Located at 828 Seventeenth Street in Denver, the Boston Building opened in 1890. Hailed by early historian Jerome Smiley as “the first of the strictly modern office buildings” in the city, the Boston Building signaled the emergence of Seventeenth Street…

Financed by and named after the early Denver developer Henry C. Brown, the Brown Palace Hotel opened on Broadway in 1892 in an elegant triangular building that was the tallest in the city at the time. For much of the twentieth century the hotel was owned…

Charles Boettcher (1852–1948) was an entrepreneur and philanthropist best known for founding the Great Western Sugar Company and the Boettcher Foundation, an organization that made the Boettcher name synonymous with generosity in Colorado. Boettcher…

The Great Western Sugar Company was co-founded by Charles Boettcher in 1900 after he observed the hardy, profitable sugar beet crop while vacationing in Europe. In Colorado, the sugar beet industry he helped launch proved a boon to the state and local…

Denver’s eight-story Ideal Building (821 Seventeenth Street) claims to be the first major building west of the Mississippi River constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. Built in 1907, it originally housed Charles Boettcher’s Ideal Cement Company…

Charles Boettcher (1852–1948), one of Colorado’s most important early businessmen and philanthropists, built Lorraine Lodge (now known as Boettcher Mansion) in 1917 as a summer retreat at the top of Lookout Mountain, west of Golden. It stands as a…