Friday, September 23, 2022

Denver's neighborhood murals: a vision for Tucson?

During July, I visited Denver. One place I stayed was in a gentrifying formerly-industrial neighborhood along Broadway where the cross-streets are avenues named for states. (To see a map, click on “Location:” at the bottom of this post.) When I went out for a walk, I spotted 20 murals in the four blocks between Iowa and Arizona Avenues.

This blog has over 1,000 Tucson murals over the past 15 years. The number of murals in just these four Denver blocks is close to 2% of 15 years' worth of murals all over Tucson! That's a lot of murals in a small area — something like Fourth Avenue in Tucson. (Denver also has at least one neighborhood packed with even more murals called RiNo — which, by the way, has nothing to do with Donald Trump and Republicans.) This got me thinking that Tucson neighborhoods wanting more visitors could pack lots of murals in a few blocks.

All of these murals gave the area a (literally) artsy feel when I walked through it. Here are unedited quick snapshots of the murals I saw:

I snapped these on July 24th and 25th.

No comments: