To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
Hidden Denver
An informal guide to strange and wonderful places in the Mile High City
You may think you know Denver, but there's more to the story.
Although a relativelly young American city, Denver came into its own during World War II, when its distance from the vulnerable coasts prompted it to become a major center for weapons production. After the war many GIs, with fond memories of the mountains and Colorado’s benign climate returned to Denver to live.
Born as a jumping-off place for the Gold Rush of 1859, miles to the west in the Rocky Mountains, Denver grew up treeless, flat and featureless with only the confluence of the undistinguished and unnavigable South Platte River and the lesser Cherry Creek to mark the site.
But over the last century and a half, how the Queen City of the Plains has grown. Now the dominant urban area between the Mississippi River and the West Coast, Denver and its suburbs have become a vibrant metropolitan area of more than 2 million people. From its origins as a rough, hard scrabble mining town, Denver boasts as strange and wonderful a history as any young city in America.
From miners and soiled doves to beatniks, cranks, dreamers and inventors, Denver has a little bit of it all. Following are some of the unusual locations and sites that enhance the Mile High City as a fascinating place to live and visit.
Articulated Wall, Denver Design Center, 595 S. Broadway.
This magnificent 85-foot high yellow sculpture was created by Herbert Bayer, who, at the time it was erected in 1985, was the last living member of the famed Bauhaus movement. Founded in 1919 by architect and designer Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was the home for painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and architect Mies van der Rohe until it was run out of Germany by Adolph Hitler in 1933. Bayer died in 1986. The sculpture is owned by the Denver Art Museum.
Rocky Mountain Arsenal, 64th Avenue and Quebec Street.
Once described as the most polluted site on the planet, this one-time nerve gas factory encapsulates the history of the 20th century environmental movement. Built during World War II to manufacture mustard gas and napalm, including the fire bombs dropped on Japanese cities, it was leased in the 1950s to Shell Chemical Co. to manufacture agricultural pesticides.
The resulting combination of chemicals that seeped into the groundwater created a toxic soup that almost defies scientific definition. But since the mid-1960s, with greater awareness of the environmental damage done to the area, a massive cleanup effort has begun that continues to this day. Now the former death factory has become one of the nation’s largest wildlife refuges where bald eagles nest, and five hundred other species of wildlife have been sighted. For information about tours, (303) 289-0232, ext. 150.
Black American West Museum, 3091 California St.
A unique collection of artifacts and documents recording the often ignored contributions of American-Americans to the development of the West. Small admission fee. Hours are seasonal. (303) 292-2566.
Molly Brown House, 1340 Pennsylvania St.
Long before the movie Titanic swept the world in the ‘90s, Denver had the real deal: The residence of the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown. The heroine of the 1912 luxury liner’s sinking, Mrs. Brown and her millionaire miner husband, the rough and tumble J.J. Brown, bought the Victorian home in 1894 for $30,000. And Molly (actually Maggie) lived here off-and-on until her death in 1932. Though fabulously wealthy, she was never accepted by Denver society and spent much of her time abroad. Her house has been completely restored and is visited by an estimated 40,000 people a year. Its rescue from developers in the late 1960s was one of the origins of the national historic preservation movement. Small admission fee. (303) 832-4092.
Buckhorn Exchange, 1000 Osage St.
An experience unique to the American West, this restaurant opened in 1893 and holds Colorado Liquor License No. 1, making it the oldest continuing bar in Colorado. World-famous for its fish and game oriented menu, the Buckhorn was one of Buffalo Bill Cody’s hangouts at the turn of the century. Not for the animal-rights crowd, the walls of the Buckhorn are covered with dozens and dozens of mounted trophies ranging from buffaloes to chipmunks. Reservations are encouraged. (303) 534-9505.
Buffalo Bill house, 29th Avenue and Lafayette St.
Speaking of Buffalo Bill, the famed scout and Western showman died broke and disappointed in his sister’s house on this block on Nov. 4, 1917. Private residence. Do not ask for directions. Buffalo Bill is buried west of Denver off Interstate 70 at 987 ½ Lookout Mountain Road. In addition to his grave, there is a museum and gift shop. (303) 526-0747, (303) 526-9367.
Caboose Hobbies, 500 Broadway.
Billing itself as the largest model train store in the world, the Caboose can make grown men go weak in the knees. It’s all here, books, caps, videos and train equipment and layouts of any gage and vintage. Mind boggling for the model railroad enthusiast. State Capitol steps, Colfax Avenue and Broadway. Thousands of tourists have had their picture taken on the west side of the Colorado State Capitol building on a step with a brass plaque denoting that they are 5,280 feet above sea level. Only one problem - it’s the wrong step. One mile high is actually two steps up.
Neal Cassady school, 410 Park Avenue West.
Few people would think of Neal Cassady, the prototype for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and education in the same sentence, but here it is: Ebert Public School, where the young Cassady’s schooling began and ended. The ultimate hipster and legendary Beat Generation figure went to grade school here off-and-on from 1932 to 1938. He and his father, a barber, lived at a long-demolished flop house at 16th Avenue and Market Street, and his mother lived at 22nd Avenue and Stout Street, four blocks from Ebert School. An unpaid bar tab from Cassady is still framed on the wall at My Brother’s Bar, 2376 15th Street.
Mary Chase home, 532 W. 4th Ave.
The author of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Harvey about the loveable dipsomaniac Elwood P. Dowd and his invisible six-foot rabbit buddy Harvey, lived here during her long career as a journalist and society editor.Private residence. (For more, see Harvey sighting.)
Cheeseburger monument, 2776 Speer Blvd.
Cities ranging from Louisville, Ky., to Pasadena, Calif., claim to be the place where the cheeseburger was invented, but only Denver has a monument to this most ubiquitous of American food. On March 5, 1935, restaurateur Lou Ballast and his wife registered the trademark "Cheeseburger" with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office, and the rest is non-history ... the family never protected the trademark. But here it still is - the site of the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In, where a stone marker donated by the dairy industry commemorates the Ballasts’ achievement.
Colfax Avenues A and B, one block south of the 3400-3500 block of Colfax Avenue between Madison and Cook streets.
According to local historian Phil Goodstein, in 1903, a developer named Frank Snell decided to cram thirty houses onto what normally would have been a twenty-four house block. The result was these two unorthodox but charming mini-streets of Denver Square style homes.
Denver Mint, 320 W. Colfax Ave.
Watch your money being made. One of only three remaining mints in the United States, free 15-minute tours are offered Monday through Friday. No cameras. Jokes about free samples are trite. Tours start on the Cherokee Street entrance. (303) 405-4761.
Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys, 1880 Gaylord St.
Housed in the historic Pearce-McAllister cottage built in 1899, this enchanting collection of dollhouses, Teddy bears and modern and vintage toys is a delight for children and adults. Small admission fee. (303) 322-1053.
Denver omelet
There are too many myths swirling around about the origins of the breakfast meal of eggs, ham, onions and green peppers to name a definitive site, but many argue that the omelet was created at the Brown Palace Hotel, 321 17th Ave. Who knows? But the beautiful Victorian hotel is worth a look in its own right.
Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place.
The Denver Press Club has been at its current address since 1925 and is open to the public. Among those who have passed through its doors include Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Pat Oliphant and Paul Conrad, Gene Fowler, Lowell Thomas, H.. Allen Smith, and many other prominent journalists.
Denver "walk of stars," 1089 Bannock St.
Hard to top for sheer weirdness. Back in the early 1960s when this building housed the local ABC-TV affiliate, someone came up with the idea of imitating Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater and bringing current ABC stars to Denver to memorialize their feet and hand prints in concrete. Unfortunately the careers of Jack Kelly, Ty Hardin, Peter Breck, among others, didn't shine that brightly, but the visitor can still compare hand and shoe sizes with Linda Evans, Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester of The Adams Family) and cowboy king Roy Rogers, who had surprisingly little feet.
East High School, 1545 Detroit St.
One of Denver’s four original high schools, the building is a replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Mamie Doud Eisenhower home, 750 Lafayette St.
With her bangs and shy feminine style, Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower was a perfect symbol for the Eisenhower ‘50s. She and Dwight David Eisenhower were married at her parents’ home here on July 1, 1916. The thirty-fourth president of the United States was a frequent visitor to Denver and Colorado during his eight years in office. Private residence.
Eugene Field Wynkyn, Blynkyn and Nod statue, 700 S. Exposition St.
The beloved children’s poet Eugene Field spent time in Denver as a journalist and short story writer before moving to greater fame in St. Louis. This 1919 statue commemorates one of his better-known poems, Wynkyn, Blynkyn and Nod who sailed off to sea in a wooden shoe. Mothers used to read this poem to their children to send them off to the Land of Nod. The three little boys symbolize the three stages of sleep and the wooden shoe represents a crib. Field’s home in Denver was at the site of the present Denver Public Library.
Group of Eight Table, Denver Public Library, 10 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, west side of the seventh floor Library Commission room.
After Denver hosted the 1997 Group of Eight world economic summit, this table, valued at $15,000, was where world leaders like Bill Clinton and Russia’s Boris Yeltsin held court. After the conference, it was donated to Denver’s public library. Brass plaques on the table show where each of the then world leaders sat.
Ruth Handler store, 2800 E. 6th Ave.
Ruth Handler, the mother of the Barbie doll and a graduate of Denver’s East High School, once operated Nearly Me, a store selling prosthetic breasts, at this address. Now it’s a bridal supply shop. Harvey Sighting, 17th Avenue and Fairfax Street. In the Broadway play Harvey, playwright Mary Chase listed this block as the place where Elwood P. Dowd first met the invisible rabbit. Jimmy Stewart went on to star in the 1950 film version. (See Mary Chase house.)
Sonny Liston’s house, 3395 Monaco Parkway.
The controversial former heavyweight champion of the world lived in this modest house in 1964...
Mad bomber house, 2650 W. Mississippi Ave.
On Nov. 1, 1955, fifty-four-year-old Denver business woman Daisie E. King boarded a DC-6 at the local airport for a vacation trip to Alaska. Less than fifteen minutes later the plane exploded in a sugar beet field north of Denver, killing all forty-four people aboard. The subsequent FBI investigation focused on Mrs. King’s twenty-three-year-old son, Jack Gilbert Graham, a young hellion and malcontent who managed a drive-in restaurant for Mrs. King. Graham eventually confessed to planting twenty-six sticks of dynamite in his mother’s luggage and plotting to kill her for a $36,000 insurance policy. Graham was executed in the gas chamber for murder on January 11, 1957. He lived in this house with his wife, their two young children and his mother. Private residence.
Perry Mason movies, Denver City and County Building, 1437 Bannock St.
Many of the 26 made-for-television episodes of The Return of Perry Mason, were filmed here from 1985 to 1993. Raymond Burr bounded up these steps in each show.
Bat Masterson and the Oxford Hotel, 1600 17th Avenue.
The former lawman who cleaned up Dodge City, Kansas, had fallen on hard times by the time he wound up in Denver in the 1890s. An associate of Wyatt Earp, he spent a fair amount of time drinking at this hotel and bar before being ordered out of town by the local sheriff. Masterson went on to New York and started a second career as a sports writer. He died there in 1921. While at the Oxford, check out, if you can, the elegant marble men’s bathroom in the basement.
Golda Meier house, 1146 9th St.
Golda Meier, who served as prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, was born in Milwaukee, but moved to Denver as a girl and grew up in this house. It was originally located at 1606-1608 Julian St. on Denver’s West Side, but was moved to the Auraria Campus’s Historic 9th Street Park in 1988 at a cost of $280,000. It is used as a conference center.
Dora Moore School, 846 Corona St.
Graduates of this beautiful and still-operating 1889 elementary school include actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., former first lady Mamie Eisenhower and singer Judy Collins, who all lived in the neighborhood. The school is named for Dora More, who served as principal for thirty-six years until her retirement in 1926.
Augustus Stanley Owsley III house, Colorado Boulevard between 17th and 23rd streets.
In the mid-1960s when hippie chemist par excellence Augustus Stanley Owsley III became too hot in California, he moved his d-lysergic acid diethyalmide ( LSD or "acid") lab to somewhere along Colorado Boulevard across the street from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. "Owsley purple" and some of the other powerful (and illegal) psychedelic drugs of the ‘60s were manufactured at roughly this location. Private residences.
Alfred Packer grave, Littleton Cemetery, 6155 S. Prince St., southwest corner of Lot 65.
Reviled at his death in 1907 as the only American ever convicted of cannibalism, Alfred G. Packer was hired as a trail guide for a group of prospectors in 1874. After the party was lost in the mountains, Packer showed up two months later looked rather well-fed. He was accused of eating his employers and was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. One of Colorado’s most famous quotes is the remark of the sentencing judge: "There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, but you, you voracious man-eating son of a bitch, you et five of them..." Packer’s sentence was eventually reduced and he was paroled in 1901. Confusion about the name Alfred or Alferd comes from a misspelling by a drunken tattoo artist. Packer allegedly thought the mistake was funny. He was probably innocent, too.
Punchbowl, 2052 Stout St.
Check out the magnificent landscape paintings on the backs of the wooden booths at this funky neighborhood bar and restaurant. Legend has it that they were painted for drinks by an unemployed local imbiber and bar regular.
Richtofen Castle, 7012 E. 12th Ave.
This was the residence of Walter Von Richtofen, the uncle of World War I German flying ace Manfred Von Richtofen, the Red Baron, who shot down eighty Allied airplanes. Built in 1882, the limestone castle is covered with lions’ heads, part of the family coat of arms. It was designed to be part of an elaborate health spa, but the elder baron was brought down by the Panic of 1893 and never recovered financially. Private residence.
The Rossonian, 2650 Welton St.
Once the epicenter for Denver’s African American culture in the 1930s and ‘40s, this onetime premier jazz club has fallen on hard times. Built in 1912 at the Baxter Hotel, it became The Rossonian in 1929 and was a performance venue for the likes of Count Basie, Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington. Though it was placed on the National Historic Register in 1995, several attempts to reopen it as a center for the performing arts have been unsuccessful.
Damon Runyon’s first wife’s home, 1515 Downing St.
The author of Guys and Dolls and chronicler of New York’s violent but sentimental gangsters in the 1920s, met his future first wife, Ellen Egan, a Denver society writer, when she lived here in 1909. Runyon moved to The Big Apple later that year. He and Ellen married in New York in 1911. The site is now a post office parking lot.
Satire Lounge, 1920 E. Colfax Ave.
Rumor has it that back when this was a comedy club (It’s a Mexican restaurant now), Dick Smothers, straight man for the Smothers Brothers comedy duo, got married here in the early 1960s after one of their shows.
Shredded wheat
Working out of his Denver home in 1892, food faddist Henry D. Perky invented a shredding machine for making wheat kernels more pleasing to the palate. The result was Post’s Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal, which Americans consume at a rate of seventy-five million boxes a year. From Denver, Perky moved to Niagara Falls, New York, and opened a factory and health spa which offered a menu of shredded wheat beverage, roast turkey stuffed with shredded wheat and shredded wheat ice cream! Where Perky lived in Denver is still under research; he initially sold his Cereal Making Machine from a horse-drawn cart in the streets of downtown.
Mattie Silk’s house of business, 1942 Market St.
The most fabled of Denver’s madams of the post-Gold Rush period, Mattie Silks’ House of Mirrors was the top of the line as a brothel, serving Denver’s elite in the 1870s. Mattie’s legend grew when she shot it out, allegedly topless, with another rising madam, Kate Futon on the banks of the South Platte River in 1877. A petite blond with a good sense of business, she married a Colorado rancher and died in 1929 as a well-thought-of matron.
Silverado building, 2800 E. Mexico Ave.
The large silver building on the southwest corner of the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Mexico Avenue was the home of the notorious Silverado Banking savings and loan. When the thrift went belly-up in 1988 after a wild loaning spree by its executives, taxpayers were left with a $1 billion bill to pay off. Silverado’s best-known director was Neil Bush, son of then-President George Bush and brother of President George W. Bush.
Sleeper house, Interstate 70 near the Genesee exit.
This futuristic home, once described as "a hamburger with a side sliced off sitting on a pedestal," was used by Woody Allen as one of the locations for the silly 1973 film Sleeper. It will appear briefly on a mountaintop to your left as you drive west on I-70. Private residence.
Sloans Lake torpedo, southeast corner of Sheridan Boulevard and 17th Avenue; take the Yates Street exit.
Sitting in a public park at the foot of the Rockies is a World War II torpedo, commemorating the approximately 3,000 men who died in the Silent Service. The monument remembers the sailors on the USS Grayling, which was lost off the coast of the Philippines in September 1943.
Russell Stover candies, 748 Lincoln.
There’s nothing left here to see but a parking lot, but from the early 1920s until 1931, this was the location of the Russell Stover candy company. The Stovers bought the rights to the ice cream candy bar Eskimo Pie (originally known as the "I-Scream Bar," ) and popularized it here before opening "Mrs. Stover’s Bungalow Candies," the company’s original name. A replica of Clara and Russell Stover’s home and shop is available from Hummel figurines.
The tampon, Security Building, 17th Avenue and California St. Suites 201 and 208.
Denver’s Dr. Earle Haas had offices here in 1933 when he registered the patent for the tampon. A former country doctor, he also invented a successful diaphragm. Dr. Haas sold the rights to his invention to Gertrude Tenderich, the founder and first president of Tampax. Private offices.
Terminal bar, 1539 17th Avenue.
Long before it became an upscale restaurant in 1996, the once very seedy Terminal was an occasional hangout for eccentric musician and cult figure Tom Waits when he toured Denver in the 1970s. Named for its proximity to Union Station, and adjacent train yards, the Terminal and the surrounding neighborhood were immortalized on Waits’ 1975 album, Nighthawks at the Diner.
Tiny Town, west on U.S. 285, 6249 E. Turkey Creek Road.
A wonderland of kiddie kitsch. In 1915, founder George Turner began building a one-sixth scale Victorian town to amuse his young daughter. Now it has grown to more than one hundred buildings and boasts its own transit system, the Tiny Town Railway, a miniature steam locomotive which loops around the property. Unusual, amusing. Open Memorial Day through Labor Day. Small admission fee.
Western Miners Federation Hall, Mining Exchange Building, 15th Avenue and Arapahoe Street.
This building is gone, but at the turn of the century, radicals like Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and "Big Bill" Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") met with dissident coal miners at this location to plot and preach revolution.
Copyright Gary Olson 2010 First published in The Arizona Republic
   |
Copyright 2008 World Wayfarer LLC | All rights reserved | Use of this site |