Places

Submitted by Greg Vogl on Fri, 08/08/2014 - 10:17

Colorado State Capitol

Colorado’s iconic, gold-domed Capitol looks out over the city of Denver from atop Brown’s Bluff, exactly one mile above sea level. Built between 1886 and 1908, the Capitol’s exterior remains largely original, but the interior has been subject to modernization and modification. The Capitol is part...

Park Hill

Named for its site on a hill overlooking City Park , the Park Hill neighborhood in northeast Denver is bounded by Colorado Boulevard, East Colfax Avenue, Quebec Street, and East Fifty-Second Avenue. The area was first platted in 1887. As Park Hill matured, its tree-lined streets, parkways, and...

Denver Center for the Performing Arts

The Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) is a theatrical organization that puts on professional productions, brings Broadway shows to Denver , and offers educational programming. Established in 1979, DCPA grew out of a Denver theatrical legacy that included the University Civic Theatre and...

Byron White US Courthouse

Opened in 1916 as the main Denver Post Office and Federal Building, this four-story Greek temple (1823 Stout Street) is Colorado’s finest Neoclassical Revival structure. It represented the growing role of the federal government in a city that now has one of the largest concentrations of federal...

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 customers and for shipping goods to the Rocky...

San Luis

The oldest continuously occupied town in Colorado, San Luis sits along Culebra Creek, just west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the southeast portion of the San Luis Valley . In April 1851, Hispanos from Taos, New Mexico, founded San Luis on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant , which the Mexican...

Sangre de Cristo Land Grant

The Sangre de Cristo land grant was a Mexican land grant possessed in January 1844 by Narciso Beaubien and Stephen Luis Lee. Covering almost 1.4 million acres in the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado, the grant gave rise to the first permanent settlement in...

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

Stretching west and northwest from Cortez to the Utah border, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument was established in 2000 and boasts the densest collection of archaeological sites in the United States. An estimated 30,000 sites—including cliff dwellings , kivas , and rock art —represent...

Denver Performing Arts Complex

The Denver Performing Arts Complex (DPAC) is a four-block, twelve-acre site that features nearly 10,600 seats across the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre, Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Boettcher Concert Hall, Garner Galleria Theatre, and several smaller facilities. It is one...

St. Leo’s Catholic Church

Between 1888 and 1965, St. Leo’s Catholic Church at Tenth Street and West Colfax Avenue in West Denver was the primary center of worship for Irish Catholics in the city. From the time it was built, St. Leo’s faced controversy over its role in enforcing the cultural and ethnic divisions of early...

Wheeler Geologic Area

The Wheeler Geologic Area is a sixty-acre volcanic rock formation located within the La Garita Wilderness in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. A prehistoric time capsule, Wheeler has in more recent years inspired two presidential interventions and tested both state and federal public...

Origins of Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 as the country’s ninth national park. The site was visited and considered sacred by multiple Indigenous nations before it began attracting interest from white Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While male scientists and...

Trinity United Methodist Church

Amid the high-rises and parking lots of downtown Denver , Trinity United Methodist Church (1820 Broadway) is one of the few surviving churches. Since 1888 it has played a major role in the city’s religious, political, civic, cultural, and architectural history. The finest design of Colorado’s first...

Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) (100 W. 14th Avenue) in the city’s Civic Center boasts more than 70,000 works from across the centuries and the world. Best known for its collection of Indigenous art, it was the first major museum to establish a separate Native American Arts Department (1925) to...

St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church

Towering above Eleventh and Curtis Streets with its Gothic spires and Romanesque arches, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church has served Catholics in Denver for more than a century. Established in 1878, St. Elizabeth’s was the second Catholic parish in the city. Originally composed of German...

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 others. The Gonzalez family owned the...

Hiwan Heritage Park and Museum

Hiwan Heritage Park and Museum in Evergreen comprises a four-acre outdoor space and a twenty-five-room log cabin. Josepha Williams , one of the first female doctors in Colorado, acquired the property in 1893 as a place for friends and family to stay. Guests first stayed in lodging tents and, later...

State Industrial School for Girls

Established by the Colorado legislature in 1887, the State Industrial School for Girls was a combined reform school, foster care, and prison that trained young, marginalized women to be domestic servants. Late nineteenth-century industrialization had prompted both urban poverty and anxiety about...

Aspen Center for Physics

The Aspen Center for Physics started in 1962 as a place for theoretical physicists to spend the summer thinking and talking together. Based at a small campus on the south end of Aspen Meadows, it was originally part of the Aspen Institute before becoming an independent nonprofit in 1968. Several...

Ninth Street

Ninth Street Historic Park is the heart of the Auraria neighborhood, Denver ’s oldest, founded in October 1858, a month before Denver City. In the late 1960s, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) planned to clear 169 acres of old Auraria bordering Cherry Creek to build the Auraria Higher...

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