SIDE STREETS: A racist past built into area's covenants

Besides making fun of Democrats, is there a more popular pastime in Colorado Springs than complaining about neighborhood covenants?

Maybe you don't like earth tone paint colors. You think it's outrageous you can't park in the street. Or you must have a chain-link fence.

Be glad, then, if you didn't live in Colorado Springs before 1957. Covenants in those days were far more restrictive.

Racist actually.

Consider this line from the 1940 covenants for Dorchester Heights, a subdivision in Ivywild, then an unincorporated area near The Broadmoor:

"No lot in said tract shall at any time be lived upon by any person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian race, and for the purpose of this paragraph, no Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Hindu or any other person of the Ethiopian, Indian or Mongolian races shall be deemed to be Caucasian."

Wow. At least there was an exception that allowed a few lucky people of color into Dorchester Heights.

"If persons not of the Caucasian race be kept thereon by such a Caucasian occupant, strictly in the capacity of servants or employees of such occupant, such circumstance shall not constitute a violation."

In other words, Barack Obama would be welcome as long as he was toting iced tea for a homeowner, or driving Miss Daisy or whistling "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" and battling Brer Rabbit. Otherwise, presumably the homeowners association would file a lien?

So who wrote these covenants? It was not some isolated skinhead wacko. It was Lee Dorr, of a pioneering El Paso County ranching family.

Before his death in 1990, Dorr was a lot of things: chairman of the county Planning Commission, president of the Ivywild Improvement Society and the County Historical Society, a banker, an elder in the First Presbyterian Church and developer who donated land for a park and Ivywild School.

He was not, his 80-year-old son Ray Dorr said, a hatemonger. Regardless what the covenant suggests.

"It was a difierent time," Ray Dorr said. "Looking at it from our viewpoint now, it does look odd. But he was not a racist."

Dorr said his father didn't hate people of color and certainly didn't raise him to hate, either.

"Not at all," Dorr said, recalling his own shock when he stumbled onto the covenant many years later.

"It was a surprise to me," he said. "I asked my dad about it. I said: ‘Did you really mean this?' He said it was just boilerplate language. It was common in covenants in that day."

In fact, in developing the "Count Pourtales Addition" around his Broadmoor hotel in 1926, Spencer Penrose included this covenant:

"No part of said property shall at any time be owned, used or occupied in whole or in part by any person or persons of African origin or descent, except that domestic servants, chauffeurs or gardeners of such race may live on or occupy the premises where their employer resides."

Similar language still can be found in deeds and covenants in the Old North End neighborhood and the Broadmoor, said Lenard Rioth, an attorney who is an expert on covenants.

"I run across it from time to time," Rioth said, noting that it was a hotly debated issue in the 1920s and '30s. In 1930, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld racially discriminatory covenants.

It wasn't until 1957 that the court overturned the decision, invalidating racist covenants.

So why are they still around?

"Associations are not obligated to delete racist restrictions," Rioth said. "So, they still show up."

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Tell me about your neighborhood: 636-0193 or bill.vogrin@gazette.com