Imagine yourself at the shoe store looking for that perfect pair of shoes to fit your small narrow feet. After trying every store in town, you’ve come up short again. The salesperson says he has called all the other locations and even his supplier, but there’s just nothing out there. Disappointed? Sure. But you’ve heard that news before. Then the salesperson says something that catches you completely off guard: “I do have this size 15 EEE. That should work just fine as a backup plan.” Of course, your immediate reaction is that the suggestion is crazy.
So imagine the disappointment many Stapleton residents felt when, after years of hoping for a town center in the small, narrow strip of land set aside in Eastbridge, Forest City proposed a full-size King Soopers with a parking lot so enormous that it will consume one-third of the land and consume an important street connection between 29th Drive and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. That plan does not represent a mere compromise, like buying blue shoes instead of your preferred brown; it is a complete surrender, and a total abandonment of the principles on which Stapleton was designed and built. Some people have suggested that anything is better than nothing at this point, but I could not disagree more. You wouldn’t buy a pair of size 15 EEE shoes when you actually wear a size 9 narrow and then say it’s better than nothing, so why should we settle for this travesty? When it comes to the Eastbridge Town Center, if the shoe doesn’t fit, then we should say, “No thanks.”
—David Vogel