4 JULY 2-8, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Plot Twist DENVER WATER HELPS BRING NEW LIFE BACK TO RIVERSIDE CEMETERY. BY SKYLER MC KINLEY It’s incredibly easy for a cemetery to enter a death spiral. Look no further than Denver’s oldest continuously operating burying ground, Riverside Cemetery, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Amble around the 77-acre site and you’ll come across some of the boldest-faced names in Colorado history without even trying. There are the namesakes, such as Gov. John Long Routt, Gov. Samuel Hitt Elbert, Mayor Richard Sopris, Del. Miguel Antonio Otero and Judge John Silverthorn. There are the trailblazers, including suffragist leader Eliza Pickrell Routt; Colorado’s fi rst poet laureate, Alice Polk Hill; and early Black entrepre- neurs and philanthropists Clara Brown and Barney Ford. And don’t forget the heroes: three Medal of Honor recipients; 1,200 Civil War veterans and one Silas Soule – the Union Army captain who refused orders and blew the whistle on the Sand Creek Massacre. What you won’t fi nd is much in the way of water and, in its absence, even less of the lush greenery that draws people, dead or alive, into cemeteries. As Westword reported in May 2024, at fi rst glance, Riverside appears to be moldering away, with mountains of weeds taking the place of manicured lawns as forlorn tree stumps hint at the place’s unlikely history as Colorado’s fi rst park-like cemetery. “We’re in the hole about a quarter of a million dollars a year,” says Kendra Briggs, president and CEO of Fairmount Cemetery Company, which owns Riverside and its leafi er, upscale counterpart, Fairmount Cemetery. “Because no- body wants to be buried there.” What’s killing Riverside? First came industry, led by the nearby Burl- ington and Colorado Railroad in 1881, and all the smoky, smelly render- ing plants that followed the tracks. Then came Fairmount Cemetery. Founded in 1890, Fairmount quickly established itself as a tony, bucolic alternative to Riverside’s industrial warren ten miles to the northwest. Burials, and money, followed, and Fairmount snatched up Riverside formally in a December 20, 1899, sale. By 1920, the scales had tipped so much in Fairmount’s favor that the family of John Wesley Iliff, the “Cattle King of the Plains,” moved his remains to Fairmount – taking with them the 65-ton monumental obelisk that was once Riverside’s center- piece. The marquee space where it once stood has been empty ever since. For years, Denver’s papers took turns prematurely mourning a cemetery that was gasping for air. In 1965, the Denver Post’s Empire Maga- zine lamented that Riverside was the home to “forgotten graves” and the “impoverished dead.” And in a column that year for the Rocky Mountain News, Pasquale “Pocky” Marranzino wrote that after regular acts of vandalism, “a group of citizens requested that the cemetery be designated as an histori- cal site and its monuments be repaired and its trees and lawns be improved.” Still, the grass was alive, at least. In Novem- ber 1970, Olga Curtis wrote for Empire that “Riverside Cemetery looks like a green oasis in an industrial desert. Inside the cemetery, the sights and smells of the nearby slaughterhouses and oil refi neries vanish. In silence, except for the rustle of leaves and the swish-swish of wa- ter sprinklers, stretches a peaceful panorama of green grass, gray stones, and bright fl owers, shadowed by 50-foot-high elms and maples.” That, too, would change. An elm blight killed many of Riverside’s trees in 1970. A bark beetle infestation devoured most of what remained by 1974. By 1981, several court judgments rising all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court held that Riverside didn’t own its 1879 water rights to the nearby South Platte River. Thereafter, Fairmount Cemetery Company purportedly negotiated a fl at, dis- counted rate for Riverside from Denver Water. That handshake agreement evaporated by 2001. “You don’t have handshake agree- ments in Colorado around water,” says Alan Salazar, the 16th and current leader of Den- ver Water. By the historic drought of 2003, Riverside couldn’t afford the going rate for water, so the taps were turned off completely – and for 23 years, Riverside has lurched between tangles of weeds in the wet months and piles of dirt when it’s dry. That should’ve been the end of the story, one not uncommon for Colorado: death by drought. In the West, they say, “Whiskey is for drinking – and water is for fi ghting over.” We drink for the dead, but who fi ghts for them? Perhaps whiskey is also good for dealmaking. Shortly after the publication of the 2024 cover story on Riverside, then-Westword editor Patricia Calhoun joined then-newly minted Denver Water CEO Alan Salazar for drinks (though she’s more a Mexican lager type than a whiskey snob).“Patty acquainted me with the history of the water challenges at Riverside, and she said, ‘Is there anything Denver Water can do?’” Salazar recalls. “I said, ‘Well, I think it’d be a great opportunity for us to look at the transformational landscape efforts that Denver Water funds and encourages. And in time for the 150th anniversary, it seems like a cool idea for us to engage.’” Salazar took the idea back to Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand plan- ning, and Bea Stratton, the utility’s landscape transformation program manager. “I asked them, ‘Is there anything we can do in a col- laborative way to help the appearance of the cemetery and celebrate the history of that place – and also, to bring to closure, in a positive way, Denver Water’s involvement?’” At the same time Denver Water was look- ing for a graceful way back into the cemetery, Fairmount Cemetery Company CEO Kendra Briggs was dealing with something that had nothing to do with grace or grass: toilets. To get the bathrooms at Riverside’s main building back up and running, Briggs needed to hook the cemetery up to sewer lines. To do that, the city required Riverside to fi rst bring the aging building up to accessibility codes, a fi x Briggs pegged at more than a million bucks. As Briggs mulled renovation options, her husband and predecessor, former Fairmount CEO Kelly Briggs, weighed in. “He asked me, ‘You’re going to fi x up this building, but you’re going to let the rest of the place look the way it does?’” she remembers. “He goes, ‘You need a master plan for the whole thing.’” “As I was contemplating that,” Kendra Briggs continues, “that’s when I get the call from Rick Marsicek,” Denver Water’s chief of water resource strategy, who’d been talk- ing to Alan Salazar. “There’s something you have to do with Riverside. And we want to help you,” she recalls him saying. Briggs smiles. “I was like, ‘Well, Rick, why do you want to NEWS continued on page 6 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS A test plot at Riverside is designed so that plants can live and let live. Riverside Cemetery is marking its 150th anniversary this year. SKYLER MCKINLEY EVAN SEMÓN
