IN TRANSIT: DENVER -- Denver Stapleton was once one of the country's busiest airports until the city opened Denver International on the edge of town, giving it the excuse the shut Stapleton down for good and force the airlines to move out there at gunpoint. Even before the last flight departed, the city had hatched a plan to hand the site off to developers ready and willing to embrace the New Urbanist planning principles. Where there had once been one of the nation's most claustrophobic airports, there would one day be a neighborhood of 40,000 residents designed by the architects and planners of Calthorpe Associates, one of the standard bearers in the New Urbanism. (In an ironic twist of fate, the enlightened developer is Forest City Enterprises, a close corporate cousin of Forest City Ratner -- which has Jane Jacobs making steady rotations in her grave due to its hated Brooklyn Yards project.)

In 2001, construction began, and today there are several thousand homes on the Stapleton site, at varying price points and a menagerie of retrotfitted historical styles. On some blocks, homes equipped with turrets sit across from Cape Cod cottages just down the street from Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired lofts. But nothing stupefied me as much as the rows of fresh brownstones on 29th Ave., the main drag just east of Stapleton's "town center." Why would anyone living in Denver -- who had either grown up for the wide open spaces or moved there for them -- want to live in homes that looked airlifted straight from the gentrified precincts of Brooklyn?

Demanding answers, I went door to door, knocking and asking questions to anyone who answered. The four who answered included an executive coach who had moved here from Washington D.C., a textbook sales rep who just happened to work for one of the imprints owned by my publisher, a former flight attendant-turned graphic designer, and a stay-at-home software engineer.

While I'd accepted that one could build some very nice housing in the footprint of airports (or the remnants of one), I'd resisted the idea that anyone could ever recreate the brownstones of Brooklyn and attract enough Richard Floridian types to stock it successfully. It turns out I was wrong; you can build Park Slope from scratch.

Read more of Greg Lindsay's travel blog, IN TRANSIT.