8. URBAN RENAISSANCE

A cardboard sign on the oak door of one Larimer Street saloon read, "Open During Destruction." As neighboring buildings fell, men shook on their barstools. A few went out to watch the devastation. It was 1969 and the Denver Urban Renewal Authority was demolishing a busted downtown, hoping to generate a new boom.

From bar doors, flophouse windows, and old sandstone sidewalks, Denver’s down and out watched bleary-eyed. At first, the lead wrecking ball bounced off defiant buildings. Then sprinkles of dust came down, followed by showers of stone trim. Finally bricks and chunks of granite tumbled from wooden skeletons. Whole walls fell and daylight invaded naked rooms where yesterday’s movers and shakers had puffed their cigars, sipped brandy, and risked fortunes to make Denver the Queen City of the mountains and plains.

Denver grew up fast and recklessly. With each new boom, the town tore down buildings to replace them with bigger ones. Jerome Smiley noted this propensity for trashing the past in his 1901 History of Denver: "Although Denver is but little more than forty years old, nearly all the buildings that constituted the pioneer town have disappeared." In the central business district, Smiley calculated that, "many of the present buildings are the third structures erected on their sites; and in some instances present buildings are of the fourth series."

During the post-World War II boom, Denver experienced a demolition derby like the 19th-century building boom. In addition to private developers razing sites, a public agency, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA), systematically leveled much of the urban core. Block after block of downtown disappeared under a rising sea of black asphalt parking lots.

At first, city leaders accepted urban renewal’s standard nationwide prescription for deteriorating core cities. Only after the demolition of much of old Denver, Auraria, and the South Platte Valley bottoms, did city officials begin to wonder. Was it wise to erase urban neighborhoods and replace them with housing subdivisions and shopping mall replicas of suburbia?

Agony about the losses gave birth to Denver’s historic preservation movement. Although Charleston, Savannah, San Antonio, Santa Fe, New Orleans and a few other cities had pushed preservation for decades, Denverites did not grow alarmed until much of downtown had been erased by DURA.

Auraria: Where Denver Began

Between 1969 and 1974, DURA leveled much of the city’s oldest neighborhood, Auraria. Bounded by the South Platte River, Cherry Creek, and West Colfax Avenue, this pioneer residential area had evolved into a mix of factories, shops, bars, and a heavily Hispanic residential community. DURA demolished much of this "blighted" area for construction of the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC).

This new campus opened in 1977 as an experiment in shared facilities for the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the University of Colorado at Denver. The governor and the legislature liked the AHEC idea of a compact, no-frills campus that would give lower income and working people, especially minorities, greater access to higher education.

Night, day and weekend courses; inexpensive tuition; and the convenient downtown location soon gave Auraria the largest campus enrollment in the state—more than 32,000 students. The centerpiece of the campus was a block of 19th-century houses restored by Historic Denver, Inc. Re-christened Ninth Street Historic Park, this block of homes borders a grassed-in street that retains its old granite curbs and red sandstone sidewalks. Spires and towers of other recycled landmarks—the Tivoli Brewery, St. Elizabeth’s Church, St. Cajetan’s Church, and the Emmanuel Sherith-Israel Chapel also distinguish the campus.

Central Business District

Across Cherry Creek from Auraria, DURA’s Skyline Urban Renewal project condemned as "Skid Row" 30 blocks of the old Central Business District bounded by Speer Boulevard, Curtis Street, 20th Street and the alley between Larimer and Market Streets. Only a few landmarks and the 1400 block of Larimer Street escaped the bulldozer. From 1969 to the mid-1970s, wrecking crews worked days, nights and weekends.

After downtown was leveled, the Skyline site remained forlorn flats of seedy, weedy parking lots for a decade. Slowly, new towers rose from the asphalt sea. The last Skyline development—the Tabor Center—did not open on the site of the demolished Tabor Block until 1984. In defense of DURA, Director J. Robert Cameron pointed out that the completed project gave Denver an impressive new skyline and that developers had to reserve 40 percent of their sites for open space. The new downtown, he asserted, was more spacious and gracious.

The Denver Landmark Preservation Commission

Some found downtown’s disappearance distressing. Old-timers grew confused and alienated with the loss of familiar landmarks and destinations. For longtime residents, it sometimes seemed that a trip downtown was like a trip to a foreign city.

One Denver native, Helen Millett Arndt, decided to act. Educated at Denver’s Kent School for Girls and Columbia University, she became, in 1959, the first woman appointed to the Denver Planning Commission. Arndt feared that "Denver had grown so fast after 1946 that it had lost its sense of quality, its identity." She and other concerned citizens began pushing for the creation of a local landmark commission like those in New York, Boston, and other cities.

"Mayor Tom Currigan was leery," Arndt recalled, "but a remarkable lot of Denver citizens of all ages, from ninety to about ten, stood up and said they didn’t like to see their city torn apart." In 1967, the city created the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission with ordinance power to hold public hearings on proposed landmarks and recommend those eligible for their historic, architectural, or geographic merits to City Council. If the council approved, landmark designation meant that any application for a building permit to alter or demolish would be sent to the DLPC for review. By ordinance, the DLPC can delay incompatible alterations to or demolition of an individual landmark, gaining time to seek a happier solution. In the case of buildings within a historic district, the commission can deny inappropriate exterior alterations or demolition.

During its first 30 years, the commission gained designation for some 300 individual landmarks and 30 historic districts. Such protection of Denver’s special places pleased residents proud of their neighborhoods but fearing high-rises, billboards, and commercial intrusions. Landmark status also protects solar access, mountain views, and open space. The success of Denver’s landmark program has proven the wisdom of Helen Arndt’s observation that "where an older generation will see nothing but obsolete and worn-out buildings, a younger generation may see an opportunity for a new kind of space."

Arndt found formidable allies in such disparate types as historian Louisa Ward Arps, former city councilman Philip Milstein, and Colorado’s poet laureate, Thomas Hornsby Ferril. After joining the landmark commission, Ferril proposed "funeral rites whenever one of Denver’s historic buildings is about to be destroyed." Ferril denounced DURA’s "bureaucratic demolitionists" who "shattered landmark after landmark into shards of oblivion."

Individual landmarks vary from the traditional Governor’s Mansion to the radically modern Boettcher Conservatory at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Designation revived the otherwise doomed Elitch, Mayan, and Paramount Theaters and Denver’s two grand old hotels—the Brown Palace and the Oxford. It has kept many historic church spires pointing heavenward even in downtown’s skyscraper canyons.

Historic districts range from the commercial block of Larimer Square to much of Denver’s parkway network, from linear City Ditch to Potter Highlands, a Northwest Denver neighborhood of 667 buildings. This tree-shaded haven of red flagstone walks has large Queen Anne and Italianate homes bristling with trim as well as more sedate classic cottages, masonry terraces, and four-squares. The largest historic district, East 7th Avenue Parkway, stretches from Logan Street to Colorado Boulevard, roughly between East 6th and 8th Avenues. Little-known residential neighborhoods protected by historic districts include Witter Cofield in Northwest Denver, Montclair in East Denver, and Lafayette Street and East Park Place in north central Denver. Historic district designation became a successful way to fight blight in once-deteriorating neighborhoods such as Auraria, Lower Downtown, Five Points, Capitol Hill, and Highlands.

Historic Denver, Inc.

Whenever citizens rallied to save historic buildings and neighborhoods, they could count on staunch support and technical assistance from Historic Denver, Inc (HDI). Like the landmark commission, this private preservation group was formed to protect Denver’s disappearing architectural heritage. HDI incorporated on December 11, 1970, to rescue the Molly Brown House from demolition. By 1971, HDI had 1,500 members and 200 volunteers who converted Molly’s place at 1340 Pennsylvania Street to a popular house museum.

The founding mothers and fathers of Historic Denver, Inc., included Helen Arndt, Jean Catherwood, Larimer Square developer Dana Crawford, Denver Post columnist Joanne L. Ditmer, attorney Don Etter, architect Alan Fisher, Don Holland, Christine Kosewick, Colorado first lady Anne Love, Bob Sheets, and architect Edward D. White, Jr. They all served on the first Historic Denver board chaired by Harold L. "Hal" Haney, with E. James "Jim" Judd as president, Barbara Norgren as secretary, and Kenneth D. Watson as executive director. Haney, then the Colorado State Publicity Director, suggested that the group call itself the Molly Brown House Foundation. "Everyone thought this was fine," Haney recalled later, "until Dana Crawford suggested that we not limit ourself to one house and proposed the name Historic Denver."

To fund activities, HDI in 1971 began staging ice cream socials at the Molly Brown House, its annual "Night In Old Denver" street fair, and in 1974 began annual house tours and summertime cemetery tours with dining afterwards amid the tombstones.

Fostering awareness of the Mile High City’s rich past, HDI in 1973 kicked off a publications program with Richard R. Brettell’s Historic Denver: The Architects and the Architecture, 1858-1893. Both the hardback first edition and soft cover reprint (1979) quickly sold out, as readers devoured the first serious look at the city’s architectural history. Inspired in part by Brettell’s work, HDI joined with the Junior League and the Denver Planning Office to conduct the city’s first architectural survey. Volunteers scoured all 73 Denver neighborhoods block by block, discovering many treasures among some 25,000 pre-1910 structures recorded in the Historic Building Inventory: City & County of Denver (1974, revised, 1981).

Christine Whitacre, an early editor of HDI’s monthly newspaper, Historic Denver News, also became the compiler of HDI’s Restoration Resource Guide (1981) and author of Molly Brown: Denver’s Unsinkable Lady (1984). Barbara Norgren and Tom Noel collaborated on Denver: The City Beautiful and Its Architects, 1893-1941 (1987). This lavishly illustrated, 287-page work, including biographical sketches of 67 major Denver architects, sold out and was reprinted in 1993.

HDI celebrated Colorado’s centennial and the U.S. bicentennial in 1976 by turning over Historic 9^th Street Park, resplendent after a million-dollar restoration, to the Auraria Higher Education Center. Some of the same higher education bureaucrats who opposed saving "dinky little old houses" promptly began squabbling for space in the restored Victorians. These charming houses were reincarnated for about $20 per square foot, while the bland new campus buildings cost around $30 per square foot.

After finishing 9th Street, HDI created the Historic Paramount Foundation in 1981 and began a $1.5 million campaign to buy and restore the endangered Paramount Theater, sole survivor of downtown’s movie palaces. When the house of Dr. Justina Ford, a pioneer black physician, faced demolition in 1983, HDI moved it to 3901 California Street for restoration as the Black American West Museum.

Museum founder Paul Stewart started out as a barber who collected tales from his customers. "When I was cutting hair and hearing a good story I would reach back and turn on a tape recorder," Stewart recalls. "Folks dropped in with stories, artifacts, photos. I put up displays in the barber shop as conversation pieces. I got so much stuff that I ran out of room."

By the 1970s, Stewart gave up barbering to devote more time to his museum. His interviews, artifacts, books, sheet music, and memorabilia soon outgrew the barber shop storefront and two other locations before Historic Denver helped him relocate in the Justina Ford House. There, Colorado’s black heritage is preserved and showcased in a house that itself is a reminder of the physician who delivered and cared for thousands of babies in the core city. Dr. Ford lived in the house until her death in 1952. Late in life, after being admitted to the Denver General Hospital staff and receiving a Human Relations Award in 1951, she said: "I fought like a tiger against the barriers of race and sex."

The oldest structure in Denver, the Four Mile House (1859) at 715 South Forest Street, became the next project of HDI, which helped resore and interpret the road house on Cherry Creek as a living history farm, before turning it over to the City of Denver Parks and Recreation Department.

In 1987, HDI initiated a program, "Preservation in the Schools." Youngsters also practiced preservation by helping to prepare landmark nominations for schools of outstanding historic and architectural merit. The younger generation proved adept at persuading landmark commissioners and city council persons to award their schools the brass landmark plaques. At memorable Monday night council meetings, alumni council persons shared memories, songs, and affection for schools worthy of restoration.

HDI moved into Union Station in 1983 for a campaign to designate Lower Downtown as a historic district before demolitions reduced it to surface parking for the Central Business District. HDI also started a revolving preservation fund for what The Denver Post columnist Dick Kreck nicknamed LoDo. Designation finally came in 1988 for the area between Larimer and Wynkoop Streets from Cherry Creek to 20th Street.

Historic district designation triggered LoDo’s rebirth as a popular area for bars, art galleries, and night clubs. LoDo’s renaissance attracted Coors Field, million-dollar lofts, a half-dozen brew pubs, and youthful night owls from throughout the metropolis. By the 1990s, the poorest and most disreputable part of 1970s Denver had become one of the hottest real estate and entertainment districts in the Rockies.

Historic Denverites staged a wake in 1989 for a lost landmark, the Central Bank. That neoclassical gem, the only known commercial work of renowned Denver Beaux Arts architect Jacques Benedict, was replaced by a parking lot despite widespread protest and the efforts of Mayor Federico Peņa. The mayor was a staunch preservationist whose intervention had saved the Mayan Theater at 110 Broadway, one of two remaining Pre-Columbian Deco movie houses in the United States.

Colorado poet laureate, HDI member, and landmark commissioner Thomas Hornsby Ferril died in 1989 in the Five Points house where he had lived since 1900. His daughter, Anne Ferril Folsom, donated the landmarked dwelling at 2123 Downing Street to Historic Denver, Inc. HDI stabilized the house and transferred it in 1996 to the Colorado Center for the Book. With seminars, poetry readings, and tours, the center perpetuates the work of the poet-preservationist and lends space and ears to up-and-coming poets.

The Masons abandoned their Scottish Rite Consistory and El Jebel Shrine Temple at 18th and Sherman Streets in 1994, leaving the exotic Moorish temple prey to nearby office tower occupants hungry for parking facilities. HDI orchestrated landmark designation and helped find a new owner in The Eulipions, a theater group who had outgrown their cramped Five Points Hall.

In 1996, downtown Cleveland, Ohio, celebrated the opening of its Rock and Roll Museum, a typically daring design from one of the world’s best known living architects, Ieoh M. Pei. That same summer, Denver allowed the Adams Mark Hotel to demolish Pei’s famed hyperbolic paraboloid on the 16th Street Mall, despite bitter and prolonged public protest led by HDI.

To promote greater public awareness and appreciation of Denver’s architectural heritage, HDI has launched a series of neighborhood guidebooks. University of Colorado at Denver architectural history professor Diane Wilk, who first proposed this illustrated pocket guide book series, wrote A Guide to Denver’s Architectural Styles and Terms (1996) and The Wyman Historic District (1996). Jack A. Murphy, Curator of Geology at the Denver Museum of Natural History, authored Geology Tour of Denver’s Buildings and Monuments (1996) and Geological Tour of Capitol Hill (1998). Nancy Widmann prepared The East Seventh Avenue Historic District (1998). Leigh Fletcher Grinstead, director of the Molly Brown House, wrote Molly Brown’s Capitol Hill Walking Tour (1996). LoDo loft dweller Barbara Gibson, who spearheaded installation of historic markers in LoDo, produced The Lower Downtown Historic District (1996) guide.

Kathleen Brooker, HDI president since 1992, reports that: "HDI is looking forward to the millennium, confident that we have saved much of the best. HDI receives no government funding. We are a private organization dependent on our members’ generosity, public contributions, grants, and income from the Molly Brown House Museum, tours, book sales, and special events. Historic Denver, Inc., is a citizen organization whose purpose is to preserve Denver’s significant historic fabric, its distinctive architecture, and its cultural landscapes as tangible reflections of our heritage and the foundation of our quality of life. We and our 2,000 members hope to salvage and use the past to give Denver a brighter future."

Curtis Park: The Rebirth of Denver’s First Suburb

HDI turned to one of the city’s oldest and most endangered neighborhoods, Curtis Park. HDI established a revolving loan fund for restoring homes, conducted house tours, and gave volunteer time and money to aid residents restoring antique houses. HDI relocated three doomed cottages to vacant lots in the 2800 block of Glenarm Place, and reinstalled flagstone sidewalks and tree lawns.

Sandra Dallas Atchison, an HDI officer and activist, first called attention to Curtis Park in one of her books, Cherry Creek Gothic (1970): "Few people are aware that within walking distance of downtown Denver lies a Victorian neighborhood almost completely intact...in a semi-slum trance waiting to be torn down or perhaps discovered by someone with money and the imagination to clean it up and turn it into one of the finest Victorian restorations in the country."

After reading this, some people took a closer look at the so-called "ghetto" and "slum" between Larimer and Welton, 23rd and Downing streets. Among them was Prof. William A. "Bill" West, the bachelor who fathered the Curtis Park renaissance and taught Victorian literature at CU-Denver. His interest in all things Victorian led him to Curtis Park and to write a book, Curtis Park (1980), with photography by Don Etter. He championed the Curtis Park Historic District for successful National Register and Denver landmark designations.

West bought his first Curtis Park house in 1976 for $15,000 and later purchased and restored the Italianate cottage at 2826 Curtis Street and the Queen Anne at 2418 Stout Street. These ornate red-brick houses with red sandstone trim are picturesque reminders of the time when Curtis Park attracted such notable residents as Mayor Wolfe Londoner and department store czar John Jay Joslin.

Curtis Park is the pioneer suburb in a city that has become a huge conglutination of suburbs. Suburbanization did not begin in the 20th century with the automobile, but with the city’s first light rail line in 1871. That horse-drawn contraption ran up Larimer Street, then along 16th Street, and out Stout Street to the elegant streetcar suburb named for its developer, Samuel Curtis. Curtis donated land at 30th and Curtis in 1868 for Denver’s first city park.

By the 1880s, Denver’s growing suburban tide swept beyond Curtis Park to more fashionable Capitol Hill and, still later, to the Denver Country Club. Westerners wanting more elbow room keep moving farther away from the core city and county. By the 1990s homebuilders were pushing beyond Arapahoe, Adams, Boulder, and Jefferson counties into an outer ring of suburban counties— Park, Clear Creek, Larimer, Weld, Douglas, and Elbert, some of the fastest-growing counties in the country.

Curtis Park is a key not only to Denver’s growth pattern, but to its ethnic history. At first, the neighborhood filled with Germans, the city’s single largest foreign-born group before World War I. Not until the early 20^th century did Curtis Park and adjacent Five Points become a haven for Blacks, Hispanics, and Japanese.

Denver’s grand residential suburb of the 1870s became one of its poorest urban neighborhoods. Most of the newcomers could not afford to tear down the old and build anew. They retained the Italianate and Queen Anne houses built in the 1870s and 1880s. During the 1960s, as Blacks began moving into Park Hill, many Hispanics moved into Curtis Park. During the 1970s, people interested in inexpensive, architecturally exquisite antique homes re-discovered Curtis Park. Today it is about one-half Hispanic, one-fourth Black, and one-fourth white.

"This neighborhood is rich in the diversity of its residents and its architecture," Bill West said while tweaking his exuberant Victorian moustache. "As a place where renters have a chance at becoming first-time home owners, Curtis Park, as in the 1870s, is once again Denver’s urban frontier."

Five Points and Denver’s African-American Community

Denver’s African American Community has a proud history dating back to pioneer miners, cowboys and railroaders. Blacks have been blessed with able leaders, ranging from Barney Ford in the pioneer era to Wellington Webb, who became Denver’s first black mayor in 1992. Blacks have remained a small minority, comprising about five percent of the 1990 metro population.

Since the early 1900s, the black community has centered on Five Points, so-named for the intersection of 26th Avenue, 27th Street, and Welton Street. During the 1930s, Depression a leader emerged to help Five Points, whose residents were often the last people to be hired and the first to be fired. Benjamin Franklin Hooper, "The Unofficial Mayor of Five Points," gave the black community a helping hand through many of the 20^th century’s ups and downs.

For decades, Hooper’s club at 2625-33 Welton Street was a hot spot for jazz, barbecue, craps, and dancing. The two-story, red brick complex labeled Deluxe Recreation Parlor and Ex- Servicemen’s Club was no longer deluxe by the 1970s. The old oak backbar held trophies and plaques honoring Benjamin Franklin Hooper as the "Unofficial Mayor of Five Points."

Two homemade cardboard signs on the backbar read "No Profanity" and "No Profanity Please." Although the afternoon crowd was spirited, it was not profane. Of course, Hooper’s place was primarily nocturnal. Benny, a short, slight, plainly dressed man moved fast as a cat, attending to customers.

Hooper was born at 2226 Welton Street on May 2, 1893, one of seven children of a janitor. He quit Ebert School after the sixth grade, bellhopped at the old St. James Hotel downtown, and served in World War I. Army pay seemed like a fortune to Benny, who saved it for the day he returned to Denver.

"Those days," Benny said in 1973, "colored people couldn’t stay in the downtown hotels, so I used my army money to open the Ex-Serviceman’s Club for colored soldiers. I started out in a little place down on 23rd and Arapahoe. But Mayor Stapleton came by, put his arm around my shoulder, and asked me ‘Benny, why don’t you get a new location?’"

In a white town, finding a new location for a black club was not easy. Whites in Denver, as in other cities, felt threatened by a growing black population, and took the usual step of using real estate covenants to restrict "colored" people to certain neighborhoods. Mayor Stapleton steered Hooper to 2625 Welton Street in the heart of Five Points. The mayor protected Benny in his new location and Benny became a devout Democrat: "I even started working on other negroes who said they would never leave the party of Abraham Lincoln. But then Mayor Stapleton and President and Mrs. Roosevelt started helping our people."

Hooper, the first black drafted in Denver for World War I, wanted colored soldiers to be part of Denver’s Veterans Day Parade. As blacks were not allowed to march with weapons, Benny had wooden guns carved and painted to look like real ones. "So they let us march. We had all our shoes spit-polished, every man looked great. We got downtown and they told us we had to go last, even though we were the best-dressed unit!"

During the relatively flush 1920s, Benny added a bar, billiard room and a basement jazz joint to his Ex-Servicemen’s Club. Veteran Rocky Mountain News reporter Alberta Pike found it "a swell place" where "business is good. The noisy black-and-tan crowd is the sporting, fun-loving, easy-going element...Benny at the front counter gives you a shrewd once-over from enormous soft brown eyes.... At Benny’s you are likely to find almost the entire personnel of the White Elephant ball club, the team of colored boys that pretty regularly cleans up the other clubs in the City League."

During the 1930s, Benny opened the Casino Dance Hall next door to the Ex-Serviceman’s Club. The Casino evolved into a two-story hall with balcony seating for 1,000, a 40-foot-long bar, and a huge hardwood dance floor. This largest and most luxurious of all the Five Points jazz clubs, was dressed up for Christmas, Easter and other holidays. Benny donated the hall to churches, charities, and civic groups, including the NAACP, Zion Baptist Church, the YMCA, and the YWCA.

During the good years, the Casino swung to the music of Brook Benton, James Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, George Morrison, Muddy Waters, and other musical legends. During the grim years, Hooper cooked up a scheme to get people through starving times. "I ran bread lines through the pool hall. And The Denver Post dropped off those jack rabbits that gun clubs and sportsman would shoot in the Post’s annual rabbit hunts. We gave those critters away so the poor could make rabbit stew."

When Benny was born in 1893, the town had a black community of less than 4,000. By the time he died in 1984, the population was more than 40,000. Seeing Denver’s black citizenry grow, prosper and become better integrated was bittersweet for him. Making it in Denver often meant leaving Five Points. "Now people have moved all the way out to the airport," Benny said shaking his head in the 1970s. "But once, colored town was just Five Points."

The neighboring Curtis Park restoration has led some to begin fixing up "the Points." In the spring of 1997, Benny’s old Casino, closed since his death 13 years earlier, reopened as the Casino Cabaret. After a $500,000 updating the Casino once again looks sleek and fabulous and inviting. Such Welton Street face-lifts and the introduction of Denver’s first light rail line reopened Five Points as a commercial strip noted for night clubs, restaurants, and amusements.

Riding Back to the Future

Two transportation developments have helped revive Five Points, Auraria and the core city by strengthening their connections to the rest of the Mile High metropolis. Both were initiated by the Regional Transportation District (RTD), which in 1974 replaced the old Denver Tramway Company as metro Denver’s public transit agency.

RTD’s 16th Street Mall shuttle, which began operating on October 7, 1982, made downtown more accessible. This mile-long bus and pedestrian corridor links LoDo with Civic Center via the retail and residential loft-lined 16th Street strip. The 16th Street Mall is also a central stop on RTD’s Light Rail service. Inaugurated in 1994, the light rail line runs from a large Park-and-Ride station at I-25 and Broadway to the Auraria Campus to another Park-and Ride-Station in Five Points. A second line is expected to open to Littleton and suburban Arapahoe County by 2000. Other branches are planned for Denver International Airport and the Denver Tech Center. Light rail should help clear up both traffic and air pollution. Denver does not have to go the way of Los Angeles, tied up in a Gordian knot of freeways that are no longer free.

Denverites may well ride out of the 20th century in rail cars like those that carried their great grandparents into it. And those riding the rails into Denver’s core city will find that the urban renaissance has preserved for the 21st century some of Denver’s rich 19th-century heritage.

SOURCES:

Bakke, Diane & Jackie Davis. Places Around the Bases: A Historic Tour of the Coors Field Neighborhood. Englewood: Westcliffe Publishers,Inc., 1995.

Gibson, Barbara. The Lower Downtown Historic District. Denver: Historic Denver, Inc. & The Denver Museum of Natural History, 1995.

Etter, Don D. Auraria: Where Denver Began. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1972.

Goldstein, Marcia Tremmel. Breaking Down Barriers: Black and White Women’s Visions of Integration: The Young Women’s Christian Association in Denver and the Phyllis Wheatley Branch, 1915-1964. Denver: University of Colorado at Denver History M. A. Thesis, 1995.

Ferril, T. H. Thomas Hornsby Ferril and the American West ed. by Robert C. Baron, Stephen J. Leonard & Thomas J. Noel. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing Company, 1996.

Noel, Thomas J. Denver’s Landmarks & Historic Districts: A Pictorial Guide. Foreword by Mayor Wellington Webb. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1996.

Noel, Thomas J. Denver’s Larimer Street: Main Street, Skid Row, and Urban Renaissance. Denver: Historic Denver, Inc., 1981, 1983.

Schuster, Christoph. "Economic, Social and Cultural Neighborhood Change in Denver’s Curtis Park Neighborhood from 1975 to 1996." Denver: University of Colorado at Denver M. A. Thesis, 1997.

West, William D. Curtis Park: A Denver Neighborhood. Photos by Don D. Etter. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980.

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