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Stapleton International Airport |
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 at the time of its closure. In 1995, Stapleton was replaced by Denver International Airport. It has now been decommissioned, and redeveloped as a neighborhood.
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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. Concourse A, the original building from 1929, still was in operations when the airport closed. The airport was originally created by Ira Boyd Humphreys in 1919.
The facility received a new jet runway and terminal building in 1964. 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 (18/36) in the 1980s and the terminal was again expanded. Concourse D was built in 1972, and Concourse E was built in 1988. At the time of its closure in 1995, Stapleton sported six runways (2 sets of 3 parallel runways) and five terminal concourses.
In 1982, the inaugural flight of the Boeing 767 landed at Stapleton, after a flight from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
The airport scenes in the film Die Hard II were filmed at Stapleton.1 One scene of The Shining was shot there. As well as scenes in the movie Dumb & Dumber.
Stapleton Airport was the subject of studies by Ted Fujita about microbursts.
By the 1980s, plans were underway to replace Stapleton with a new airport. Stapleton was plagued with a number of problems, including:
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 (a Continental Airlines flight to London Gatwick). 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. Yellow "X"'s 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 Denver at this time had the experience of flying out of a different airport as the one they arrived at, although the airport had the same code.
All of Stapleton's airport infrastructure has been removed except for the control tower and a parking structure which remain standing as a reminder of the site's former days. This parking structure provides shuttle service to DIA.
At the time of its decommissioning, the airport had the following runways [2]:
The old airport terminal had five concourses [3].
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 by Forest City Enterprises as the largest new urbanist project in the United States. Construction began in 2001, and as of 2004[update], 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 is expected to be home to at least 30,000 residents, four schools and 2 million square feet (180,000 m²) of retail.2. Northfield Stapleton, one of the development's major retail centers, recently opened.
Several major air crashes involved Stapleton as the origin airport, with three actually occurring at Stapleton. Additionally, a United DC-8 was destroyed after landing at Stapleton.
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![[2]](http://milehifield.topcities.com/MarkBirdScans1/Bird-008.jpg){kind=link}