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Stapleton International Airport was Denver, Colorado's primary airport from 1929 to 1995. At different times it served as a hub for TWA, People Express, Frontier Airlines and Western Airlines as well as a hub for Continental Airlines and United Airlines when the airport was closed. In 1995, Stapleton was replaced by Denver International Airport. It has now been decommissioned, and redeveloped as a neighborhood.
History
Stapleton was opened on October 17, 1929 as Denver Municipal Airport, which was later renamed to Stapleton Airfield after expansion in 1944. The renaming was in honor of Benjamin F. Stapleton, the city's mayor most of the time from 1923 to 1947, and the major force behind the project when it began in 1928.
Air disasters
Several major air crashes involved Stapleton as the origin airport, while only one major air disaster occurred there.
- On November 1, 1955, United Airlines Flight 629 exploded over nearby Longmont, Colorado while en route to Portland, Oregon from Stapleton, killing all 44 persons on board. A man named John "Jack" Gilbert Graham was found to have planted a dynamite bomb in a suitcase that was loaded onto the plane in order to murder his mother and collect insurance money. He was executed two years after Flight 629 exploded.
- On August 7, 1975, Continental Airlines Flight 426 crashed due to windshear after taking off and climbing to 100 feet on runway 35L. Fortunately, nobody was killed in the accident.
- On December 28, 1978, United Airlines Flight 173, which took off from Stapleton, made a forced landing near Portland, Oregon. Ten people died while 179 survived.
- On November 15, 1987, when Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a Douglas DC-9-14 jetliner, crashed on takeoff during a snowstorm. The probable cause of the crash was the failure of the flight crew to have the aircraft de-iced prior to take-off and the over-rotation of the aircraft on take-off. Twenty-eight persons were killed, while 54 survived. It was the only fatal crash at Stapleton.
- On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10-10, crash-landed at the Sioux City, Iowa airport on a flight which originated at Stapleton. Flight 232 experienced a catastrophic engine failure over Alta, Iowa on a flight to Chicago, Illinois. One hundred and eleven people died in the crash, while 185 survived.
Jet age
The facility received a new jet runway and terminal building in the 1960s. After deregulation, three different airlines operated large hubs out of Stapleton (Frontier Airlines, Continental Airlines, and United Airlines), leading to large levels of congestion. In order to combat the congestion, a new runway was added (36/18) in the 1980s and the terminal was again expanded. At the time of its closure in 1995, Stapleton sported six runways (2 sets of 3 parallel runways) and five terminal concourses.
Decommissioning
By the 1980s, plans were underway to replace Stapleton with a new airport. Stapleton was plagued with a number of problems, including:
- inadequate separation between runways, leading to extremely long waits in bad weather
- a lawsuit over noise, brought by residents of nearby Park Hill community
- legal threats by Adams County to block runway extension into Rocky Mountain Arsenal lands.
While there was ample evidence to support the argument that Stapleton was truly plagued by these problems, some people continue to maintain that the construction of Denver International Airport was nothing more than expensive politics.
The Colorado General Assembly brokered a deal in 1985 to annex a plot of land in Adams County into the city of Denver, and use that land to build a new airport. Adams County voters approved the plan in 1988, and Denver voters approved the plan in a referendum in 1989.
On February 27, 1995, the last commercial flight left Stapleton, which was replaced by the new Denver International Airport. Stapleton was closed later that evening, and a massive convoy of all airport vehicles (everything from baggage carts to rental cars) headed for DIA, which opened the following morning. White "X"es were placed across all Stapleton runways to keep aircraft from landing at the now-closed airport. DIA dropped DVX and KDVX as its temporary airport codes, adopting Stapleton's DEN and KDEN. Visitors to or from Denver at that time had the unusual experience of arriving at a different airport than they left the same city from.
All of Stapleton's airport infrastructure has been removed except for the control tower, which will remain standing as a reminder of the site's former days. The parking structure also remains standing.
Redevelopment
While Denver International was being constructed, planners began to decide how the Stapleton site would be redeveloped. A private group of Denver civic leaders, the Stapleton Development Foundation, convened in 1990 and produced a master plan for the site in 1995, emphasizing a pedestrian-oriented design rather than the automobile-oriented designs found in many other planned developments. Nearly a third of the airport site was slated for redevelopment as public park space.
The former airport site is now being redeveloped as the largest new urbanist project in the United States. Construction began in 2001, and as of 2004, over a thousand homes have been built on the Stapleton site. The new community is zoned for residential and commercial development, including office parks and "big box" shopping centers. Stapleton is by far the largest neighborhood in the city of Denver, and an eastern portion of the redevelopment site lies in the neighboring city of Aurora. Eventually, Stapleton will be home to at least 30,000 residents.