The Green Book was the original document created to guide the development of the Stapleton community. Historians believe the document was created sometime in the early 1990’s, but they cannot be certain. “Based on historical records, documents, and artifacts, we can be pretty certain the Green Book was created sometime between 1990 and 1994,” said historian Seth Hartland. “The writing style of the document, and the fact that it uses Arial as its font, also gives us a pretty strong clue that it was sometime during that period.”
The original Green Book is kept enclosed in an airtight case at the Forest City headquarters in the 29th Street Town Center in Stapleton. Hartland says until recently, the document had not been seen in its entirety. “Due to construction in the Willow Park East neighborhood, some construction workers had dug up some missing pages,” said Hartland. “They were smart enough to make some phone calls, and we had a team go out there and carefully dig up the remnants. What we found was several missing pages from the original Green Book.” Hartland says they are still going through the almost 20 pages of material, but they have been able to learn a lot from these missing pages. “It has been pretty eye opening,” said Hartland. “Without these pages, the Green Book is totally different. It paints a picture more true to what we see now than what we thought was intended by the Green Book.”
Hartland says many of the pages in what we currently know as the Green Book talk about diversity, but what the missing pages reveal is that the diversity was not intended to be socioeconomic diversity. “As it turns out, the Green Book did want diversity, but not at the cost of having those who may be socioeconomically disadvantaged living here. These pages are very clear on that,” says Hartland. “So, if you are going to evaluate the Green Book in that regards, and you include that new information, you would have to consider it a success.” Hartland also says the affordable housing initiative from the “old” Green Book is mostly overstated when evaluating the new information. “The missing pages also reveal an almost clairvoyant prediction of the Stapleton housing prices,” said Hartland. “What we found out from interpreting the text from the missing pages, is that the writers (unknown) of the Green Book actually hoped and predicted housing prices would skyrocket, pricing out tens of thousands of people in the city who would hope to live here to give their children a fair opportunity at a good education.” Hartland says they are still uncovering all sorts of new pieces of information as they decode the Arial text. “In the end, this is still so early, and we have a lot to learn.” Hartland says his team plans to give a complete report to the city sometime in late January.]]>