The Denver Athletic Club (DAC) is one of the oldest and largest private clubs in Colorado. Founded in 1884 in a rented hall in the First Baptist Church at Eighteenth and Curtis Streets, the DAC has grown into a social club as well as a place to work out. Its five-story home, first built in 1890 in downtown Denver and expanded multiple times over the years, features state-of-the-art fitness facilities as well as restaurants, conference rooms, and a grand ballroom.
The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Today the DAC remains a private, member-owned club with a membership of more than 2,000.
Origins
The DAC took shape when wealthy newcomers to Colorado who had enjoyed athletic clubs in their previous homes joined together to start such a club in Denver. Restaurateur and showman John Elitch, Jr., was one of five founders. Founded during Colorado’s 1880s boom, the DAC rode the then-nascent fad of physical fitness and bicycling into a large membership, including many civic and social leaders. Prominent early members included Willard Teller and Henry Wolcott, both lawyers and brothers of Colorado’s US senators, and Thomas M. Patterson, owner of the Rocky Mountain News and a future US senator. Another newspaper owner and future US senator, Nathaniel P. Hill, also helped give the club prestige and good press. The DAC kept its increasingly well-heeled members physically fit by hiring an expert, “Professor” Frederick W. Helmreich.
The Building
By 1890 club members had built a stylish, five-story Romanesque Revival home, designed by leading Denver architects Ernest P. Varian and Fredrick J. Sterner, at 1325 Glenarm Place. Inside, the basement included dressing rooms, a Turkish bath, showers, a thirty-by-forty-foot swimming pool, and a barbershop. The first floor housed a reception area, lockers, and more dressing rooms, while the second floor had a large gymnasium and billiard room. The third floor contained a large running track, fencing room, and sparring room, topped by a fourth floor filled with boarding rooms for members, visitors, and guests. The roof served as a tennis court. The clubhouse also included one of Denver’s first bowling alleys.
The fast-growing club built an addition just two years later, doubling the building’s size. Architects Varian and Sterner were hired again and matched their earlier facade’s rusticated and polished red sandstone so skillfully that later members often assumed it was all built at the same time.
DAC Park
Modern fans of football and baseball, bicycling and running, and tennis and badminton are beneficiaries of the DAC. In 1890 the club opened the Denver Athletic Club Park on the current site of East High School. The DAC inaugurated its park with the first football game ever played in Colorado, which pitted the DAC squad against the University of Colorado. DAC Park also hosted cricket games, bicycle races, baseball, track events, and all sorts of field sports. Not only did the DAC introduce these activities to the public, but the group’s events also inspired local schools and colleges to adopt competitions such as track, pole vault, and shotput.
The local sports scene soon became competitive, and the DAC did whatever was needed to win. It hired George Tebeau, a star baseball player, to upgrade its baseball team with the best amateur and semipro talent. The DAC motivated its players by placing beer kegs at each base to inspire base hitters and stealers. By providing drinks, dinners, and other perks, the DAC also incurred one of the first investigations into how “amateurs” were rewarded. This was one reason why the DAC slowly phased out its competitive sports programs in the 1900s. In 1925 East High School opened on the former DAC Park site.
An Uptown Social Club
The DAC started out as a man’s club, but women interested in sports and recreation also joined. In the early twentieth century, women increasingly used the prestigious site for social events, taking over the gym for banquets and balls. To ensure that social events no longer got in the way of sports, the club expanded with a 1926 addition. Designed by architects T. Robert Wieger, Harry J. Manning, and George H. Williamson, the addition was built in the same style as the original structure but added a sixth floor.
At the same time, as the founding generation aged, they became more interested in socializing and chatting about the good old days than in working out. The bar, billiard room, barber shop, and dining rooms gradually began to see more use. The DAC became the place to dine and dance, catch up on reading, play cards, and cultivate professional and business partners. For a while, the club had its own band. For its big holiday balls and other grand occasions, the club brought in top entertainers such as the Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller Bands.
Growth and Change
A 1951 fire killed four people and gutted the DAC building. The exterior was saved, but the interior had to be remodeled. The boarding rooms, which had grown less popular over time, were not included in the reconstruction.
Further expansions came in the late twentieth century. Noted Denver architect Rodney S. Davis designed a 1973 athletic wing in a modern style. To promote its squash courts, the DAC brought in as its squash director the six-time world-champion Hashim Kahn, who made the game fashionable among the local elite. In 1981 a three-story parking garage alleviated a chronic parking shortage, followed by another athletic wing in 1985. Designed by architect James Sudler and Associates, those two structures stretched the DAC’s footprint across the full block between Fourteenth and Thirteenth Streets, Glenarm Place, and Welton Street. As part of these expansions, the club graduated to a twenty-five-meter, eight-lane, Olympic-size pool illuminated by skylights.
Today
After all its expansions, the DAC now includes a large fitness center, six racquetball courts, seven squash courts, a full-size basketball/volleyball court, five group exercise studios, an eight-lane bowling alley, an eight-lane Olympic pool, and an indoor golf simulator. Some facilities are accessible twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.
As a business center and networking facility, the DAC also has meeting and conference rooms, a grand ballroom and a sundeck, a licensed childcare center, multiple dining options, and a full-service spa and wellness center. In 2021 the club opened a large coworking space. After almost 140 years in operation, the DAC remains the premier place to network and work out in Denver.
