This site is dedicated to my Environmental History Place Project which I have chosen to do on the new Punch Bowl Social located in Stapleton, Colorado. Enveloped in this, I also look at Stapleton at large and it’s transformation from an airport to the thriving community it currently is.
Feel free to check out my research on this area and this building in specific.
Stapleton is an eastern suburb of Denver located ten minutes from where I grew up in Aurora. The nearest Wal-Mart from my house was located in Stapleton so I visited Stapleton enough to watch it transform over the past two decades. My earliest memory of the area is a lot of empty space with overgrown weeds, the shopping plaza with the Wal-Mart, and an abandoned air control tower. The air control tower was part of the Stapleton Airport that was shut down after the Denver International Airport was constructed. In the past ten years, most of the empty space has been used for housing developments which continue even today. The air control tower was one of the last parts to be redeveloped. For a long time, I thought they were going to demolish it, but in 2017, they finished renovating it into a Punch Bowl Social. It’s been really great to look into the past and in depth of this area that’s always been present in my life. It’s crazy to think about what that whole area looked like just 25 years ago. The redevelopment of Stapleton may not have been the most resource and money efficient decision at the time but in the long run, it was very beneficial to the rapid growth of the city of Denver/ Colorado in general.
Punch Bowl Social Stapleton 