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Bain’s Department Store

In 1935 Joe Bain and his son, Victor, opened Bain’s Department Store on Main Street in Alamosa. After Bain’s closed, Victor Bain continued to own the building for decades, renting it out to a variety of automobile dealers and appliance shops. In 1994 the…

Barney Ford's People's Restaurant

In 1863 the black pioneer Barney L. Ford built the People’s Restaurant at 1514 Blake Street in Denver. The success of the restaurant helped make Ford into one of the the state’s most influential black business and civic leaders. Although the building has…

Beaumont Hotel

When it opened in 1887, the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray was one of the finest hotels in the Rocky Mountains. After several successful decades, its fortunes declined along with Ouray’s mining economy, and it eventually closed in the 1960s. In 2005 the hotel…

Beaver Creek Resort

Tucked away in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Beaver Creek Resort has had a rich history since it first opened to the public in 1980. Located in Eagle County, Beaver Creek is a major ski resort owned and operated by Vail Associates. The valley that houses…

Brown Palace Hotel

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…

Buckhorn Exchange

Located at 1000 Osage Street, just south of Lincoln Park, the Buckhorn Exchange is Denver’s oldest operating restaurant. Established by Henry H. Zietz in 1893, the restaurant has occupied the same building for more than 120 years and is known for its…

Casa Mayan

Between 1946 and 1973, the Casa Mayan (1020 Ninth Street) served as a restaurant in the Auraria neighborhood of west Denver as well as a family home and multicultural meeting place for writers, musicians, artists, athletes, architects, politicians, and…

Cave of the Winds

Cave of the Winds, located in Williams Canyon a few miles northwest of Colorado Springs, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Colorado. Two schoolboys are credited with discovering the cave in 1880, though various legends hold that Ute and…

Celebrity Sports Center

Celebrity Lanes, later known as Celebrity Sports Center and then Celebrity Fun Center, was a relatively successful entertainment complex in Denver from the 1960s through the 1980s. The center represented the rise of a national trend in centralized…

Chicago-Colorado Colony

The Chicago-Colorado Colony (1871–73) established the city of Longmont near the confluence of St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks in 1871. Financed by wealthy Chicagoans and consisting mostly of immigrants from the Midwest, the colony was an agricultural…

Cigar Making in Colorado

Cigar making in Colorado constituted one of the state’s earliest industries during the nineteenth century, lending an air of sophistication to the fledgling Colorado Territory. Cigar making employed thousands of Coloradans across the state during the…

Climax Molybdenum Mine

Located in Lake County beside Fremont Pass, the Climax Molybdenum Mine started production in 1918 and grew to become the world’s largest underground mine. Deemed a national priority during World War II because of molybdenum’s importance in hardening…

Colorado National Bank

Colorado National Bank (CNB) was founded in Denver in 1862 and managed to survive the state’s ups and downs until its 1998 sale to Minneapolis-based US Bank. The intermarried Kountze and Berger families, prominent as early Denver treasurers, civic…

Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion

The Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion at 420 E. Eleventh Avenue in Denver is one of the oldest still-standing residences in the city. It was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth…

Daniels and Fisher Tower

Rising 330 feet above Sixteenth Street, the Daniels and Fisher Tower in Denver was based on St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and opened in 1911 as a beacon drawing shoppers to the adjacent Daniels and Fisher department store. The Daniels and Fisher…

Denver City Cable Railway Building

The Denver City Cable Railway Building (1201 Eighteenth Street) was built in 1889 as the company’s new headquarters and wheelhouse for its system of cable cars. As a central piece of Denver’s large cable-car network, which was one of the most extensive…

Denver Tramway Powerhouse

The Denver Tramway Powerhouse (1416 Platte Street) was built in 1901–4 to generate power for the Denver Tramway Company’s extensive network of electric streetcars. From a 1911 expansion until the last electric streetcar service in 1950, the powerhouse…

Dickens Opera House

In 1881–82 rancher and businessman William Henry Dickens built the Dickens Opera House at the corner of Third and Main Streets in downtown Longmont. The two-story opera house, with Dickens’s Farmers National Bank on the first floor and an auditorium on…

Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Rising about 2,800 feet over its famously scenic forty-five-mile route, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad was originally built in 1881–82 as part of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway’s effort to reach the mines of the San Juan Mountains…

Fairplay Hotel

The Fairplay Hotel was designed in the Rustic style by architect William Bowman and completed in 1922. Located on the site of an earlier hotel at the prominent corner of Fifth and Main Streets, the Fairplay became the largest and oldest hotel in town,…

Farmers State Bank of Cope

Farmers State Bank of Cope (Washington County) opened in 1918 at the southwest corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The first and only bank that ever operated in Cope, Farmers State Bank was founded and led largely by local women until the Great…

Gray Goose Airways

Denver’s history is full of innovation and success associated with the emergence of air travel, but perhaps just as many ventures failed. Though Gray Goose Airways was ultimately unsuccessful, founder Jonathan Edward Caldwell was doggedly persistent in…

Great Western Sugar Company

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…

Greeley Tribune Building

The Beaux-Arts Greeley Tribune Building opened in 1929 to house the operations of the Greeley Tribune, Weld County’s oldest newspaper. From 1937 until the mid-1950s, the building also contained the offices of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy…

Gumry Hotel Explosion

On August 19, 1895, a steam boiler exploded in Denver’s Gumry Hotel, killing twenty-two people and injuring dozens. Hotel fires were not uncommon in nineteenth-century Colorado, but the Gumry explosion was the worst hotel disaster in Colorado history and…

Henderson Molybdenum Mine

Located about nine miles west of Empire, the Henderson Molybdenum Mine was developed by American Metal Climax (AMAX) and opened in 1976 to work one of the world’s largest known molybdenum deposits. A conveyor belt for transporting ore connects the mine…

High Country News

High Country News (HCN) is a nonprofit, independent media organization covering issues that define the American West. Based in the small western Colorado town of Paonia, High Country News publishes a biweekly newsmagazine as well as a variety of digital…

Hotel de Paris

Hotel de Paris was an idealized imitation of a Norman inn and is older than the State of Colorado itself. A former cook, journalist, and miner, Frenchman Louis Dupuy (born Adolph François Gerard) established the hotel and restaurant on October 9, 1875,…

Hotel Jerome

Built in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler (1841–1918), the Hotel Jerome was Aspen’s original luxury hotel. After the 1893 silver crash destroyed the town’s economy, the hotel survived as a boardinghouse and slipped into comfortable shabbiness. When Aspen…

Hover Home and Farmstead

The Hover Home and Farmstead is a historic mansion and agricultural property on the west edge of Longmont. Retired pharmacist Charles Hover and his wife, Katherine, bought the farm in 1902 and built the mansion in 1913–14. Over the next several decades,…

Ideal Building

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…

Inter-Laken Hotel

Originally established in 1879 as the Lakeside Resort, the Inter-Laken Hotel was developed by James V. Dexter into a high-class, late nineteenth-century resort near Twin Lakes. Popular for about two decades, the hotel declined and eventually closed in…

J. S. Brown Mercantile Building (Wynkoop Brewing Company)

This five-story. red-brick building in Denver went up in 1899 for John Sidney Brown’s wholesale grocery business. Strategically located at 1634 Eighteenth Street—across Wynkoop Street from Union Station—it was next to the rail lines it depended on for…

Key Savings and Loan Association Building

The Key Savings and Loan Association Building at the southwest corner of South Broadway and West Hampden Avenue in Englewood was designed by modernist architect Charles Deaton and constructed in 1966–67. A striking concrete ovoid shell with a glass…

Kuner-Empson Cannery

The Kuner-Empson Cannery at Third and Martin Streets in Longmont canned vegetables from farms on the northern Front Range from 1892 to 1970. Originally built by industrialist John H. Empson in 1889, the cannery was one of the first major industrial sites…

Lost Trail Ranch

Lost Trail Ranch was established in 1877 as a way station and resupply spot along Stony Pass Road from the San Luis Valley to the mining camps of the San Juan Mountains. Located at an elevation of 9,800 feet along the Rio Grande, the way station served…

Manitou Springs Spa Building

The Manitou Springs Spa Building stands on top of Soda (or Manitou) Spring on the north bank of Fountain Creek in downtown Manitou Springs. The three-story Spanish Colonial Revival building was built in 1920 to help revive Manitou’s sagging health…

Minnequa Steelworks Office

Built by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) in 1901–2, the Minnequa Steelworks office building and medical dispensary in Pueblo are among the best examples of Mission-style architecture in Colorado. The dispensary helped provide healthcare to…

Oxford Hotel

The Oxford Hotel (1600 Seventeenth Street) opened in 1891 and is now Denver’s oldest surviving hotel. Developed by brewer Adolph Zang and designed by architect Frank Edbrooke, the hotel originally provided a luxurious stay for travelers passing through…

Shenandoah-Dives Mining Company

The Shenandoah-Dives Mining Company was active in the San Juan Mountains from the 1930s through the 1960s. As one of the largest mining operations in the region during the twentieth century, the company’s history exemplifies the boom and bust cycles and…

Sim Hudson Motor Company

The Sim Hudson Motor Company at Thirteenth Street and Senter Avenue in Burlington (1332 Senter Ave.,Burlington, Colorado), the Kit Carson County seat, served as a car dealership and service center for more than eighty years. Built around 1919 as the…

Ski Industry

Colorado’s ski industry anchors the state’s thriving tourist economy. Built primarily on national forest lands, the state’s numerous ski resorts attract upwards of 12 million visitors annually, generating billions in revenue. Introduced to the state in…

St. Luke’s Hospital

St. Luke’s Hospital was a Denver fixture for over a century, serving the community as one of several hospitals in the capitol. St. Luke’s role in training several generations of doctors and nurses garners historical significance for the building complex…

Stanley Hotel

Designed and funded by Freelan Oscar Stanley, the Stanley Hotel opened in 1909 in Estes Park. The first-class resort helped make Estes Park into a tourist destination, especially after the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915. In the…

Stapleton International Airport

Stapleton International Airport opened as a small municipal airport in 1929–30 and went on to become Denver’s primary airport for sixty-five years, until it was replaced by Denver International Airport in 1995. The airport played a major role in Denver’s…

Tabor Opera House

The Tabor Opera House (308 Harrison Avenue, Leadville) was built by Horace Tabor in 1879 to bring high-class entertainment to the rough mining camp of Leadville. It was for a while one of the top theaters in the state. Horace Tabor had to sell the…

The Broadmoor

Perennially ranked one of the top resorts in the United States, the Broadmoor opened just southwest of Colorado Springs in 1918. Built on the site of a failed casino complex and upscale suburban development at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, the Broadmoor…

The Fort

The Fort, an adobe restaurant just south of Morrison, was modeled on historic Bent’s Old Fort and built using traditional Hispano methods and materials. Designed by William Lumpkins, an architect internationally known for his work in the adobe and Pueblo…

Tivoli Brewery

Constructed in 1864, the Tivoli Brewery in Denver was the first brewery built in Colorado and the second in the nation. Over the course of its complex history, the brewery changed hands multiple times until it was abandoned in 1969. The Tivoli building…

Tramway Building (Hotel Teatro)

Completed in 1911, the Tramway Building (1100 Fourteenth Street, Denver) consists of a striking red-and-white tower and adjacent car barn that originally served as the headquarters of the powerful Denver Tramway Company. In 1956 Tramway sold the building…

Tremont House Hotel

The Tremont House Hotel was established in the fall of 1859 near Cherry Creek in Auraria (later West Denver) and soon became one of Denver’s top hotels. In the 1880s, the hotel declined as flood-prone West Denver became home to immigrants and industry…

Van Briggle Memorial Pottery Building

Built in 1907–8, the Van Briggle Memorial Pottery Building in Colorado Springs was designed by architect Nicolaas van den Arend to serve as the company’s salesroom, pottery plant, and headquarters. Incorporating more than 5,000 tile and terra cotta…

Western Hotel

The Western Hotel at 716 Cooper Avenue in Glenwood Springs started in 1887 as a one-story brick restaurant building. In the early twentieth century, the building was expanded under the ownership of the Bosco family, which began renting rooms there by the…

Wonderbound

Based in Denver, Wonderbound was established in 2002 and has quickly grown into the second-largest professional dance company in Colorado. Originally called Ballet Nouveau Colorado and affiliated with a Broomfield-based dance school of the same name, in…

World’s Wonder View Tower

Built in 1926, the six-story World’s Wonder View Tower in Genoa served for many decades as a tourist attraction and way station along US Highway 24. Visitation declined after Interstate 70 rerouted traffic farther away from the tower in the 1970s, but…