Places

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

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...

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 before being sold to the Denver National Bank...

Grant-Humphreys Mansion

Exuding ornamentation and ostentation, Grant-Humphreys Mansion (770 Pennsylvania Street) is Denver 's best-known Beaux-Arts neoclassical residence, combining Colonial Revival and Italian Renaissance elements. Prominently sited on the southwest shoulder of Capitol Hill , it overlooks Governor’s Park...

Denver City and County Building

Facing the State Capitol Building and completing the dominant east-west axis for Civic Center , Denver ’s City and County Building (300 W. Colfax Avenue) is the grandest monument of Mayor Robert Speer ’s City Beautiful efforts. The elegant neoclassical building houses the mayor, city council, many...

California Gulch Superfund Site

Established by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1983, the California Gulch Superfund Site encompasses about eighteen square miles in central Lake County , including the city of Leadville . One of the nation’s first Superfund sites, it was created to clean up heavy-metal pollution...

Berthoud

Berthoud is a semirural town south of Loveland in both Larimer and Weld Counties. It started in the early 1860s as Little Thompson Station, a stagecoach stop near the Little Thompson River about halfway between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver on the Cherokee and Overland Trails. Berthoud was...

Denver Zoo

The Denver Zoo started in 1896 with a single bear in City Park and has grown to an eighty-acre campus. There are 350 employees overseeing a total of about 3,700 animals from more than 600 species. The zoo draws more than 2 million visitors per year, making it one of Colorado’s most popular cultural...

You are here