Aurora has landed a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a community-driven redesign of Fletcher Plaza, the small civic square on East Colfax Avenue named after city founder Donald Fletcher. The city will match the federal award, bringing the total project budget to $150,000 for what officials are calling the Play On! project.
According to the Sentinel Colorado, Play On! will use surveys, hands-on design activities, youth engagement and artist-led efforts to gather input from residents of the East Colfax corridor, which runs between I-225 and Aurora's border with Denver at Yosemite Street. The plan calls for a temporary transformation of Fletcher Plaza built from that resident feedback, with construction slated to begin in spring 2027 and a culminating public event planned for June 2027. Whichever changes prove most popular during the temporary phase could eventually become permanent installations, per the same report.
Ginger White Brunetti, director of Aurora's Library and Cultural Services department, said Play On! will help re-imagine and rebuild Fletcher Plaza as a safe, vibrant, community-centered public space. The project includes community workshops and volunteer build sessions aimed at testing design features meant to create a welcoming and safe gathering place for children, families and local artists.
A Dallas Nonprofit Will Lead the Design Work
Guiding the design process is the Better Block Foundation, a Dallas-based nonprofit founded in 2010 and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2015. The organization relies on 120-day rapid-prototyping methods and open-source toolkits to run temporary neighborhood transformations, and it has carried out similar projects in more than 90 cities, according to the Better Block Foundation. Krista Nightengale, the foundation's executive director, said the group's work shows what is possible when residents help lead public-space projects.
Play On! draws on a wide roster of local collaborators, including the Aurora Park, Recreation and Open Space Department, Downtown Aurora Visual Arts, the Creative Alliance of Downtown Aurora and Manos Sagrados. Fletcher Plaza sits within the Aurora Cultural Arts District, a designation that traces back to early 2000s city planning efforts and earned official state certification as a Colorado Creative District in 2021, according to the Aurora Cultural Arts District. The plaza, created in 2004, is surrounded by cultural anchors: the Aurora Fox Arts Center and the recently renovated Martin Luther King Jr. Library sit next door, the Storyteller Theater and The People's Building face it across East Colfax Avenue, Vintage Theatre sits a block east, and Downtown Aurora Visual Arts is two blocks west.
Building on a Bigger Corridor-Wide Push
The Fletcher Plaza grant lands amid a much larger redevelopment campaign across Original Aurora. Northwest Aurora voters approved forming a Downtown Development Authority in a November 2025 special election, passing DDA formation with 79 percent support and authorizing 30-year Tax Increment Financing with 83 percent approval, according to Colorado Politics. That financing mechanism captures future property tax growth in the district to pay for long-term corridor improvements without raising local tax rates.
In June, the Aurora City Council recommended nine local business and property owners, including Downtown Aurora Visual Arts Executive Director Priscilla Montoya and Society 303 owner Natasha Sztevanovity, to serve on the new authority's board, as the Denver Gazette reported. The board was selected from 33 applicants, following Aurora's call for board applicants earlier this year, as per Hoodline. The authority is set to hold its first meeting this week, at The People's Building, to establish governance rules and review the corridor's master plan, according to Sentinel Colorado.
Nearby civic infrastructure has already seen major investment. The Martin Luther King Jr. Library next to Fletcher Plaza reopened in December 2025 after a $2.5 million federally funded expansion that doubled its footprint to 14,000 square feet and added a STEM makerspace and computer lab, according to the City of Aurora. That renovation opened a second floor that had sat unused since the building was constructed in 2004, the same year Fletcher Plaza itself was created.
Community Input Shaped the Broader Plan
The East Colfax corridor targeted by Play On! encompasses roughly 36,000 residents and has been shaped by the Colfax Community Vision & Action Plan, which engaged more than 870 participants across 24 public events in 2024 and 2025, per the City of Aurora. That planning effort earned Aurora a Colorado Downtown Excellence Award in the Best Plan Large Community category from Downtown Colorado Inc. in April, recognizing the plan's inclusive stakeholder engagement process.
Not everyone is convinced rapid redevelopment will benefit longtime residents equally. Some East Colfax small business owners, including the founders of the Meso-American cafe Ollin Cafetzin, voiced concerns in June that municipal urban renewal projects could drive gentrification and displace existing merchants, according to CBS Colorado. Community organizers have called for formal accountability measures to protect existing residents as the DDA and its tax-increment financing move forward.
Public safety remains part of the backdrop for these plaza redesigns. Earlier this month, a multi-agency law enforcement operation dismantled a drug ring operating along the East Colfax corridor, seizing 15 pounds of cocaine, 46 firearms, and five pipe bombs, Hoodline previously reported. Temporary changes tested through Play On! are explicitly meant to help counter that kind of safety challenge by creating a welcoming, family-friendly gathering space at the heart of the corridor.
