Great Runway Tunnels I Have Known

I'm fascinating with the former Stapleton International Airport.

Several times now I've taken myself through the northern reaches, along what will someday be an unbroken Sand Creek Trail. Right now, the Sand Creek Trail branches off the South Platte River Trail just south of I-76, where a graceful steel bridge takes the intrepid cyclist into an urban wasteland chock-a-block with refineries, mega-warehouses, industrial graveyards, and the UPS Commerce City package handling facility. The trail isn't finished--you have to get off the trail about a half mile east of Dahlia Street, and get onto the I-76 frontage road (the trail continues a while further, but dead ends right behind UPS), but that's actually not so bad, because the frontage road only gets about one vehicle every three or four minutes on a spring Sunday. Eventually, this road dumps you out at the Sapp Brothers truck stop, and the trail picks up--sort of--as it dives underneath Quebec Street and I-70. You eventually emerge with a wonderful view of the new "Northfield at Stapleton" mega retail development (currently home to a SuperTarget, a Circuit City, a multi-cinema, and Bass Outdoor World, and soon to be home to a Macy's and other shops, because we need them so desperately) on one side of you and an airplane and helicopter graveyard (pictured above) on the other.

And at this point, the trail turns into a confusing mess--across a fence, concrete recycling equipment is chewing up the last of the old runways, while on the other side of you the Union Pacific Railroad tracks extend (presumably) to Kansas.

But then, if you knew where to find it--"knew" being the operative word--the trail would take you into a magical space. When this land was a major international airport, the city built a couple of bridges across Sand Creek at this point, so the airplanes could access the runways north of the freeway (and nearly everyone remembers the I-70 tunnels that the airplanes used after they'd crossed the creek). One bridge, I guess, was for smaller planes, because it was only about two or three hundred feet wide. But the other--you could easily imagine a 747 moving over your head, this bridge being as wide as a city block is long. And the bike trail went underneath it. It was cool, dark, and mysterious. Even in 90-degree weather, it seemed about 15 degrees cooler in the middle of the wider tunnel.

This was the entry to the narrower tunnel, as seen from the bigger one (pictures here date from September, 2004):
Take a look at the opening at the end of the tunnel to get an idea of scale--and remember, this was the narrower of the two air-bridges. Note the "Dip Ahead" sign--I saw that same sign today, cast off by the side of the path.

Here are a couple of views inside the wider tunnel:

Note the massive quality of the concrete supports.

I loved this place, and while I knew that the city, in conjunction with Forest City, the Stapleton master developer, was building a massive new "Central Park" on the land south of this tunnel, I had great hopes that this structure would be preserved, as a very physical reminder of the old airport. Alas, someone must have thought this would turn into a crime problem, or something equally banal, for this is what the tunnels look like today:
As you can see, the bike path is still there, but the vast underground tunnels, spaces that called to mind the underground sewers of Paris (not that I've ever been there), or some really dramatic place out of a graphic novel, are gone. But at least I got to see them before they were erased.