Capitol Hill District of Denver, circa 1898. A careful observer of this photograph might be tempted to think this is the Capitol building, but it isn't. It faces the wrong direction and must have been a courthouse or a city building. Indeed, I suspect this photograph was taken from the capitol looking west.
This caused me to recall earlier visits to Denver, and the up and down nature of its downtown.
The edge of the Capitol Hill District of Denver in 2018. This view doesn't face the same way as the 1898 photo above.
Personal recollection figures on this blog from time to time, even though its main focus is on something else. In the recollection context, it it occurs to me now that I have a personal connection with Denver that stretches back at least forty years, maybe a bit longer. Longer than that of most of the people, I'd guess, who live there. If I add a familial familiarity to it, which of course is less reliable, it would stretch back beyond the late 1920s.
Indeed, while I don't say much about it here, I have a familial connection with Colorado that goes back to the 1860s, much longer than many of the European American folks there. A great grandfather on my father's side moved from Ohio to Leadville to be a miner in the second half of the 19th Century, although he rapidly changed his occupation to shopkeeper in that high altitude town.* So our family's association with Colorado is, well, nearly as old as the state of Colorado.
In fact, my father was born in Colorado, something I rarely mention. All of his siblings except for his youngest brother, as well has my father, were born in Denver. His parents moved to Scotsbluff Nebraska when he was seven, and usually if asked my father would just say he was from Scotsbluff, even though he left Scotsbluff for Casper when he was in his early to mid teens.** That means his association with Denver was nearly as strong as it was with Scotsbluff, although I don't know if the first few years of your life really count that way as you really don't recall much about them personally.
Be that as it may my father didn't talk that much about his childhood in Denver. In fact, some of the more interesting details of that period in my father's family's history I know from other family members. For instance, I know that my father started school when he was four years old as the parish priest felt he was ready for it, and he attended a Catholic grade school in Denver. When they moved to Scotsbluff he was enrolled in the public school there, so he didn't grow up going to Catholic schools.*** His younger brother had the opposite experience, FWIW, attending the Catholic grade school here when the family moved from Scotsbluff, where he'd been born.
Be that as it may, he identified more with Nebraska and when Denver was discussed, when I was a kid, it often entailed relatives who continued living there after our family had left, some of whom still did when I was growing up. The Bergers in particular were their aunt and uncle who lived there all the way into my high school years, outliving my grandparents by decades. All of my father's family were extremely fond of them, although I can recall meeting them only once, when they came up here for some reason.
That reflects, I guess, my father's view of Denver, or maybe of travel. My father didn't like travelling at all and he never went to Denver without a reason. That reason came when I was in grade school, probably around 5th or 6th grade, which is coincident with my first trip to Denver.
When I was about that age. . . I'm no longer precisely sure of when it was, I developed asthma. It arrived pretty suddenly. At that time, there were no allergist in our area at all, and the only recourse was to go to Denver, which we did.
To go to Denver to be tested for medical reasons isn't a good introduction to the town, but at the same time I recall looking forward to it for childish reasons. I knew, of course, that it was a big city. I also knew that a friend of mine had models that his father, who was a cartographer, brought home when he went to Denver for work.
Going to Denver for work is interesting in and of itself and I've been to Denver hundreds of times for work. But at the time, that seemed very exotic and strange, maybe even a little sad, in and of itself. But that did introduce me to the concept that Denver had a store that sold really neat models. While we were there, we went there.
That store was across the street from the Denver Dry Goods store, a huge department store whose building still exists, just off of 16th Street, in downtown Denver, but which is now an apartment building. For some reason, when my father spoke to his siblings about Denver, the Denver Dry Goods stores was frequently mentioned. It must have been a place they held in regard from the time in which they lived there.
The model store that was across the street from Denver Dry Goods also sold Avalon Hill games, the first time I'd ever seen them. We didn't buy one, I know, as I didn't know what they really were, and of course back in those days you couldn't really look such things up anywhere. A few years later, just a short view, I'd stumble into those games, which I really like even though there's nobody to play them with anymore. I guess that first trip was my first introduction to them, in a way.
I can also recall that we stayed, on that occasion, in a hotel that was just off of downtown Denver. The building is still there and I still recognize it when I drive past it. Just down from it was a Big Boy restaurant that we didn't eat in, but which for a long time thereafter was a landmark that I'd recognize. We had to go to National Jewish, the great Denver hospital that focuses on respiratory diseases. The net result was the disturbing finding that I was allergic to a lot of animals, and some plants. I'll not go into that other than to note, as is common with asthma, it abated in later years, then came back to some degree, and has abated again, although not before I had to go through three separate rounds of shots over three different periods of time; the first in the 1970s of which we're speaking, the second in the 1990s after I graduated from law school, and the third just recently as a prophylactic measure as we got a dog.****
Anyhow, that Denver of the 1970s was, by my recollection, much like Salt Lake City is now. It was a big city, but it was a big business like city. It didn't have the carnival atmosphere that it has now. It was glass and steel with shops and the like that was unlike anything in Wyoming, but it was also cold and sterile and meant business.
The business that it meant was the oil business at that time, and the 1970s was the era of rampant oil activity in the region. I didn't know it then, but I'd come to know that Denver had become a major oil hub at least as early as the 1950s.
My mother enters the picture there, actually as in 1957 or so she'd come down to Colorado from Alberta as my aunt Marguerite was getting married. The family had gone into hard times during the Great Depression and they never really emerged from it. Starting at age 16 my mother had gone to work and that work took her to Alberta, where she at first worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and then worked as an oil and gas secretary. In 57 or so, however, my aunt had become engaged to a Quebecois engineer who had moved to Colorado to study. The family circumstances being strained, the decision, nearly an order, was to send one member of the family to Colorado for the wedding and that person was my mother. In order to do this, she had to quit her job in Alberta.
By her recollection, her employer and co workers in Alberta begged her not to go, and warned her that if she stayed to work in the U.S. which was easy to do, she'd be "worked to death". Indeed, American oil companies that I've worked with make the reverse complaint about their Canadian colleges, claiming that they basically won't work. That does give testimony to the "American Work Ethic", and whatever it entails, for good or ill. At any rate, she didn't heed their warnings and quit her job figuring that after the Colorado wedding she could find work in Denver, which was booming due to the oil business.
As it happened, and for whatever reason, the industry in Denver wasn't hiring, but prospective employers uniformly pointed her north towards our city, which is where she ended up and where she found employment, as an oil and gas secretary, right away. All that leads into another story which I'll forgo now, and maybe just forgo. But what it shows, in part, is that Denver was an oil town.
It was still an oil town in the 1970s. And in fact at that time oil companies that were headquartered in Casper Wyoming were pulling out in favor of Denver. Casper had been a major regional oil hub and the newspaper, as late as the 1970s, declared it to be "the Oil Capital of the Rockies". It was losing its oil office workers by the late 1970s. Then the crash of the 1980s came.
When that came it hit Casper hard, and it was devastating to Denver.
It was that Denver that I next became familiar with.
As a University of Wyoming student in the mid 1980s, I started visiting Denver for the first time in over half a decade. A good friend of mine was highly familiar with Denver and knew his way around. While going to Denver myself for any reason wouldn't have occurred to me, it was second nature to him, and our group of outdoorsy friends was ironically introduced to urban Denver, as it had very good outdoors stores. We used to go down to Denver from time to time to hit the sporting goods stores and the outdoors stores, such as REI (then in a different location) or Eastern Mountain Sports, which was downtown.
In that same time frame, I also would go down from Laramie to Denver on the occasional day trip with a girlfriend of the time. As she was outdoorsy (we were all geology students) we'd go to the same sort of places, but she also had a strong interest in music which I did (and do) as well. So the list of places we'd go to was expanded to include music stores, including ones that sold records. One of those places still exists,
Wax Trax, which has changed hardly at all. A really neat one, however in a residential neighborhood off of downtown I couldn't possibly find today, assuming it exists.
Wax Trax in Denver, which has weathered the ages.
At some point in this time frame I also discovered the Tattered Cover bookstore, but I"m not sure who introduced it to me. I suspect it was the girl I was dating, but I'm not sure. Oddly enough my father knew of the store at that time, even though it was founded in 1971, well after he had left the city as a boy, so I have no idea how he was aware of it.
The Denver of that era seemed busy to us, but its downtown had taken a pounding. Many buildings were closed at first, but by the mid 80s a new downtown was developing after 16th Street was closed to vehicle traffic. A new retail district began to pop up. Still, lower downtown Denver was a wreck dominated by the massive Gates Rubber Company building, which was completely abandoned. Nobody dared walk in that era unadvisedly. Five Points, the area just off downtown, was legendary for being rough and had a reputation for that which dates back into the 1930s. While we tried to avoid it, occasionally you'd hit its edges coming and out of town past a traffic island park that was always covered with drunk people at any hour of the day. Off of downtown, as you approached the Capital Hill District, you encountered neighborhoods that were highly decayed.
The large episcopal cathedral dominated the area near Wax Trax and was in such rough shape, with boarded up windows, that I assumed when first encountering it that it had been abandoned.
Indeed, at that time, if you went to 16th Street you didn't stray much off of it. Only a block away the town had a much different character. Down by the Gates building it was a hobo jungle and completely dissolute. Nobody in their right mind went there at all.
After 1986 I didn't go to Denver again for years. We all graduated from UW and went off to work or unemployment. I went on to the latter, as did most of the geology students I knew at the time. The last time I was in Denver of that era was in 1986 itself, when I went down once by myself. I wasn't in Denver again until the spring of 1990, when I was a law student. On that single occasion I went down with a friend and was really left with no particularly noteworthy memories of the trip except for seeing a bagpipe player on the street who was playing Garryowen. More than anything else the trip on that time left me with that sad feeling of old memories not really being capable of recapture. The fun part of going to the town with my undergraduate geology friends was really gone, and the fact that I was there with a law school friend didn't make up for it. Had I thought on it more, that trip, symbolizing an evolution of various sorts, would have probably made me pretty blue about the experience.
It was after I started practing law that I started going to Denver a lot. And it was after the construction of Coors Field that the town began to change massively.
You wouldn't think that the construction of a baseball field would change a city, but Coors Field did.
Coors Field was opened in 1995 and was constructed where Gates Rubber had been. The classic baseball stadium brought new life to lower downtown Denver and absolutely everything about it began to change thereafter. The nearly wrecked area of lower downtown started to rapidly evolve into a hip, cool and youthful area. It's still evolving in that direction twenty five years later, the change being both complete and ongoing. By the 2000s it was highly evident, and the areas around 16th Street that had been scary were swept up in it.
That's what brings me to La Boheme.
La Boheme, Denver Colorado.
This is a photograph of the mural on the side of La Boheme in Denver, which euphemistically calls itself a "gentleman's cabaret". By that it means, no doubt, something on the order of "strip club".
La Boheme, which means the female Bohemian in French, is located in what was once a pretty rough downtown Denver neighborhood which went through gentrification after Coors Field was constructed. The transformation in this area was remarkable and its still ongoing, Colorado's legalization of marijuana had reintroduced a feeling of decay into downtown once again. At any rate, in spite of many old buildings being bought and converted into new upscale uses, and in spite of being located across the street from the downtown Embassy Suites, a nice Denver business hotel, La Boheme keeps on keeping on.
I can't recall this mural being there until just recently, so it's presumably a new addition. Perhaps keeping in mind where it is, it's not shockingly skanky and is actually fairly well done. It's placement resulted in a minor debate with my travel companions on whether it depicts Marilyn Monroe, Jenny McCarthy, or none of the above. The first two choices would in some ways emphasize the tragic nature of the establishments purpose. Anyhow, it's fairly well done except that the figures left hand, which isn't really visible in this photo, is quite meaty, making for an odd appearance.
I couldn't recall if it was La Boheme or not, and now in recollection, I realize it it wasn't. But in the 2000s I had an occasion to go to Denver for work and in so doing I parked downtown to walk to 16th Street. Construction was ongoing just as it is now, as old dilapidated buildings yielded to new construction. At any rate, I was walking towards downtown on a path that took me past a bar that was a strip joint. This was probably around 11:00 a.m. or so. As I did that, a girl came out of the club who was obviously employed as one of the "dancers".
She wasn't good looking, in the way that movies like to imagine girls so employed to look. Indeed, she was skinny and extremely pale in the way that people who never see the light of day are pale. Her occupation was betrayed by her dress, which was only suitable for one of two professions, both of which are a species of prostitution. She barreled out of the door on her way to somewhere else, probably after having picked up her wages for selling her appearance the night prior, and perhaps having just finished up from whatever wreck of an evening it had been.
The old dilapidated Denver boldly defiant in the face of the new, cool Denver.
Well wherever that place was, it's gone now, I'm sure. But La Boheme, the last of the really old seedy Denver, keeps on keeping on, out of place, and out of time.
Which doesn't mean that Denver has become a mythical bright shining city on a hill.
Indeed, quite contrary to that, Denver gives really good evidence of the human inclination to destroy everything through our worst instincts. Denver is why we can't have nice things.
Denver's downtown was changing in character by the late 1990s in any event, and while it was getting increasingly vibrant, it was also getting increasingly grungy. And then marijuana came.
As Denver's fortunes boomed based on a new, and largely consumer basis in a new economy, it drew in tens of thousands of people from elsewhere in the country, many from California. "Californication" became a slam on the process but Colorado simply became overwhelmed, transforming the state. It's a lesson for those who always have a growth is good mindset, as much of the old Colorado was killed in the process. And as part of that process, a new California outlook came to the state's politics, which ironically went from the pro grown political right to the progressive liberal left. With that came the push to legalize marijuana.
And legalize it Colorado did.
Marijuana has ruined Denver.
That statement might be too harsh, of course, but only a little. With the legalization of marijuana all the predicted social problems that would never come about, it's backers claimed, have. Law enforcement problems of all sorts have dramatically increased, for example. And the number of street people living on Denver's streets, which in recent years have generally been relatively warm in the winter, are now epic.
Street people were always a feature of downtown Denver, but the numbers and character have really changed. In the 1980s these sad souls were concentrated in lower downtown and Five Points Now they're just everywhere in the downtown area. And they aren't the same people. In the 80s, they were sad victims of poverty and alcohol. Now they tend to be the young who surrendered their lives to dope.
The social lesson there, and the legal one, is self evident, but being ignored. Money talks and people are making money off of the drug, the human toll doesn't matter. Denver is a good argument for making marijuana illegal, not the opposite.
And with the decline, the rise in self indulgent artificial trend of the moment has captured Denver as well. Denver's not only become wealthier, but an element of artificialness has crept in as well, the way that suddenly wealthy societies built on a false and temporary wealth are. Think the Roaring Twenties.
Will it stay that way? Hard to say. But watching Denver over a long period of time, and having noted its rise and fall of fortunes, it's not safe to say. The one thing that can be said is that its a new Denver, and its not necessarily a better one.
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*This isn't a thread on Leadville. I'll have to put one up someday. But I will note here is that my grandfather and grandmother's location in Leadville put them in that town in its heyday, and in that period of time during which all of its famous residents, such as the Browns and the Tabors, lived there. There was a apparently a community of relocated Leadville residents, which would have included the Browns, who lived in Denver after Leadville declined and who regularly met.
**He'd already been to one year of high school, maybe two, when he moved to Casper. I'd thought for a long time that the entire family moved to Casper at that time but in fact my grandfather must have gone back and forth from Scottsbluff to Casper for some time, as it seems that he was already operating the meatpacking plant he purchased in Casper in 1940 or so. Chances are that economically there was a period when they weren't able to get a second house and whatnot so there may have been a year or two when he was commuting back and forth very frequently.
***My mother, in contrast went to all Catholic schools. Quebec didn't have public schools at the time and all schooling was private.
****A typical condition of those with asthma is not to talk to people about it and most asthmatics, myself included, never speak of the condition to outsiders. That's because its impossible to describe and involves some very odd experiences when a person is actively afflicted, including the knowledge that you are repeatedly brought to the edge of death and then back out. Most young asthmatics, I suspect, spend the rest of their lives with the knowledge that life is very fragile and never have the illusion of long life or the expectation of it that other people have. Simply having had the condition is its own Momento Mori. I' only note that all here as childhood asthma creates a profound psychological impact on the person who endures it even if you outgrow it, which a large number of people afflicted with it do.
I've outgrown it and mostly had by the time I had graduated from high school. Indeed when I enlisted in the National Guard I stated that I hadn't been afflicted since age 13, even if I was, or might have been, fudging on that age. Even at that, however, it came back to a degree while I was in law school when I acquired a new allergy that was a real seasonal problem for several years and which caused a second round of shots. As that went away, which thankfully it did, the Manx cat volunteered to live with us and took up residence in our home in spite of my theoretically being allergic to cats. For whatever reason, however, he never caused me to have very many problems, although he did cause some, and when he sadly passed my wife campaigned for a dog, which she had always wanted. That caused the third round of shots.
Swing back to Denver, I'm allergic to something there, but only mildly. I have no idea what its, but for much of the year if I'm simply there I have a slightly runny nose and feel slightly allergic to something.
