More About Globeville

As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, I drove up to the Globeville neighborhood Saturday afternoon to photograph Denver's only World War I monument. Globeville is a working class neighborhood, with a lot of industry, and although now mainly Hispanic, it was once a Polish neighborhood.  It is also close to the trendy RINO (River North) neighborhood, and is predicted to be the next big target for gentrification. When I was done taking photographs of the memorial, I noticed a church across the street that I thought was the one where I attended the funeral of Lucy, my friend Richard's wife.  That church was a Polish one, and upon closer examination this was not it.  However, I remembered that that church was right across the street from a barrier wall for Interstate 70.  Driving just a block south, I found it, as seen in the photograph on the left.

Richard and Lucy both worked at Denver International Airport, and wound up getting married after a brief courtship.  Richard and his mother Francis lived in a 3 bedroom apartment on Dayton Street in Denver, and Lucy moved in with them.  Francis (seen on the far left in the photograph on the right) was my brother-in-law George and his cousin Ana Silvia's aunt (Ana Silvia is standing next to Francis). Francis and Lucy never got along, which is neither here nor there, but made for a lot of drama.  Lucy (seen in the photograph on the far right, standing next to me) was eventually diagnosed with a brain tumor.  She slowly lost touch with reality, and eventually passed away.  Her funeral took place at the Polish church in the  photograph above.  It was a pretty touching ceremony.  Evidently Lucy and her family immigrated from Poland when she was a young girl, and the priest reminisced about when she was a child in the neighborhood.  Interstate 70, by the way, is being rebuilt along this stretch of highway, and many homes and businesses, and most certainly this church, will be torn down to accommodate it.  A very sad thing - another old, pleasant, working class neighborhood altered forever.