A hundred and fifty years of Denver deciding what it wants to look like, from its first commercial block to a titanium museum.
A hundred and fifty years of Denver deciding what it wants to look like, from its first commercial block to a titanium museum.
Frontier town, then Gilded Age ambition, then a city that decided to get weird.
Denver's first commercial district and its first historic district. The storefronts change constantly; the upper floors still show the original brickwork, arched windows and cornices.
A department-store tower modelled on St Mark's Campanile in Venice. When it went up it was the tallest thing between the Mississippi and California. The store was demolished; the tower stayed.
A hotel built as a triangle, because Denver's street grids collide at odd angles here. Inside the triangle is an atrium ringed with iron balconies under stained glass.
Windows shaped like the scars an aspen leaves when it drops a branch. The eyelids are not decoration, they shade the glass and shed rainwater.
Roughly 9,000 titanium panels folded into peaks and valleys. The part that looks like it is trying to stab the street is the architecture, not an ornament bolted on.
Downtown in reverse, newest architecture to oldest.
1892, Italian Renaissance Revival, built while Denver was working hard to prove it was no longer a frontier town. The floor plan is two capital E's back to back so more offices caught daylight.
Gothic Revival from 1888 by Colorado's first licensed architect, with a 181-foot stone spire. Start counting the groups of three and you will not stop.
Beaux-Arts, opened 1914. Symmetry, giant arches, stone and scale, all of it built to make arriving somewhere feel like something.
Same architect as the Brown Palace, one year earlier. Two completely different answers to the same problem, and a white terra-cotta annex next door that matches nothing around it.
Through LoDo, where Denver started.
11 stops, about 60 minutes of riding and talking. Timings are what the route is built to; wind, lights and how long you want to stand under the bear will move them.