My first post about the Cross Community Coalition’s Environmental Justice Tour, on Monday, presented a poorly lit picture of the last farmhouse in Globeville. My second post, on Wednesday, offered several photos of the housing stock in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea.

Today I want to show you some of the heavy industry that surrounds and permeates these neighborhoods. I’m sorry I haven’t provided a map for any of these posts: it took me a long time to figure out the route of most of the tour. I’ve included cross streets in the discussion below, so if you’re motivated, you can go to Google Maps, search for “Globeville, Denver,” and find the places I’m talking about.

I’ll begin with Valu Tires, at 40th and Steele, which turns into Vasquez north of I-70. Michael Maes, the tour guide, said that a number of junkyards have moved into these three neighborhoods but have avoided the ban on junkyards by calling themselves “recycling centers.” Now, there is a Discount Tire Company a few blocks from our house in Broomfield, but there isn’t a big pile of tires right next to it. Discount Tire either stores them inside the building or orders them as needed. The tour continued up Steele to Vasquez, where I snapped this long-distance picture of Xcel’s Cherokee Station (the red-and-white smokestack with the plume on the center-left) and the Suncor refinery to the right.We continued up Vasquez to 56th and down Brighton Boulevard to York, in the process going by this Suncor building, which is across the street (more or less) from Riverside Cemetery.As far as I can tell, we then took York to 58th and headed west to Franklin, where I took a picture of the last farmhouse in Globeville featured in Monday’s post. But from the map in Google, I get the impression that we drove up to 64th because we got so close to the red-and-white smokestack of Xcel’s Cherokee Station (part of the bus window is in this picture), and to the trains hauling coal.We went south, past the Purina Puppy Chow plant at York and I-70 (built in 1930, so I guess they routed I-70 around it when they built it in the 1960s),and then drove east and north to reach the northern part of Swansea, where I took the picture of the house without sewers featured in Wednesday’s post. Then we ended the tour back at the Cross Community Coalition offices,which are just across the railroad tracks from the Eaton Metals building (I’m not sure if that building is being used right now)and only a couple of blocks from the Growhaus at 48th and York.