[mr1138]

I went for an interesting tour/talk at Stanley featuring the main creator behind the project. He had some interesting things to share about Forest City and the history of the project. He made it sound like Forest City is pretty much completely uninterested in working with local/startup businesses and prefers to lease to national chains. He had originally simply wanted to open a brewpub in Stapleton, and ended up partnering with other businesses to open the Stanley Marketplace in Aurora when it turned out that there was nowhere in Stapleton-proper that would work.

He also talked about the physical divide between Stanley and Stapleton, how Forest City was VERY unhelpful when it came to bridging that divide, and how he had to basically corner Mayor Hancock, an official from DIA, and a representative from Forest City when he had them all in a room together simply to get them to agree to take the chain-link fence on the property line down (each had been telling him the fence was the other party's responsibility in 1-on-1 conversations). It was all pretty interesting, though I couldn't help but think that simply taking the fence down isn't quite enough. The local road network should be punched through that property line in more places - the furthest west a vehicle can cross is 5 blocks east at Fulton St. Any additional road connections are probably pretty unlikely at this point, which is too bad. At least there are pedestrian trails that cross near Clinton St.