6. THE CITY BEAUTIFUL

Denver roared past urban rivals to become the biggest city in the Rockies, but chaotic speculation and growth left many scars. Not a single park or public square graced downtown Denver. Little sense of order or aesthetics prevailed as the boomtown became a dusty, drab Midwestern city.

A few enlightened pioneers envisioned citywide beautification as early as the 1890s. After visiting the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and seeing how a swamp had been transformed into a beautiful neoclassical showplace, John Evans returned to Denver inspired to improve the Mile High City. The aging ex-governor and businessman proposed a park and parkway plan, but he was too old and tired to push the plan with penny-pinching city officials. Of the Evans plan, only Park Avenue and City Park materialized. Greater city beautification awaited a more powerful politician.

"The Speer that Made Denver Famous"

As the economy slowly recovered, the city’s political fortunes also improved with the election of Denver’s most powerful mayor. Robert W. Speer proved to be incredibly energetic in transforming a raw, young city into what he called "the Paris of America."

Speer came to Denver from Pennsylvania in 1878 at the age of 23. Like thousands of others, he arrived with lungs raw and bleeding from tuberculosis, under doctor’s orders to seek out a dry, sunny, curative atmosphere. Colorado’s salubrious climate transformed the puny Pennsylvanian. He gained weight, a strong handshake, and a broad grin.

Renewed, Speer jumped into the favorite sport of Denver’s wheelers and dealers—real estate. He served as secretary of Horace Tabor’s Lookout Mountain Development Company. Belatedly, Speer realized that the anticipated boom in Lookout Mountain luxury homes might not come for decades. He shrewdly switched to an upscale real estate market closer to home, joining John A. Ferguson, Frederick R. Ross, and others in developing a fashionable residential area on the northern edge of the Denver Country Club. In this still-affluent neighborhood between 1st and 4th Avenues, from Downing Street to University Boulevard, Speer garnered his reward—his large home still stands at 300 Humboldt Street. Critics sniped that he built Speer Boulevard as a fancy driveway for himself and his Country Club chums.

Speer seemed to be everywhere. On the board of directors of the Festival of Mountain & Plain, he ballyhooed this fair to lift Denver’s spirits and showcase Colorado’s assets after the 1893 Depression struck. As a staunch booster, he became a stalwart member of the Chamber of Commerce. Fellow up-builders liked Speer’s "go-ahead-ativeness." They elected him president of the Denver Real Estate Exchange and named him a director of the Denver Manufacturers Bureau.

Speer also went to work for the Democratic Party. After election as city clerk in 1884, he moved through appointments as Denver postmaster, Fire and Police Board commissioner, and president of the Board of Public Works. He became the city’s craftiest politician. "I am a boss," Speer once confessed. "I want to be a good one."

"Red tape and restricting laws," Speer said on another occasion, "will not make a crooked politician straight but will make a straight politician useless. Personally, I believe in the concentration of all administrative powers in the hands of one official. It fixes the responsibility for good or bad government." In 1904, Speer successfully ran for mayor after he and other city shapers drafted a new city charter and persuaded voters to approve it. The so-called "Speer Charter" gave Denver one of the country’s most powerful mayoral offices. Speer seized that office to which he was reelected in 1908 and 1916.

The new mayor changed the color of Denver from brown to green. In 1905, he inaugurated a tree-planting program that ultimately gave away 110,000 shade trees to residents promising to plant and care for them. Speer established the office of the city forester to help transform a patch of the Great American Desert into an oasis of trees, shrubs and lawns.

Speer shared his vision in a January 7, 1907 pep talk to the city council: "We are in a plastic state. As the twig is bent so the tree will grow.... Denver can be made one of the ordinary cities of the country, or she can be made the Paris of America. It will cost money, but this investment will pay ten dollars for every one spent. Let us start [with Civic Center] plaza near the business center—have statues, trees, and flowers—where our people and tourists may gather each evening under the most artistic electric lighting—near the spray from grand fountains and listen to the finest music in the land....Then build not an ordinary, but an extraordinary drive or Appian Way into the mountains.... Take these forward steps, and you will never turn back—our future greatness will be assured."

The City Beautiful Plan

Mayor Speer could be found in his office evenings and on weekend mornings pondering plans for new parks and public buildings. In the heart of the city, Speer proposed a gracefully landscaped Civic Center. Between the State Capitol on the east and a projected new City and County Building on the west, he had some of the nation’s foremost city planners design grounds, monuments, a central library, fountains, and an outdoor Greek theater. This park-like heart was step one of a four-part plan for transforming Denver into a City Beautiful.

The second step, a network of tree-lined parkways, led from downtown to outlying residential neighborhoods. "Shaded drives," as Speer noted, "in this climate and land of bright sunshine, are appreciated more than in most cities." During Denver’s hot, dry summers, parkways are at least ten degrees cooler than un-shaded asphalt and cement streets. Speer Boulevard, the pace-setter parkway, also resolved the problem of what to do with dumpy, dangerous Cherry Creek.

Denver’s City Beautiful era is epitomized by the transformation of Cherry Creek, where the 1858 gold strike gave birth to the town. Jerome Smiley, in the closing pages of his 978-page History of Denver (1901), urged the Mile High City to begin "municipal works that would vastly contribute toward making Denver the City Beautiful." Smiley argued that the first target should be "the avoidable and blighting blemish—to use a mild term—caused by the presence of the wretched Cherry Creek." He recommended that the creek "be diverted to Sand Creek, and its water passed around the city to discharge into the Platte River several miles below [the city limits]." Then the city could install "a trunk sewer in the creek’s bed, that sandy and miserable waste."

Fortunately, Mayor Speer had a better idea. Striving to preserve and enhance Denver’s meager waterways, he walled the creek and began landscaping it with trailing vines, shrubbery, and trees. Small triangular parks were created along Speer Boulevard where the diagonal boulevard intersected downtown streets. Two larger tracts were acquired for Sunken Gardens Park in front of West High School and Alamo Placita Park at 1st Avenue. To honor the man who made the town eyesore into the scenic centerpiece of a grand boulevard, the City Council in 1910 renamed Cherry Creek Drive as Speer Boulevard.

Speer Boulevard led to Washington Park via the Downing-Marion Street Parkway. East 6th, 7th, 17th Avenues and Monaco Parkway extended the plan into East Denver. Most of the parkway plan has been implemented, although subsequent mayors have failed to complete a few remaining segments such as a proposed South Platte River Parkway.

The third step in Denver’s City Beautiful evolution was the establishment of large neighborhood parks to serve as mini-civic centers. These major parks became centerpieces for public buildings—schools, branch libraries, firehouses, churches and other community hubs. Sloan’s Lake, Washington, and City parks are legacies of this plan.

The fourth step in Speer’s City Beautiful plan was creation of the Denver Mountain Parks. The last and most ambitious scheme of Denver’s Progressive-era boosters carried the dream of public playgrounds and open space beyond the boundaries of the City and County of Denver into Clear Creek, Douglas, Grand, and Jefferson counties. These Denver Mountain Parks later came to include the Winter Park Ski Area and the Red Rocks Outdoor Amphitheater.

Some 13,500 acres of mountain parks survive, reflecting Denver’s dreams of enhancing not only the city itself, but the entire metropolis. Thanks to this park system, Denver is one of the few cities in America that boasts its own ski area, its own outdoor amphitheater, and its own buffalo herd.

The Park System

Speer doubled the city’s park space from 573 to 1,184 acres. At City Park, where the zoo consisted of a few chained and caged animals, Speer installed zoological gardens. Behind protective moats, monkeys, sea lions, bears and other beasts could cavort in natural-looking environments. In City Park Lake, an electric fountain with nine colored lights and 25 water jets provided visual accompaniment to the free concerts of the Denver Municipal Band. City Hall worked with Denver philanthropists such as the Boettcher, Gates, and Phipps families, to construct the Denver Museum of Natural History, Colorado’s largest museum to this day. It is spectacularly sited on the east side of Lake Ferril, which commemorates Colorado poet laureate Thomas Hornsby Ferril.

Realizing the special magic of water in a semi-arid region, Mayor Speer built the south lake of Washington Park, Sunken Gardens Lake, and added Berkeley, Sloan’s and Rocky Mountain Lakes to the park system. When city dwellers reached their new parks, they found plenty to do. The city provided bathhouses and bathing beaches at Berkeley, City, Sloan’s Lake and Washington Parks. Visitors found fish in the well-stocked waters as well as sailboats, canoes, and paddle boats. In winter, the lakes were converted to ice-skating rinks.

Whereas the private sector built clubs and amenities for privileged individuals, the Speer administration built public tennis courts, swimming pools, ball fields, playing fields, and graciously landscaped parks and parkways for all citizens. Recreational opportunities, as Progressive-era reformers argued, should not just be for the rich.

Robert and Kate Speer never had children, but made all Denver’s children their own. Their favorite statues were the Children’s Fountain in City Park and Wynken, Blynken and Nod in Washington Park. Playgrounds were constructed in every corner of the city, including the poorest neighborhoods, which needed them most. "Three years ago," reported the American City Magazine for May 1910, "Denver did not know that a good playground for children was...something else than a vacant space where children, unsupervised, had the opportunity to fight it out. Today Denver is one of the leading cities in the playground movement."

The late Denver historian Louisa Ward Arps cherished a favorite story about Mayor Speer’s fondness for children: "When Boss Speer heard via the grapevine that the telephone company was planning to tear down Cedric Kaub’s tree house on Gaylord Street, he became furious. Speer sent one of his men out to assure the Kaubs that no one would touch Cedric’s tree house. No one did." Speer used his skill and experience as a real estate developer to the city’s advantage. When the city attorney ruled that Denver had no power to acquire land west of the city limits at Sheridan Boulevard, Speer bought the land as a private citizen and sold what is now Inspiration Point Park and its million-dollar view to the city for the price he paid for it—$8,000.

Denver’s greatest asset, as the mayor realized, was its view of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains. Even lifelong Denverites can still round a corner or reach the top of a hill and thrill at the panorama framed between Pikes Peak and Longs Peak. While the mountains had not been growing higher, buildings and billboards had. Realizing the threat, the Speer administration urged that telegraph and telephone cables be buried underground, worked out a compromise 12-story building height limit, and tried to ban billboards. Speer also worked with the Denver Chamber of Commerce to fight another threat to the mountain view: Denver passed its first smoke abatement ordinance in 1916. This pioneer effort began the fight against air pollution that still sullies Denver’s reputation and mountain views.

Denver’s Only National Political Convention

To boost Denver as a convention city, the mayor campaigned for a $500,000 municipal auditorium—the largest in America except for Madison Square Garden in New York. Speer and the Chamber of Commerce raised $100,000 to celebrate the 1908 grand opening of the auditorium with Denver’s first and only national political convention. This Democratic Party lovefest focused national attention on the Mile High City.

"Whiskers are in evidence everywhere," snickered the New York Times on July 7, 1908: "Homespun suits are to be seen, also the ‘biled’ [boiled] shirt." The Times called it a "hayseed" convention, and journalist William Allen White agreed. He compared "this gathering of the ‘peepul’, this uprising of the oppressed" to "the great barbaric yap of which Walt Whitman speaks."

For the convention, the city draped downtown with red, white and blue bunting. Brass bands greeted each state delegation as it arrived at Union Station. Thousands donned "I live in Denver—Ask Me" buttons and showed delegates around town. Others brought a trainload of snow down from the mountains and dumped it in front of the auditorium so delegates could cool off with a snowball fight. A band of Arapaho Indians circled downtown on a streetcar, letting out war whoops whenever they spotted a delegate.

At Union Station, arrivals encountered the city’s new Welcome Arch. This 70-ton bronze-coated, steel gateway supported a huge "WELCOME" sign, illuminated by 2,194 light bulbs. Mayor Speer dedicated the arch on July 4, 1906, declaring that it "is to stand here for ages as an expression of love, good wishes and kind feelings of our citizens to the stranger who enters our gates."

Initially the arch also said "WELCOME" on the downtown side, but the Chamber belatedly realized that departing visitors should not be "WELCOME" to leave. Red-faced Chamber officials replaced that side of the sign with the word "MIZPAH." Denverites simply told visitors that it was an "Indian word" for "Howdy, Pardner."

Actually, mizpah is the Hebrew parting salutation found in Genesis 31:49: "The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another." Despite the mizpah misinterpretation, The Denver Post assured arriving Democrats, "We can read and write, lots of us, and we don’t know a woman in Denver who carries more than one revolver when she comes downtown shopping." Damon Runyon, ace reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, concluded: "Miss Denver, a sassy creation of red, white and blue, appliqued with green and edged in purple mountains, stood waiting to receive all visitors and conventioneers with open arms."

A Chicago Tribune reporter found many delegates in Denver’s saloons and wondered "just what effect altitude and alcohol together have on Democrats." The Tribune and conservative mossbacks scoffed at the Democratic presidential pick, William Jennings Bryan. Despite strong support from Colorado and other Western states, the "boy orator" from Nebraska was defeated that fall of 1908 in his third and last presidential race.

Denver in the Progressive Era

Denverites of the Progressive era aspired to make Denver not only the biggest and richest city in the region, but the most attractive. The Mile High City achieved that goal thanks in large part to Mayor Speer. Although hardly handsome himself, the pudgy, balding former carpet salesman gave Denver some of America’s finest parks, parkways and public buildings. The city’s schools, libraries, and even its fire stations were built as noble, neoclassical-style monuments. Among the new public amenities was a municipal bathhouse with free soap and towels for the unwashed masses. Street urchins lined up outside the bathhouse, now a designated Denver landmark at 20th and Curtis Streets, in winter as well as summer.

Speer passed a pioneer gun control bill in 1911, making it a felony punishable by a $1,000 fine and a penitentiary sentence to carry concealed weapons. Civility, as well as cleanliness and beauty, became a civic goal. Denver’s violent, dirty, and raw frontier hangovers were minimized and its progress maximized.

Speer walked to work one nippy day in 1918, fed the sparrows on his office window ledge as usual, and then was stricken by influenza. He became one of the millions killed by the worldwide flu epidemic which ultimately caused more deaths than World War I. More than 10,000 people jammed the Municipal Auditorium to say goodbye to the city’s most loved, most controversial, and most effective mayor.

His widow Kate Thrush Speer donated much of her husband’s small estate of $40,000 to pay for the bronze eagle and chiming clock atop her husband’s dying dream—the City and County Building finally completed in 1932 at the west end of Civic Center. Kate remained in their house at 300 Humboldt Street until her death in the 1950s. Her most prized possession was a model of the Wynken, Blynken and Nod statue she and Robert had erected for the children of Denver in Washington Park.

One of the eulogies for Mayor Speer came from the prince of the Progressive era muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens. In his Autobiography (1931), Steffens described a tour of Europe’s model cities with American city-shapers, including Denver’s mayor:

"We saw.... London and Paris, Brussels, Frankfort, Munich, Vienna, and Switzerland. We saw the good things to copy that Mayor Speer sought for Denver. He was Denver, that honest, able man; his eyes were Denver’s eyes; his ambition was his city’s.... When we came to Düsseldorf, ‘the best-governed city in Europe,’ he looked like a painter seeing a paintable landscape."

Admittedly, Speer used some ugly tactics to achieve a City Beautiful. Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey in his classic exposé The Beast (1910), paints a dark picture of the Speer era. According to Lindsey, Speer was first elected mayor in 1904 with the help of 10,000 illegal votes. In 1916, however, all parties admitted that he was honestly elected for his last term. Although Speer eventually cleaned up his act, it is true that he achieved so much because he operated both above and below the table. Certainly he relished dealing with the city’s power brokers in the proverbial smoke-filled back room.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mayor Benjamin F. Stapleton and his manager of Parks, George Cranmer, used New Deal funding and manpower to further implement the City Beautiful dream. During Stapleton’s administration, the city finished Civic Center, extended and improved the park and parkway system, and added to the Denver Mountain Parks system. Thanks to the Progressive-era propensity for long-range master planning, New Deal employment programs such as the CCC and WPA found plenty of civic projects awaiting a work force which completed many City Beautiful era dreams.

Buffalo Bill

Lookout Mountain, one of the earliest and best known Denver Mountain Parks, gained special significance when Denver laid to rest there the remains of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody. This Western icon outperformed all the others; he taught the world to think of Americans as cowboys and Indians. Thanks largely to him, generations of children grew up playing a game which often started with a squabble to see who would play the greatest cowboy of all—Buffalo Bill.

Americans, starved for national heroes, seized upon living persons to recast into mythical role models. Such was the fate of Buffalo Bill. During his lifetime, he became the star of stage plays, movies, 557 dime novels, and his own Wild West Show.

Heroes of one generation, of course, become the next generation’s target practice. Buffalo Bill stayed in the saddle longer than most, although his debunking began in the 1920s. During the 1960s his long curly hair, grandiose goatee, and buckskin fringes made him a hairy role model for hippies.

By the 1980s, however, Bill was being shot full of holes. Western historians of the 1990s have found Buffalo Bill beneath contempt. In the newest, most politically correct Western history textbook, Richard White’s It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, the greatest mythic Westerner of all is given only one sentence in 644 pages of tiny type. Buffalo Bill has been written off as a white male chauvinist fraud, a violent bigot who slaughtered animals and Native Americans.

Western history without Buffalo Bill would have astonished early 20th-century Americans. Cody’s career began when he ran away from home at age 13 to join the Colorado gold rush. A year later, he became a Pony Express rider who boasted that he covered 322 miles in 21 hours and 40 minutes using 21 horses. In one of his alleged autobiographies, Life & Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1917), Cody says railroad construction crews nicknamed him after he fed them buffalo steaks. Bill killed, according to his own count, 4,280 buffalo.

Cody also hunted Indians. He slew Yellow Hand, a Cheyenne leader, in 1876 and boasted: "Jerking his war-bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.... As the soldiers came up, I swung the Indian chieftain’s top-knot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’"

Despite Cody’s fame as an Indian fighter, he later befriended many former foes. Ironically, Indians he helped put on reservations found some of their better paying and more gratifying jobs with Cody, travelling the U. S. and Europe as performers with the Wild West Show.

Fred Bonfils and Harry Tammen, founders of The Denver Post, reckoned Buffalo Bill the greatest Westerner of all and smelled money. Tammen loaned Cody $20,000 and later foreclosed on the bankrupt, aging showman. Tammen made Cody the star of the Post’s Sells-Floto Circus, although the creaky, bewigged hero had to be lifted onto his horse. Cody moved into his sister’s house, a Queen Anne dwelling at 2932 Lafayette Street, now a designated Denver landmark. There, on January 10, 1917, the Sir Galahad of the Plains crossed over the Great Divide.

Some 25,000 people viewed the corpse as it lay in state inside the gold-domed Colorado State Capitol. Another 25,000 joined the funeral procession to the top of Lookout Mountain. The Denver Post’s huge, $100,000 equestrian statue never materialized, but a museum and graveside shrine did. Cody’s hefty wife Lulu, who died in 1921, was buried atop her rambling husband to pin him down for eternity. Millions of pilgrims have climbed the mountain to visit the grave of the poor farm boy who grew up to be America’s most celebrated Westerner. Thus Lookout Mountain, one of the first Denver mountain parks established to preserve a natural area, also became a shrine to a hero who had done much to transform the wilderness.

While Buffalo Bill, as usual, stole the show, the more important point of the Lookout Mountain story was to celebrate Denver’s unique and enlightened approach to its mountainous hinterland. Jacques Benedict, who designed many mountain park structures, pointed out in his article "The Denver Park System," for the November 1914, issue of The National Architect: "Surely there is nothing being created in other cities quite so unique, so distinctive as the Mountain Park Idea, and the future fame of Denver will rest on the fact that with small means and great sacrifice, this smaller city chose rather to advertise, not her commercial supremacy, but her generosity, her belief in the broad spaces, and the distant vistas which make progressive citizens...."

SOURCES:

Denver Municipal Facts. City and County of Denver, 1909-1931.

Larsen, Charles. The Good Fight: The Remarkable Life and Times of Judge Ben Lindsey. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972.

Noel, Thomas J. and Barbara S. Norgren. Denver: The City Beautiful and It’s Architects. Denver: Historic Denver, Inc., 1987/1993 reprint.

Reese, Carol McMichael. The Politician and the City: Urban Form and City Beautiful Rhetoric in Progressive Era Denver. Austin: University of Texas, 1992 Ph.D. dissertation.

Russell, Don. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960.

Wilson, William H. The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

NEXT CHAPTER >
BACK TO CHAPTER LIST >