This is the first post of the Archival Outliers, Invented Ephemerals in Constructing Environmental Histories series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.

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Historians, if lucky, might encounter an unexpected piece of the past in the archive, and if they’re really lucky, this material or artifact may stick with them, regardless of whether it has an intended place in their scholarship. Its hold can be a nag, searching for its place in contemporary work. For me, this unexpected archival find came in June 2024, at the Denver Public Library (DPL). Housed in DPL is the Denver Valley Highway Project collection, one of the primary archival sources on the construction of the highway, also known as Interstate 25. This collection largely encompasses planning documents, legal briefs on condemnation orders from the government, and appraisal reports and correspondence regarding properties being demolished to make way for the highway. In addition to the numerous documents on the Valley Highway, part of the collection includes an audiovisual component—a 16mm film that was originally intended for television in the 1950s. It was the unexpected discovery and viewing of this nearly twelve minute long, black-and-white, silent film that has stuck with me in search of its place.

The film recorded workers demolishing houses, tearing down roofs, walls, and windows along with residents’ homes and memories. These homes were acquired through eminent domain and the highway isolated longtime residents from their families, friends, churches, and access to Denver’s downtown.¹ The footage also shows grocery stores and local businesses displaying moving signs in their windows, laborers mixing and laying down concrete for the construction of highway lanes, creating road signs, and putting up streetlights. The film was shot close-up and tightly framed, with highway workers in what appears to be an arm’s length from the videographer at times, providing intimate insight into the tasks being performed and the radical transformation of urban space.

Film stills from [Series 3 Audiovisual], City and County of Denver, Valley Highway Project, WH2007, Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library.

In Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (2005), Finis Dunaway describes the camera as a “technology of memory” for its ability to preserve changing or vanishing landscapes, from Walden Pond to Hetch Hetchy Valley.² The 1950s Valley Highway film embodies this idea of the video camera as a “technology of memory,” affording viewers a deeper emotional and human dimension through its visuals than reading city planning records and transportation reports can provide.

Construction of Hetch Hetchy Valley Dam (1914-1934). Images from the San Francisco Chronicle, December 3, 2021.

The film, seemingly in place and out of place, imposed a sense of wonder about whether this film could be both a memory-archive (it is) but also an archival outlier (which it is too). Is it possible to hold both categories at the same time, or does one have to negate the other? And if so, which, and why? Does a memory-archive or technology of time, labour, and memory have to be retrievable or perhaps, does it have to be public? This 16mm film is housed in a public library and is therefore public material, nonetheless, there are countless memory-archives that exist in private or domestic spaces.³ Does the film only exist as some gray area, vacillating between use and disuse dependent on the scholar or researcher, both a visual memory-archive and outlier as compared with the perceived utility of the rest of the collection which is filled with top-down government documents. 

Put in context, Denver, similar to major urban centers in the mid-twentieth century United States, to address increased automobile ownership, subsequent traffic congestion, and defense rationales during the Cold War, expanded its Interstate system.⁴ Denver’s plan for a limited access highway through the city first emerged as a New Deal project in 1938.⁵

Early transportation studies suggested constructing a route through Denver’s South Platte River Valley to connect with both the north and south parts of the city.⁶ In 1944, Charles D. Vail, Colorado’s Chief Highway Engineer and namesake of its most famous ski area, hired consulting engineers Crocker and Ryan to prepare a report on this proposed route. Crocker and Ryan concluded that the north-south course, later known as the Valley Highway, would be significantly more efficacious than alternative routes to the east and west, reducing the time and cost of transportation through and around Denver, while increasing safety. Similar to other cities, urban planners were willing to sacrifice what they identified as “declining” areas to achieve such outcomes when deciding on where to build Denver’s interstates.⁷ Construction of the Valley Highway began in 1948 and was completed in 1958. The Valley Highway was 11.2 miles long and cost just over $33 million.⁸ The Crocker and Ryan report stated, “it goes without saying that in the design and construction of such a highway great care should be taken to avoid any detrimental effect on the community traversed.”⁹ As the film shows, however, this could not be further from the case in north Denver neighborhoods.

For the past year, I have struggled with how to fit this haunting twelve-minute video into my dissertation, an environmental justice history of Denver’s 80216 zip code. How can I adequately capture the toll and memories of emotional and physical change that residents, laborers, and their families experienced by losing their homes and witnessing the transformation of their neighborhood? How and where can I express the subsequent emotional hold the visuals of housing demolition and local businesses closing captured in the film have had on me?¹⁰ As I continue to grapple with these questions and wrestle with what to do with this archival outlier–I am left with my own set of archival ephemera, an archive of an archive housing an archival outlier–and I appreciate film as one of many critical tools contributing to the historic record and the camera’s ability to enhance the personal stories behind housing demolition and the material transformation of the city. For now though, I will rewatch this movie to rethink its place in history, memory, and perhaps one day historical scholarship.

Valley Highway Project, WH2007, City and County of Denver,Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library.

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1. Many residents reflected on their experiences of losing their homes to highway construction as part of the “Globeville and Swansea and Elyria Oral History Project,” Denver Public Library, 2013 and “Globeville-Elyria-Swansea Memory Project”, History Colorado, 2018. The locations of the homes being demolished in the film are primarily on Lincoln and Grant Streets between 45^th and 46^th in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood close to the intersection of Interstate 25 and Interstate 70.

2. Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 3. María Cotera “Unpacking our Mother’s Libraries: Chicana Memory Praxis Before and After the Digital Turn” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, eds. Dionne Espinoza, Maria Cotera, Maylei Blackwell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

 4. On the increase in car ownership in the twentieth century, especially in the era of postwar affluence see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003) and Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). For more on the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, also known as the Federal-Aid Highway Act or the Interstate Highway Act (1956), see Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5, (2004): 674-706; Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Ryan Reft, Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca C. Retzlaff, ed., Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2023); Megan Kimble, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways (New York: Penguin Random House, 2024).

 5. Dianna Litvak, “Freeway Fighters in Denver, 1948-1975,” master’s thesis, University of Colorado Denver, 2007.

6. Crocker and Ryan, “The Valley Highway: A North-South Limited-Access Highway Through Denver,” December 9, 1944, City and County of Denver Valley Highway Project, WH2007, Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library.

 7. Litvak, “Freeway Fighters in Denver, 1948-1975,” 11. For other examples of highways impacting communities see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1974), 850-884; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert R. Gioelli, Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway; Reft, Phillips de Lucas, and Retzlaff, ed., Justice and the Interstates; Kimble, City Limits. 

8. “Commemorating the Opening of the Denver Valley Highway,” November 23, 1958, Colorado State Library, http://hermes.cde.state.co.us/drupal/islandora/object/co:30723/datastream/OBJ/view; Ken Pearce, “Freeway Averages 44,000 Cars Daily,” Rocky Mountain News, May 24, 1959.

9. Crocker and Ryan, “The Valley Highway: A North-South Limited-Access Highway Through Denver,” December 9, 1944, City and County of Denver Valley Highway Project, WH2007, Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library, 5. Soon after the completion of the Valley Highway, which cut directly through Denver’s Globeville neighborhood, the East-West Interstate-70 was constructed in 1964, bisecting both Globeville and neighboring Elyria-Swansea along E. 46^th Avenue. In the process, thirty-one homes were demolished. See Daniel Doeppers, “The Globeville Neighborhood in Denver,” Geographical Review 57 (1967): 506-22; Larry Betz, Globeville: Part of Colorado’s History (Denver, 1972), 31. 

10. For more on the toll archives have on the researcher see “The tolls of archival research and how it has made me a better historian,” On History, March 24, 2017, https://blog.history.ac.uk/2017/03/the-tolls-of-archival-research-and-how-it-has-made-me-a-better-historian/#respond; James Robins, “Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?” History News Network, February 16, 2021, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/can-historians-be-traumatized-by-history-content-w; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 144-148.