Bridges

I have to hand it to the City of Denver. When I first moved here, Lower Downtown was kind of scuzzy, and just to the west of Unions Station was a wilderness of railroad tracks all the way to the Lower Highlands neighborhood, which was best known for it's crack houses.  These days the entire area has been redeveloped, and are connected by pedestrian bridges.  The Lower Highlands is now one of Denver's hottest neighborhoods, featuring hip restaurants, new expensive apartment buildings, and a great view of downtown Denver.  A pedestrian bridge over Interstate 25 leads to the Commons West neighborhood (seen in the photo on the left), which features trendy restaurants and shops in 19th century buildings, intermixed with newly built apartments and office buildings. Plus, the Denver Beer Company, with it's popular outdoor patio, is a neighborhood focal point.

If you continue walking west, you come to a bridge over the Platte River (seen in the photo on the right), which leads to Commons Park, a large expanse of green that makes a great place to mellow out, located just a short walk from downtown.  Lining the park is the Riverfront neighborhood, which features both high rise apartments, trendy brownstones, and still more trendy restaurants (are you beginning to understand the priorities of Denver hipster?  Thought so).

And just past the bridge over the Platte is the Millennium Bridge, seen in the background of the photograph on the left, which leads to a highly dense extension of the Lower Downtown neighborhood, filled with some of the most expensive high rise apartments in the city.  There are now so many people living in this area that it has both a King Sooper's Grocery Store (part of the Kroger chain) and a large Whole Foods.  Denver has built a huge population base just to the west of downtown, guaranteeing that it's downtown will always be very livel.  Unaffordable to people with modest incomes, but anyone can take the light rail train downtown and pretend to be a part of the hipster scene, right?  Right!