City Park Entrance 2.0

Bring Your Own Pen.

*(Pueblo City Park entrance gets makeover. By Zach Hillstrom for The Pueblo Chieftain.)*

One of Pueblo's most popular recreational attractions is currently undergoing a facelift to return it to the former glory its developers envisioned when the park opened over 100 years ago.

Through the combined efforts of Pueblo Parks and Recreation and a group of impassioned community members in the Aberdeen neighborhood, the east entrance to Pueblo's ultra-popular City Park is in the middle of a transformation that will restore some of the stunning features that attracted Puebloans to the park in its earliest days.

When City Park first opened to the public in the early 1900s, its east entrance served as a grand introduction to the type of world-class attraction its developers had planned it to be.

Charles Dittmer, an affluent Swedish Immigrant and horticulturist who acted as the driving force behind the park's design and construction, imported over 70 varieties of trees and plants from as far away as Europe and China, designed a large fountain for the park and even purchased living swans to be shipped in to live at the lake.

But perhaps Dittmer's crowning achievement when it came to City Park was its magnificent east entrance.

Dittmer designed a grandiose entryway complete with ornate statues of Roman mythological figures that he imported from Italy, pillars constructed of pink granite brought in from Texas Creek, and an 80-foot iron gate, all of which combined to form what the Star-Journal referred to at the time as the "handsomest gates in the West."

But over the hundred-plus years that have passed since the park opened on the city's western edge, much of its aesthetic grandeur has gone by the wayside.

The critical need for scrap metal during World War I saw the entrance gates melted down for the war effort; its ornate lighting fixtures were too fragile and impractical for extended use outdoors and, at some point, the statues of Satyr, Apollo, Mercury and Hebe completely disappeared.

The original entrance also featured six intricate urns and vases -- five of which are still in the possession of the parks department; the location of the other is unknown -- as well as a pair of statues depicting mythical griffins. Unfortunately, one of the griffins was severely damaged when one of its wings broke off, and the other was removed by vandals in the late 1980s.

Parks and Recreation Director Steven Meier said he long had his eye on City Park's east entrance as a possible restoration project, but it wasn't until a pair of Aberdeen residents named Barb Hegarty and Corinne Koehler became interested in the portal that the pieces began to fall into place to make the dream a reality.

"(Hegarty and Koehler) spurred it on," Meier said.

"I was trying to get some things done around there, but they kind of urged me a little bit to get this thing rolling. And when the neighborhood interest comes in, that always helps. ... They had some ideas and I had some ideas, so we kind of combined them all and got things rolling."

A ride in the park
Hegarty has been the primary force behind the restoration. Prior to kick-starting the project, she would often ride her bike through the park and wonder what the entrance may have looked like in the prime of its life.

"I rode through the gates every day and thought 'God, this is a shame. They're beautiful! ... There's got to be a history here, so why do they look like crap?" Hegarty recalled.

So Hegarty reached out to Koehler, her friend and fellow Aberdeen resident, who put her in touch with the late George Williams, a local historian and former assistant director of Pueblo Parks and Recreation who was widely known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Pueblo's parks and history.

Williams provided Hegarty with a comprehensive report he'd compiled in 1996 about the park's entrance and gates, featuring meticulously detailed notes on each individual fixture that once embellished the entryway.

"So I read through that (report) and was looking at the pictures and what it used to look like and I'm thinking, we need to get this back to some semblance of what it was," Hegarty said.

"Something had to be done because the entrance was just nothing," Koehler said. "It was kind of a forgotten entrance, and City Park is the most used amenity in the community; thousands of people go through that park all the time, and it really needed to have that entrance go back to what it was."

Back to what it was
Hegarty said her first step was to try and track down the missing statues.

She heard rumors about where the statues might be but was told the family that is rumored to have them would not allow anyone access to them.

"So we kind of put that on the backburner," Hegarty said.

The next step was to try and find a metal artisan who could fabricate the steel walk gates that flanked each side of the entrance, but since the funding for the project consisted of only private donations from community members, the price tag was too hefty.

"I said there's got to be a way to do this cheaper," Hegarty recalled. "But then I remembered that Pueblo Community College, where I got my first nursing degree, has a metal arts program."

Hegarty attempted for over two years to recruit the PCC welding program to fabricate the steel gates, but her efforts were in vain.

All of that changed when she met PCC's current welding program manager, Catlin Davis.

"I love Catlin Davis," Hegarty said. "He just said, 'Yes. This is really cool. I want you to meet with my metal arts club.'"

Davis and his Welding 250 students created new steel gates that closely replicate the originals, and Automotive Service Technology Department Chair James Cordova painted them with a black powder coat before they were installed at the park on Oct. 5 of last year.

But the project didn't stop there.

The next step was to figure out what to do about the urns, vases and broken griffin, Hegarty said.

Four of the urns and vases were still on top of the pink-granite pillars at the time the project began, and parks department employees discovered a fifth urn in a long-forgotten corner of the parks building basement.

So the next step was to have the 100-year-old urns sandblasted and repainted.

The delicate process took some time and money to complete, but the urns -- which were originally painted bronze but are now a matte-black, to match the walk gates -- took their rightful place atop the park's entrance in mid-February.

The next step
A drive through the east entrance of City Park today looks quite different than it did just six months ago, as the new walk gates and painted urns have already given the entrance an entirely new look and feel.

"It's pretty obvious that the urns needed to be renovated, and now that they have, they and the gates are very recognizable as being a great addition to the entryway," Meier said.

Despite the new improvements, Meier, Hegarty and Koehler still have a handful of other projects in mind to further return the entrance to its former splendor.

In addition to the backburner goal of locating or replicating the missing statues, artists are being sought to repair the existing griffin and replicate a new one, though the limited funding has currently rendered that project unaffordable.

Koehler said another important task will be convincing Black Hills Energy to relocate some of the street lights that have been placed in front of the entrance and install new lighting fixtures to give the park more of what she called a "statement entrance."

"Pueblo has so many wonderful historic buildings and structures and features that we really need to take care of them and appreciate them," Koehler said.

"Most communities don't have this rich history and rich mix of cultures and things that have been contributed, and we really need to take care of them and appreciate them because they are what make Pueblo so beautiful."