The appearance of Durango’s Wal-Mart store is a good example of how Durango has progressed so successively during the 27 years that Greg Hoch has led the city’s planning department.
A better-than-average looking façade, the parking lot broken up with trees, and none of the tall poles and bright lights that adorn Wal-Mart stores in other locations. Tall, “put your carts here,” signs? Not in the parking lot of the Durango store.
Durango’s planning department was rightly tough in its requirements for Wal-Mart, the first of the big box stores. When Home Depot followed a few years later, the precedent had been set; it had to look good, too.
Hoch has a slide show of how Durango’s Main Avenue looked decades ago. Large, bright signs, each competing to protrude farther over the sidewalk than the next, no trees, and what are known dismissively as cobra-headed street lights. We tend to forget: Main Avenue has come a long way.
At Main and 14th Street, the strip mall could have been overlaid in the Western theme. No, said the planning department, Durango never looked like that. What was historically appropriate was, and is, important.
Hoch has been fond of saying no one community should look like another. That means continuing as best possible the historical even as it changed over time, and not accepting the construction appearances that so often are copied by one town after another.
There has always been a need to accommodate additional residents in Durango’s narrow river valley. For multiple reasons, many people have wanted to live close-in. But what might be appropriate for one neighborhood in terms of lot size or mother-in-law apartments might not be for another. Plenty of neighborhood listening sessions have taken place, with the loosely formed Boulevard Neighborhood Association the most vocal in protecting its historical appearance and in preventing commercial encroachment.
It can be difficult to shape appropriate changes without harming neighborhoods, or accepting reduced standards, but modifications came out of a public process. Not everyone has been pleased, but in total, Durango’s residential areas look very good.
Today, unique sections of town are referred to as “character districts,” with current attention on north Main Avenue and Camino del Rio.
Three Springs and Twin Buttes have been thoroughly planned, desirable assignments for a planning department, with much infrastructure in place. It helps to have property owners with significant wherewithal and high standards.
One project Hoch will continue to guide is the complex multi-use development of the former Rocket Drive-in property, which is in the midst of multiple different property owners and which requires a frontage road. We expect that development will also turn out to be a credit to Durango.
Greg Hoch’s contributions will be celebrated from 1 to 2 p.m. Sunday in Buckley Park. Stop by and thank him for his superb leadership role in making Durango as livable as it is.
