7. DENVER’S UPS AND DOWNS

During the 1920s, Denver flew into the air age with construction of Denver Municipal Airport. Mayor Benjamin Franklin Stapleton encountered shrill opposition led by The Denver Post, which ridiculed "Stapleton’s Folly" and dubbed the proposed Sand Creek site in northeast Denver "Simpleton’s Sand Dunes." Why build an airport so far away from downtown when there were better, closer sites? If God meant for men to fly, he would have given them wings. This boondoggle, fumed the Post, had been conceived to allow the mayor to squander municipal money buying out landowners, most notably the mayor’s crony, H. Brown Canon of Windsor Farm Dairy, at inflated prices.

"Rattlesnake Hollow," as other cynics called the site at East 32nd Avenue and Quebec Street, was blasted as a taxpayer subsidy for a few rich kids who liked to play with airplanes. Sure enough, the power-elite, whose offspring flocked to the new sport of aviation, endorsed the plan. Denver’s first families swamped the grand opening celebration, October 17-20, 1929 — one week before the stock market crash. The city paid $143,013 for the 640-acre site and another $287,000 to build the airport with four gravel runways, one hangar, a tiny terminal, and a wind sock.

Three days of dedication festivities drew crowds estimated at 15,000 to 20,000. Rubberneckers watched the climbs and dives, the loops and rolls of airplanes overhead. Sightseers thronged around Boeing’s "Leviathan of the Air," a 14-passenger biplane equipped with Pullman sleepers, a kitchen, and a dining room.

Coloradans celebrated "The West’s best airport...a model for further airport development...a great center on America’s aerial map.... large enough and level enough to meet all future needs of long distance passenger flying."

To feed the flyers, "Mom" Williams opened her Skyline Buffet next door to the terminal. Mom, the original airport concessionaire, was replaced in the 1960s by Sky Chef, which opened one of Denver’s fanciest restaurants. Shrimp-boat dinners and ice cream sundaes made Sky Chef famous, as did its orchestra and after-dinner dancing. Denverites held their children’s birthday parties at the airport, toasting the air age future. Mayor Stapleton, a penny-pincher, installed devices wherever he thought the city could grab some spare change to help pay for the new airport. Coin-operated turnstiles guarded the stairway to the observation deck. Catch-penny vending machines sold everything from combs to flight insurance. Pay toilets captured as much as $45,000 a year until 1974, when the Women’s Coalition to End Pay Toilets sued the city. Women protested that men had free urinals. After pondering how to meter urinals, Mayor William H. "King Solomon" McNichols, Jr., had half the locks removed on the women’s stalls.

The bathroom battle ended in somewhat shorter lines in front of women’s toilets. Feminist eyebrows were further raised by the "baggage bunnies"—teenage girls attired in culottes and polka-dot ties. These youngsters were told to convince travelers that "Denver really does have something special about it."

Baggage bunnies and free women’s toilets notwithstanding, airport usage did not take off until after World War II, finally catching up with the pie-in-the-sky rhetoric of its 1929 dedication. To honor the mayor who had braved considerable opposition to build it, Denver Municipal was renamed Stapleton Airport on August 25, 1944.

The Great Depression

Denver’s new airport and activity elsewhere around the city slowed down in the 1930s as the Great Depression struck Colorado. By 1933, the worst year of the Depression, one out of every four Denver adults was out of work.

Following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, the federal government began experimenting with solutions to the nationwide economic chaos. Some of these federal programs not only provided jobs, but improved the city and its hinterlands.

One of Roosevelt’s pet projects, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) hired young men for federal service and housed them in government barracks at such places as Fort Logan and Morrison. They worked to improve the outdoors, building trails, campgrounds and other amenities in Denver’s Mountain Parks, including a unique outdoor amphitheater at Red Rocks.

This theater was the dream of George Cranmer, a wealthy, ex-stock broker, who had liquidated his firm a year before the market crash. He had long been fascinated by the large rocks jutting up at the base of the mountains west of Denver. While traveling in Sicily, he saw the Greek outdoor theater at Taormina and envisioned a Denver counterpart.

Mayor Stapleton in 1935 appointed Cranmer as manager of Improvements and Parks, giving him a chance to realize his dream. Stapleton regarded Denver’s Red Rocks Mountain Park as a giant rock garden. Cranmer, conversely, wanted to make a giant outdoor theater by leveling the boulder-strewn area between two massive outcroppings for seating. He convinced CCC officials to proceed quietly with plans to clear the area. Workers took several days to set all the dynamite charges. Then they blew up all the baby boulders at once —pulverizing Stapleton’s rock garden. Denver architect Burnham Hoyt designed the stage and seating in harmony with the natural setting, making the theater an architectural as well as acoustical triumph.

Another New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put Denver’s unemployed to work repairing schools, fixing gutters, planting trees, killing rats, and filling chuckholes. Larger WPA projects included installation of sewers, reinforcing the banks of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, and constructing West Alameda Avenue Parkway to Red Rocks Park.

The WPA hired women to make clothing, stuff dolls, prepare school lunches, and run nurseries. It supported weavers who repaired old Indian and Hispanic textiles at the Denver Art Museum. At the Colorado Historical Society, researchers gathered historical data and compiled an excellent state guidebook: Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State.

Many Denver artists ate because of WPA’s art program, which paid them $35 a week to decorate schools and government buildings. Allen Tupper True, an 1899 graduate of Denver’s Manual Training High School, locally known for his murals in the Colorado National Bank Building and the Telephone Building, also did murals for the WPA. A Treasury Department grant supported Gladys Caldwell while she chiseled two of Denver’s largest statues, the mountain sheep guarding the 18th Street entrance to the Post Office (now the Byron White Federal Courthouse).

The WPA spent more than $42 million in Colorado—$5 million more than the state produced in gold during the same period. By 1937, WPA workers were remodeling the Agnes Phipps Tuberculosis Sanitarium at East 6th Avenue and Quebec Street into an Army Air Corps Technical School that evolved into Lowry Air Force Base. When the WPA ceased operating in 1943, Denver’s unemployed no longer worried about jobs. They knew the United States military wanted them. America was at war. Whereas the United States’ active involvement in World War I lasted only a few months, World War II involved Americans for four years. Wartime industry and military installations transformed Denver.

The wartime ordnance plant on West 6th Avenue epitomized the transformation. After the war, it became a huge Federal Center for numerous agencies and thousands of employees who make Denver the largest federal office center outside of Washington, D.C. Steady, high-paying federal jobs with good benefits brought many newcomers to Denver during and after the war.

The Cold War

The Denver Chamber of Commerce, which helped locate sites for Fort Logan in the 1880s, for Lowry Air Force Base in the 1930s, and for the Federal Center in the 1940s, continued to boost the Mile High City as a military town after World War II. Pointing out that the East and West Coasts were far more vulnerable to enemy bombs and missiles, Coloradans promoted the Rocky Mountain West as an unassailable bastion for military installations.

The Pentagon concurred. The Air Force Academy arrived in 1958, followed by the North American Air Defense Command. Both complexes are in Colorado Springs, but Denverites regarded the Springs as just another jewel in their Rocky Mountain Empire. The Cold War likewise increased business at Denver’s Lowry Air Force Training Base, as well as at Buckley Field and Fitzsimons Army Hospital. Denver lobbied effectively for two other major military installations—the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. At Rocky Flats, plutonium triggers were manufactured and maintained for nuclear bombs. The Arsenal made toxic weapons for chemical warfare. Both sites were regarded as heaven-sent boosts for the local economy. With the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, Lowry Air Force Base closed and was converted to civilian housing and educational purposes. Coloradans also began the long, costly cleanup of contamination at Rocky Flats and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

The Cold War also fueled an explosion in the number of defense contractors. Ball Brothers Research Corporation, Martin Marietta Aerospace Corporation, and other firms set up Denver-area plants employing tens of thousands in the Highest State, which portrayed itself as the fortress of America.

Denver’s growing role as the largest government employement center outside of Washington sparked a post-World War II boom comparable to the initial 1870-1893 bonanza days. This new boom put Denver on an economic roller coaster ride that reached it zenith in the early 1980s before the inevitable, scary downward plunge.

The Oil Boom

Oil and the automobile age reshaped the Mile High city. Denver’s emergence as an oil hub rivaling Houston and Dallas was not accidental. As early as the 1950s, the Denver Chamber of Commerce began sponsoring an "Oil Progress Luncheon." Hundreds of oil and gas men, with their lackeys and lawyers, were treated to a display of Colorado’s climatic and recreational advantages. They were assured of Colorado’s favorable tax laws for oil companies, including minimal land use costs and no severance taxes. The chamber also advertised Colorado’s advantages in petroleum trade journals and in publications such as Petroleum Information, a large Denver clearinghouse and information center for the oil and gas industry.

Major oil companies as well as wildcatters flowed to Denver to open new headquarters or branch offices. The city’s new royalty were oil kings and queens, including Colorado’s first two billionaires—oil men Philip Anschutz and Marvin Davis.

Among the oil magnates were a few givers as well as a horde of takers. Frederick R. Mayer, for instance, sold his contract oil-drilling firm, Exeter, Inc., in 1980—just before the oil crash. With proceeds estimated at $75 million, Mayer moved into the airy pinnacle of the Norwest Tower and dedicated his time and money to making Denver a home for the arts. He became the principal supporter of the Denver Art Museum. Of Frederick and Jan Mayer, DAM Director Lewis Sharp said in 1997: "Before you can ask, they come and ask what the museum needs." Often working anonymously, the Mayers donated to an encyclopedia of needy causes. For instance, they helped the Denver Public Schools set up a successful School of the Arts to show deprived youngsters that the arts can pay off and provide fulfilling lifelong vocations or avocations. Honoring the memory of Anne Evans, the Mayers bought and restored her mountain cabin on Upper Bear Creek. Like Anne Evans, this couple shared their love for art with all Coloradans.

While some oil tycoons sank money into the community, most were preoccupied with extracting black gold. Colorado crude oil production soared from five million barrels in 1945 to 47 million by 1970. During the 1970s, oil and energy companies bankrolled a gusher of downtown high-rises, topped by the 44-story Anaconda Tower and its swanky Petroleum Club (reorganized as the Top of the Rockies Club in 1996).

In the early 1980s, Denver continued to be the nesting place of the construction crane. Philip Anschutz and others erected the 56-story Republic Plaza (1984), which boasted almost as much prime office space as did all of downtown in 1950. Republic Plaza topped the 54-story City Center Tower (1983) and the 52-story United Bank Tower (1984) with its curved pinnacle (the Mayers’ office) that led locals to dub it the cash register building.

The curved top of the cash register building represented the peak of the boom, which soon turned to bust. Indeed, United Banks of Denver, which built the tower, soon disappeared into the economic maelstrom, becoming just another acquisition of Norwest Banks of Minneapolis. Every aspect of life in Denver was affected by the boom-and-bust cycle—from high-rise banks on 17th Street to the wildlife at the Zoo.

The Denver Zoo

Whereas the original mining boom inspired Coloradans to rush to respectability, the second great boom era led them to greatly improve and expand their cultural facilities in a quest to make Denver a World Class City. Typical of Denver’s aspirations was a boom-and-bust campaign to give the city one of America’s best zoos. Denver had opened a zoo in 1896 at City Park after William Jennings Bryan—a black bear cub, not the presidential candidate—became a troublesome pet for Denver Mayor Thomas S. McMurray. The mayor gave "Billy" to Alexander J. Graham, the keeper of City Park, whose house at 2080 York Street is now a designated Denver landmark. After Billy gobbled up his chickens, Graham built the first cages of what became the Denver Zoo.

Besides the frisky bears, the 1896 "zoo" consisted of native wild fowl at Duck Lake. Prairie dogs and antelope also occupied the bleak, 320-acre tract set aside as City Park at the eastern edge of town. A large collection of Chinese pheasants became the zoo’s main attraction until many of them became liberated on the eastern plains, where they have proliferated to the delight of hunters.

Not all zoo animals were appreciated. After the 1905 importation of red squirrels, the furry acrobats reproduced quickly and took over the zoo. These egg-eating rodents next invaded City Park’s Duck Lake and reduced the population of native and imported birds from 83 to 12. The city, egged on by the Audubon Society, planned to shoot the squirrels. Animal lovers and naturalists such as Enos Mills loudly protested these public executions. The city spared the squirrels, banishing the ones that could be caught to the Denver Mountain Parks. Liberated squirrels multiplied all too rapidly throughout the Mile High metropolis.

Denver’s zoo consisted of a sad collection of caged and chained creatures until Robert W. Speer became mayor in 1904. His famous 1906 appeal to civic pride and civic benefactors, his "Give While Your Live" speech, envisioned, among many other improvements, a great zoo: "Our animals in City Park need new homes. Prison bars can be done away with.… Concrete rocks, waterfalls, trees, etc., with a moat in front would make animals even in captivity feel at home."

Speer had the city’s landscape architect, Saco R. DeBoer, draw plans for improving the zoo. The mayor appointed Victor H. Borcherdt, a Denver native, zoo director. Borcherdt designed and built Bear Mountain, the high point in the zoo’s history—and topography. Completed in 1918, this artificial hill 43 feet high and 185 feet long cost $50,000. It was a natural habitat built of tinted and textured concrete cast from formations on Dinosaur Mountain on the north side of Morrison. Barless bear pits are surrounded by hidden moats, native plants and a natural looking stream.

The protruding south tip of Bear Mountain was constructed to resemble a cliff dwelling like those at Mesa Verde National Park. This, Borcherdt reckoned, would make a perfect home for the zoo’s monkeys. The first monkey arriving in 1917 was named Woodrow Wilson, in the presidential tradition of Billy Bryan, the bear who started the zoo. Woodrow soon had plenty of company. But the monkeys kept escaping from their moated cliff dwelling, and it was converted to a sea lion habitat. After being placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, Bear Mountain received a $250,000 restoration that rebuilt, among other things, concrete trees worn to stubs by climbing, scratching and rubbing bruins.

Bear Mountain put Denver in the forefront of American zoos. The St. Louis Zoo crew, one of the world’s best, saw Bear Mountain and promptly hired Borcherdt. After his departure and Mayor Speer’s death, the Denver Zoo went into a long hibernation. The Albuquerque Zoo used New Deal funding to improve its facilities as did Pueblo’s City Park Zoo. Even Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs drew Denverites. Although many New Deal funds and labor programs were available, Denver made only one notable addition to its zoo between 1918 and the 1950s: Monkey Island was installed in 1937 with the help of the WPA. The island, soon ruled by a spider monkey named Cleopatra, became a hit with those wanting to watch their distant ancestors.

The zoo desperately needed attention. Tight-fisted Mayor Stapleton had put the zoo on a starvation diet. Little had been constructed — or even well maintained when James "Quigg" Newton became mayor in 1947. Among many other reforms, Newton hired Saco R. DeBoer to master plan a rebirth for the long neglected zoo. To fund restoration and additions, Newton oversaw creation of a private fund-raising and management support arm, the Denver Zoological Foundation.

Mayor Newton, planner DeBoer and Helen Johnson, chair of the Denver Zoological Foundation, began a major overhaul of the zoo.

They began with a 1950 rehabilitation of Monkey Island, followed by construction of a Children’s Zoo (1951), a Pachyderm Habitat (1959), a Feline House (1964), a Giraffe House (1966), an Animal Hospital (1969), and the Johnson Bird World (1975) on the site of the old Singing Pavilion birdhouse. The new aviary allows visitors to walk through several habitats with free-flying birds in a building covered outside with vines in which native birds nest. The Mountain Sheep Habitat (1979) echoes Bear Mountain, but lacks the exquisite detailing. Northern Shores (1987) houses sea lions and other Arctic wildlife, which included Klondike and Snow, polar bear cubs rejected in 1995 by their mother and raised by the zoo staff.

Wolf Pack Woods (1988) was followed by Tropical Discovery (1993). The zoo’s most ambitious undertaking since Bear Mountain, Tropical Discovery is an $11.5 million exhibit topped by a huge glass pyramid soaring over the ruins of a pre-Columbian temple, invaded by plants and animals. Primate Panorama opened in 1996 on the site of the old Children’s Zoo.

Some 1.6 million visitors annually come to see more than 3,100 animals representing 640 species from all over the globe. Clayton Freiheit, director since 1970, has added hundreds of new species, including many rare and endangered ones, and planted more than 500 trees in the 76-acre zoological park. At last Denver has a world class zoo.

Flush Times

The oil boom and federal spending made Denver flush, and air travel put the isolated, provincial Mile High City within a few hours of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. By making itself the regional air travel hub, as well as the rail center, Denver attracted offices of both the federal government and businesses. Some firms, such as Johns Manville, Anaconda, and American Express, even left New York to establish headquarters in Metro Denver. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, downtown Denver erupted with new skyscrapers. Suburban subdivisions, shopping malls, and office parks flooded the High Plains in all directions. Ranch houses replaced ranches and prairie dog villages in suburban Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Douglas, and Jefferson counties. But another bust lay just around the corner.

More Downs and Ups

The crash came in the mid-1980s as the price of oil slid from $34 a barrel in 1981 to $9 a barrel in 1986. Once again unemployment and office vacancy rates soared. Some 13,000 Denver oil industry workers lost their jobs. In 1985 and 1986, a downtown Denver overbuilt during the energy boom of the 1970s and early 1980s had the highest office vacancy rate in the nation—30 percent. Republic Plaza, the tallest of 10 new office towers sprouting skyward between 1978 and 1983, stood strangely quiet, a 56-story ghost.

In March 1987, downtown office space, which once commanded as much as $40 per square foot, was auctioned off for prices closer to $5 per square foot. A 2,348-square-foot office on the 13th floor of the once-proud Denver Club Building leased for 10 cents a square foot.

During the 1990s, Denver continued its economic roller coaster ride. The 1980s nose dive ended in an abrupt upturn. Newcomers attracted by the relatively cheap housing prices, high vacancy rates, and Colorado’s climate and recreational advantages turned the economy around. By the mid-1990s Denver had emerged as one of the healthiest and fastest growing cities in America. On the suburban outskirts, Douglas County became the fastest growing county in the country.

In a November 1996 article for National Geographic on "Colorado’s Front Range," Michael E. Long found that "a robust economy and swift access to mountains, canyons, trails, trout streams, and ski slopes have lured hordes of new suburbanites to the Front Range, all seeking their slice of the West’s open spaces and blue skies." Newcomers and old-timers alike found that the new boom darkened skies with air pollution and hemmed in Colorado open spaces.

Whereas Denver’s ups and downs once rode the gold, silver, and oil markets, the next bust may be a Los Angeles-style exodus from a community where the quality of life is diminished by air pollution, traffic congestion, limited water supplies, high home prices, and too many people. While suburban frontiers were wrestling with tremendous growth, the core city underwent an even more remarkable renaissance that made Denver the envy of many other urban centers.

SOURCES:

Bluemel, Elinor. Florence Sabin: Colorado Woman of the Century. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1959.

Etter, Carolyn & Don. The Denver Zoo: A Centennial History. Niwot: The Denver Zoological Foundation & Roberts Rinehart Publishing Co., 1996.

Leonard, Stephen J. Trails and Triumphs: A Colorado Portrait of the Great Depression, with FSA Photographs. Niwot: Univ. Press of Colorado, 1993.

Miller, Jeff. Stapleton International Airport: The First Fifty Years. Boulder: Pruett Pub. Co., 1983.

Roundtree, Russ. Western Oil Reporter’s Rocky Mountain Oil History. Denver: Hart Publications, 1984.

Wickens, James Frederick. Colorado in the Great Depression. Denver: University of Denver Ph.D. History Dissertation, 1964.

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