colfax was the most influential period of her life, putting her on a political course that was capped with her term as prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974.

The duplex was saved from destruction by members of the Jewish community and relocated to the Auraria campus' Ninth Street Park, where it is now a museum.

Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe settled much of this neighborhood, and their stamp remains.

Beth Jacob High School for girls and the orthodox boys' school Yeshiva Toras Chaim provide education. The Mikvah of West Denver sits in a quiet neighborhood providing its cleansing waters by appointment.

And an eruv, an extended area within which orthodox Jews may perform tasks on the Sabbath that otherwise would be restricted to within their homes, has been set up on the west side, marked with an unobtrusive Kevlar string.

Entrepreneurial thoughts

Back down Knox to the track bed, we walked west over two old wooden railroad trestles that cross Lakewood Gulch. The tracks were taken up over the summer, but we crossed by stepping from tie to tie, looking down to the gurgling water below.

Soon we came out of the trees and brush to a neighborhood and were greeted by a strange sight.

Here, the old tracks run for two blocks in the asphalt of 12th Avenue, between Newton and Perry. We couldn't find anybody who had lived there long enough to remember when freight trains chugged along the curb, but the sight was easy enough to imagine.

Light rail will not run in the street, however, shifting instead to run through the park on the south side of 12th.

The sun was in our faces by the time we ran into Mark Williams, 33, walking with son Tabor and dog Harlow in the park along 12th. He lives up the hill on Newton Street. He thinks light rail might bring more noise to the neighborhood, but overall he welcomes it.

"I expect to be affected favorably," he said. "I would hope they would clean some stuff up, maybe get some sidewalks along here."

On the west side of Perry Street, there will be another small neighborhood light-rail station.

That gave Mike Greening, another homeowner, an entrepreneurial thought. He lives on the corner of 12th and Osceola and owns a rental house across the street. Since it will be a quick train ride to the Auraria campus, Greening wants to scrape off his house and build a fourplex of rental units.

Then, over at the rental house across the street, Greening wants to tear down the garage on the alley and build a coffee shop. He's got sketches of his plan, which he hopes to call The Perry Street Underground, a takeoff on the London subway.

Inside, he wants to have a real-time electronic timetable so customers can keep an eye on when their next train will arrive at the station a block away.

One of his neighbors is Phyllis Antone, 47, night manager at a fast-food place on Federal. We found her, surrounded by family members and friends, enjoying the early evening cool-down in her backyard at the corner of Perry and 12th.

She welcomes the station that will be built catty-corner from her home. For her, light rail means not having to ride a bicycle over to her job on Federal in the middle of the night.

"I'm excited about it," she said. "It'll open up things for us."

With two of her 12 grandchildren running around, we asked if she was concerned about their safety with trains set to be rolling by right across the street.

"No," she said emphatically. "They're my responsibility to watch, not RTD's."

A few doors up Perry Street, Charlie Holt was watching a grandson play on his living room floor. The idea of light rail is familiar to him. He's 76 now, but in his younger days, he was a gandy dancer on the Santa Fe Railway in Kansas.

He, too, thinks it'll be an improvement to the neighborhood.

"If I was a working man, I'd probably be taking it," he said.

'Give it 10 years'

We continued west of Perry along the track bed, leaving Lakewood Gulch and entering Dry Gulch.

A little farther up the stream, three kids were down by the water with a bucket, pulling out crawdads the way generations of kids in this neighborhood have done before them.

Alejandra Carallo, 10, was leading the expedition with her sister, Karla, 6, and buddy Romeo Martinez, 9. They all live up on the south side of the gulch.

The girls' father, Arturo Carallo, 37, has lived on West 11th Avenue for 17 years. He's looking forward to light rail because he figures it will clean up the gulch area and provide him with some reliable transportation in bad weather. He works in construction.

"When there's a lot of snow, I won't have to drive," he said.

Directly across the gulch from here, on the north side, we met with Nettie Moore, an institution in these parts for her relentless lobbying for improvements in the old West Colfax neighborhood. The playground where we sat for a chat is named for her, as is nearby low-income housing.

This 82-year-old spitfire on her second pacemaker is so eager to see light rail go through the park below her house she can taste it. Nettie intends to be on that first train ride five years from now.

When her dad moved the family from a Highland flat to the old house at the foot of Utica Street in 1927, the streets weren't paved and the site of the Nettie Moore Playground was little more than overgrown thorns and thistles up and down the sides of steep gullies.

The street got paved, and more houses got built, but Nettie never left.

"I wouldn't live anywhere else," she said. "Give it 10 years and you won't even know this place. If you go up and down the street, people are fixing up and remodeling.

"If my dad could only have lived to see this."

The old Pig'n Whistle

Back on Colfax, another neighborhood institution sits in dismal ruin. Eddie Bohn's Pig'n Whistle was a landmark for more than 60 years at Wolff Street. Bohn was a boxer and sparred with the great Jack Dempsey. The Manassa Mauler stayed at the Pig'n Whistle's Room 39 - long since demolished - when he passed through Denver.

It was the era when Colfax was thriving. Bohn opened a gas station and restaurant there on Dempsey's birthday in 1926 - just a few months before Dempsey lost his world heavyweight title to Gene Tunney before a crowd of more than 120,000 in Philadelphia. Dempsey returned often to "The Pig."

Another sports celeb who hung out there was Billy Martin, who for a year managed the Denver Bears before going on to the New York Yankees. He once gave Bohn a pig for his birthday, and it escaped into the streets of west Denver. Martin ran along Colfax chasing it.

We resumed walking the old track bed from Utica Street, coming to another trestle that had washed out.

Soon, we were standing at Sheridan Boulevard, the Denver line. Back in the trolley days, riders had to drop more coins here at what was called County Line Station to continue the ride to Golden.

Now, traffic is so heavy across the big gully on Sheridan that we had to walk up to the signal at 10th Avenue to cross.

Tomorrow, we enter Lakewood. We can tell from here that the whole character of the walk is in for a big change.

Voices of the West Corridor

FasTracks kicks off in earnest next year when construction begins on the light-rail line from downtown to Golden.

"I'd be bummed if I was in these homes."

Kerry Hicks, 34, of Denver,

remarking on the proximity of houses to the light-rail route while playing disc golf in Paco Sanchez Park

"I can't imagine much negative from this. The exposure will be great."

Mike Webster, 42, of Denver, while playing on the park's disc golf course

"It's one of the few buildings left down there."

Alan Kropf, owner of Arctic Pacific Fisheries on West Colfax, pointing out that his 100-year-old company used to be housed in the historic brownstone on lower Colfax that now houses Brooklyn's bar

"This is history. To think, all of these years this was here."

Phyllis Antone, 47, who lives at 12th Avenue and Perry Street, displaying two rusted steel plates, dated 1943 and 1931, that once held rails in place. She retrieved them over the summer when old tracks were removed.

"I ran into an electrician and he said, 'Take it.' It's hard to come by copper these days. Prayer works, because I prayed for this, and look."

Ray Smith, 48, while stripping copper wire for salvage near Stuart Street

"The one thing about West Colfax is everybody knew everybody from one end to the other. You knew where everybody lived, and you left your doors open at night. People just stopped in to visit you."

Denver attorney Steve Farber, who as a young boy rode the trolley from his home at 13th Avenue and Raleigh Street to his father's produce stand at downtown's Loop Market

About the series

FasTracks kicks off in earnest next year when crews start building the 12-mile light-rail West Corridor line through diverse and history-rich neighborhoods from downtown to Golden.

All eyes are on this first line, as it will set the tone for the nine other corridors to be built in the massive $6 billion transit system approved by voters in 2004.

To begin telling this story, the Rocky's team of reporter Kevin Flynn, above center, photographer Darin McGregor and videographer Laressa Bachelor trekked the length of the West Corridor. We invite you to come along, and experience our amazing urban journey of discovery.

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