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ED SADOWSKI
ARCHITECTURE
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Downtown
Denver
ARCHITECTURE
The 19th Street Bridge ///////////////////////////////////////////
The historic 19th Street Bridge, spanning the South Platte River, is the oldest bridge in the western US outside of the West Coast.
Built in 1888, the bridge replaced a wooden structure damaged from flooding of the Platte. It is one of the few remaining cast iron bridges remaining in the US, a pin-connected, five-panel, two-span Pratt through truss design, with unusually deep I-beam upper struts. Its beautiful design has cast iron newels and latticework on the cantilevered sidewalks, and embellished finials and cresting on either end. In 1904 a plan to rebuild the bridge as an extended viaduct was defeated.
Mostly unmodified since construction, timber decking was replaced with corrugated steel following a 1961 flood and some bent hinges were replaced as a result of a 1965 flood. The bridge carried automobile traffic until 1986. Because of repeated wear and deterioration caused by salt for melting ice, the bridge was restricted to pedestrians and bicycles after 1986.
In 1992 a 19th Street vehicular bridge was built upstream over the Platte, just northeast of the original bridge. Since 2011 the historic bridge has been a highly unusual event venue—for the annual Greenway for the Blue Moon After Party on the Bridge.
1999 Broadway Bldg. & Holy Ghost Church ////////
19th at California & Broadway
It’s a unique and unlikely tale of two buildings: The Holy Ghost church occupied a tight triangular space that a developer wanted to build on. At first seemingly untenable, the awkward idea was made to work. The solution: a skyscraper built around a church. Financial incentives to the church and a clever and cozy design has seen two utterly dissimilar buildings thrive in ever so-close proximity to each other.
Completed in 1985, the concave 46-story high rise curves and wraps itself protectively around the back of the church. Interior and exterior design features of shapes and colors complement its smaller, older counterpart.
The Italian and Spanish renaissance-style church was begun in 1924 and completed in 1943 with a gift from Helen Bonfils. Three hundred tons of Colorado colocreme travertine marble beautify the walls and columns of the church, making it the largest collection of this stone in the United States. Beat figure and friend of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, was once an altar boy here.
Art Hotel ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
12th & Broadway
The 165-room ART Hotel, located in Denver’s museum district, is a “modern architectural gem bursting with unique multisensory installations,” according to Condé Nast. The Art Hotel boasts “the highest caliber of art in any U.S. hotel,” one of the few hotels in the world that can be described as doubling as an art museum.
Contemporary paintings, sculptures and murals (complete with a printed guide) grace two galleries, as well as hallways and guest rooms of the hotel, the works selected as well as commissioned by an in-house curator, formerly of the Denver Art Museum.
The hotel’s porte-cochère is a grand entrance featuring a striking electronic canopy of 22,000 computer-programmed patterns of shimmering, undulating LED lights by the world’s premiere light artist, Leo Villareal. The hotel’s inclusion on “best” and “coolest” reviews and lists of accolades and awards is impressive.
The Auraria Higher Education Campus //////////////
The Auraria Higher Education Campus is one of a kind in the world in that one campus is shared by three institutions of higher learning: The University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver. Sharing includes classroom space, venues, library, bookstore and student services.
Conceived in 1968, Auraria is a unique urban commuter campus on 150 acres located on the southwestern edge of downtown between the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, near the site of the Auraria gold mining camp settlement of 1859. The campus has 42,000 students, 5,000 faculty and staff, with over four million square feet of building space.
It is on the site of the former Tivoli Brewing Company (now revived after a hiatus), which in the 1800s was the largest brewery in the West. Auraria’s 1992 purchase of the Tivoli Shopping Center made it the world’s only campus shopping center. MSU Denver superlatives: in the 1980s, as Metropolitan State College, it became the nation’s largest public, four-year college; offers the only beer industry bachelor’s degree in the world; partnered with the University of Colorado Denver and Denver Public Schools to create the Denver Student Teacher Residency, the first known program of its kind in the nation that unites a school system with universities to transform teacher education students’ final year of college into an intensive residency. Auraria's Eugenia Rawls Courtyard Theatre is one of three of-its-kind in the world, being the only facility in the United States designed as three theatre spaces in one. The audience can be configured as a thrust theatre, a theatre-in-the-round, or a traditional proscenium arch stage (Broadway style).
Located on campus is St. Elizabeth of Hungary, one of only a handful of church communities in the world (and only four in the US) composed of both Roman and Russian Orthodox Byzantine Rites. The campus holds the childhood home of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the only known US residence of one of history’s most influential women. The house was saved from demolition and moved from its west Denver location in 1988 to the Auraria Campus.
Barney L. Ford Bldg. ////////////////////////////////////////////
1514 Blake St.
Barney Ford (1822-1902) led one of the most remarkable lives ever recorded of an escaped slave, rising to be a wealthy man and much honored civic leader in Colorado, the first African American to serve on a Federal grand jury. He was a brilliant entrepreneur, owning many businesses, including several in this building.
Ford is a member of the Colorado Black Hall of Fame, the Colorado Business Hall of Fame, and has a stained-glass portrait in the House Chamber of the Colorado State Capitol.
This building and adjacent ones on Blake, as well as on Wazee and Market streets, were built in 1863 right after a downtown fire that destroyed almost all of the Denver business district. These are possibly the oldest brick buildings in the West outside of the West Coast.
The Brown Palace Hotel //////////////////////////////////////
17th and Tremont and Broadway
The Brown Palace is distinguished among the world’s hotels with a number of superlatives. The Brown was the world’s first hotel with an atrium lobby. When built in 1892, the amount of semiprecious onyx used for the lobby interior walls was the most ever for a building until that time. The Brown was said to be America’s second fire-proof hotel (no wood was used for the floors and walls).
The Brown is recognized as having one of the great tea rooms in America, with its more than century-old tradition of proper British-style high teas. The Brown’s baked goods are mostly made in a unique, 1940s carousel oven, one of only three known to be in existence in the world. The hotel has pioneered urban beekeeping with its rooftop bee hives.
Its celebrity who’s who list of past visitors include superstar entertainers, world leaders and royalty. Almost every US president since 1905 has stayed at the hotel. Distinctive accommodations include Victorian-themed suites, presidential suites and the Beatles Suite (with a custom). Each January sees a most peculiar ritual, where the National Western’s Grand Champion steer walks a red carpet through the elegant lobby during afternoon tea. Denver’s second-oldest hotel is said to have resident ghosts, most often sighted in the Club Room.
The Buell Theatre //////////////////////////////////////////////////
14th and Champa Street
The Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre is one of the nation’s top venues for traveling Broadway shows, plays and comedy acts. It is continuously ranked as the highest-grossing theatre of its size in the country, with over half a million yearly attendance.
The Buell Theatre (seating capacity 2,830) is the largest and most versatile part of the Denver Performing Arts Complex (DPAC), the largest performing arts complex under one roof. The theatre is named after distinguished architect Temple Hoyne Buell. The theatre is within the original outer walls of the former Denver Municipal Auditorium and Arena, originally constructed in 1908, and at that time the second largest venue of its type in nation next Madison Square Garden.
After the Arena was demolished in 1990, the Buell Theatre opened in its space in 1991. The theatre’s house interior is lined with around 8,000 pieces of gray and pink sandstone from Lyons, some of which contain fossils. Three hundred loudspeakers are located throughout the house. The height of the ceiling was determined partly to accommodate the Phantom of the Opera chandelier, a major prop for the show’s first national touring production and the first touring Broadway show to perform in the Buell.
The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
E. Colfax Ave. and Logan St.
(technically located one block outside of designated "downtown" and included here because of this proximity)
The Cathedral has the largest number of stained glass windows of any church of any denomination in the United States: 75 windows, holding 20,000 pieces of glass, filtering in sunlight to produce an intentionally dimly-lit interplay of light and space in the Gothic tradition.
The specially designed German-crafted windows were intended “to dwarf man and the present...and be a sanctuary of space and silence.” In 1912 the total cost of the 75 windows were $34,000. Today, just one transept window would cost over $500,000.
This double-spired French Gothic-style cathedral, completed in 1911, was built with Colorado granite and Indiana limestone, with Italian marble throughout the interior. Margaret Tobin Brown (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown”) helped raise funds to build the Cathedral.
Pope John Paul II celebrated mass in the Cathedral twice during his 1993 World Youth Day visit to Denver. The Cathedral was named a basilica in 1979, the fourth such designation in a western state. A basilica is a church with certain privileges conferred on it by the Pope. A leading Catholic publication listed Denver as one of the ten most important Catholic cities in the nation.
Clyfford Still Museum ///////////////////////////////////////////
1250 Bannock Street
The Clyfford Still Museum is home to the world’s most intact public collection of an American artist.
Opened in 2011, the Museum remarkably holds nearly 95% of Still’s total output. Still (1904-1980) is considered to be among the most important and influential painters of the 20th century, a founder of abstract expressionism, along with Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock and a few others.
The Museum holds 800 paintings and 1,600 paper works, as well as complete archival materials, of the enigmatic and reclusive artist, an output never been exhibited publicly.
His will dictated that his art be displayed in a city willing to supply a permanent home for his works. Through the effort of then Mayor John Hickenlooper and the City of Denver, the Still estate awarded the artist’s works to Denver. The Museum has achieved an elite status, a model single-artist museum, “among the best art museum experiences anywhere.”
The Museum has made it possible for the public to explore the full trajectory of the artist’s 60-year career for the first time, through various means, including an innovative school-visit program. The carefully-fashioned concrete brutalist structure sits on a one-acre site landscaped with sycamore trees, and has won multiple architectural awards, having been called the most successful piece of contemporary architecture in Denver.
The Colfax-Larimer Viaduct ///////////////////////////
GONE INTO HISTORY
When completed in 1917, the Colfax-Larimer Viaduct was the longest concrete span of its kind in the world: nearly a mile and a half of reinforced-concrete structure.
The Larimer viaduct connected the central business district to the railroad yards, while the longer Colfax viaduct, including a steel span over the South Platte River, reached west Denver. The viaduct consisted of a series of arches and cantilevers designed to handle the problematic expansion and contraction of the viaduct caused by heat and cold.
A forgotten part of Denver lay underneath the Colfax Viaduct—the "Bottoms," which from the late 1800s through the 1950s was home to cigar stores, bicycle shops, churches, grocery stores, hay markets and midwives. Eastern European Jews and Italians first lived there, followed by Mexican immigrants.
By the early 1980s, 35,000 vehicles crossed the viaduct daily, which was in need of repair. The original viaducts were demolished and replaced in 1983 by the present Colfax Viaduct and Auraria Parkway.
Colorado State Capitol Building ////////////////////
E. Colfax Ave. and Lincoln St.
The State Capitol’s superlatives embody its architecture as well as the political events significant to those who have worked in the legislative chambers of the building.
The capitol is the world’s only building with a one-of-a-kind and priceless red marble whose only location was quarried in its entirety in Colorado. The Capitol became the first Capitol in the nation to obtain a prestigious certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings for energy efficiency upgrades made. The Capitol also became the first building in the country to receive the US Green Building Council’s LEED certification for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance.
The Capitol was built from Colorado white granite in the 1890s, its design reminiscent of the nation’s capitol. It sits slightly higher than the rest of downtown, with the fifteenth step of the west entrance marking the city’s official elevation, with the engraved words “One Mile Above Sea Level.”
In 1893 Colorado gave women the right to vote, the first time in history that women’s suffrage was granted through a popular vote. The very next year voters sent three women to the state House of Representatives. They were the first women elected to any state legislative body in the world. Now Colorado leads the nation with women making up 42% of our state legislature.
Coors Field /////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Coors Field was completed in 1995, becoming home to the Colorado Rockies National League baseball club, after playing two years in Mile High Stadium, where all-time major league baseball attendance records were set.
The world’s only architectural triple crown opening was in 1995 when Denver launched new ballpark (Coors Field), a new central library (Denver Public Library), a major airport (Denver International Airport), and within five weeks of each other, with a new downtown amusement park (Elitch’s) opening two months later.
At 5,200 feet (1,580 m) above sea level, Coors Field is by far the highest ballpark in major league baseball. Coors Field has been described as “the most exciting park in baseball history,” “the most home-run friendly park,” “the worst park to pitch in,” borne out by Coors Field major league records, including producing the most home runs, triples and doubles ever in a season. This superlative offensive production is ascribed not only to the altitude but also to Coors Field having the largest outfield in the majors. On April 23, 2013, the Rockies and Braves played in the coldest major league game-time temperature ever officially recorded, at 23 °F (−5 °C). Coors Field was the first major league park with an underground heating system.
Coors Field superlatives include firsts for its 2014 Rooftop addition (the "party deck"): done by the Denver-based construction and design teams headed by Mortensen Construction and Populous and ME Engineering. The innovative two-level Rooftop at Coors Field, on the upper right field deck, provides a new revenue-generating space--a unique rooftop bar--attracting an entirely new group of fans, available as a separate admission or as part of the general admission. The standing-room only space features craft beer, local food, spaces to socialize and views of the game, the city, and the Rocky Mountains. Coors Field is the first major sports venue to re-purpose a major portion of a facility (3,500 seats converted to 46,00 square feet of rooftop space) into a rooftop deck, having created at that time the largest deck or patio in professional sports. Mechanical contractor RK Mechanical played a key role in overcoming construction challenges in the project, earning it an Award of Excellence trophy by the Associated Builders and Contractors Excellence in Construction.
The team’s colors include the only use of purple in major league baseball, which covers caps, jerseys, jackets, protective gear and even printed and digital promotional materials. It makes perfect sense, in deference to "For purple mountain majesties" in Katherine Lee Bates' lyrics for "America the Beautiful." The Rockies' purple started initially as an accent color, but now is a prominent part of the team's color scheme together with black, silver and white, most notably exemplified in the team's solid purple alternate jersey. At the start of the 2012 season, the Rockies introduced "Purple Mondays" in which the team wears its purple uniform every Monday game day. In 2017, the club's official purple was changed to a lighter tone because its previous shade often appeared blue under certain lighting conditions.
During construction in 1994, a most unusual discovery: workers found a number of dinosaur fossils throughout the grounds: a Cretaceous-era dinosaur egg, an unidentified dinosaur rib, and the crown-jewel, a 7-foot-long, 1,000-pound Triceratops skull. Fittingly, the team mascot was chosen to be Dinger, the purple dinosaur.
In 1995 Coors Field was the first ballpark to have its own (on-site) brewery, the award-winning Blue Moon Brewing Company at the Sandlot. The MillerCoors-owned brewery is located in the ballpark at 22nd and Blake, with a very unusual architectural feature: the original old building at that location was incorporated into the stadium. The brewery is open to the public during the baseball season. Inside the ballpark, Blue Moon Brewery is located at the Sandlot on the main concourse of Coors Field behind Section 112 in the right field corner. Its signature beer, Moon Belgian White, was created here, and has won multiple medals at the Great American Beer Festival. Its other award-winning brews include Summer Honey Wheat, Harvest Pumpkin Ale and Agave Blonde Ale.
ARCHITECTURE
THIS PAGE ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
19th St. Bridge
1999 Broadway Bldg./Holy Ghost Church
Art Hotel
Auraria Campus
Barney L. Ford Bldg.
Boettcher Concert Hall
Brown Palace Hotel
Buell Theatre
Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception
Clyfford Still Museum
Colfax-Larimer Viaduct
Colorado State Capitol Building
Coors Field
PAGE TWO (of 2) ////////////////////////////////////////////////
Daniels & Fisher Tower
Denver Art Museum
Denver City and County Building
Denver Millennium Bridge
Denver Public Library
Ellie Caulkins Opera House
Highland Bridge
Jacobs Bldg.
Sugar Building
Tabor Grand Opera House
Union Station
Windsor Hotel
