In 1970, Denver could boast a handful of skyscrapers, a blossoming ski industry, a team in the American Football League and even a tropical conservatory at Denver Botanic Gardens. Interstate Highway 25 and most of I-70 had been completed, creating a north-south and east-west traffic flow that allowed for further growth of the suburbs. After the disastrous South Platte River flood of the mid 1960s, Denverites had approved construction of the Chatfield Dam and Reservoir to protect the city from subsequent multi-million dollar water disasters.
In some ways, the late 1960s and early 1970s marked the last hurrah for the old Denver power elite. Although their descendants intermarried enthusiastically, giants like Gerald Hughes, Claude Boettcher and Lawrence Phipps were long gone. Echoing their demise, landmarks of yesteryear crashed in clouds of dust that blanketed the city for years. Many of the older downtown buildings disappeared, including the Daniels and Fisher department store and the 1880s Tabor Center. As a result, by the mid-1970s, the city had lost much of its small town flavor.
The Daniels and Fisher Department Store, circa 1911. Today, only the tower remains.
The “new Denver” began to emerge back in 1958, when the City and County of Denver had established the Denver Urban Renewal Authority. Along with the demolition of most of downtown, their major coup would be the creation of the Auraria Higher Education Center on the site of the city’s oldest settlement, the pioneer town of Auraria.
The Auraria mega-project involved moving an entire Hispanic neighborhood across town to make room for the 127-acre urban commuter campus. Movers and shakers included D.U. Chancellor Chester M. Alter, who was the first to suggest that three colleges (Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State College and the University of Colorado at Denver) could share building space, a decision that led to complications that still exist. Since campus founders believed that students would use public transit rather than drive to school, insufficient parking space also became a long-term issue. Despite multiple catastrophes and protests by neighborhood activists, however, all three schools were open for business in January 1977. A surprising enrollment of more than 26,000 students on a campus built for 15,000 meant that the Auraria schools would spend the following decades trying to catch up. Nevertheless, the campus was a huge success, allowing access to those who might never been able to attend college. More than 30 years later, after many modifications, the three schools serve 20 percent of all Colorado students in higher education.
Construction of the Auraria Higher Education Center, with Mile High Stadium in the foreground.
As buildings and neighborhoods continued to fall to the wrecking ball, Denver’s blossoming preservation community began to feel the far-reaching effects of Urban Renewal. In 1967, supporters of the Denver Landmark Preservation Ordinance made the first attempt to save the city’s historic structures. Thanks to the efforts of developer Dana Crawford, downtown’s restored Larimer Square, between 14th and 15th streets, became a popular tourist destination in the early 1970s. After losing a fight to rescue the David Moffat Mansion from the wrecking ball, the fledgling organization known as Historic Denver, Inc., resuscitated the Molly Brown House, which is now one of the city’s most popular house museums. Their second effort, the Ninth Street Historic Park project on the Auraria Campus, meant saving an entire block of Victorian houses, which turned into a million-dollar project. With preservationist Barbara Sudler at the helm, Historic Denver gained steam as it relied strongly on volunteers and a “pay as you go” plan.
By 1980, Denverites were still riding the last wave of prosperity from the post-World War II population boom. Jobs were plentiful, the housing market flourished and developers got rich as the baby boomers multiplied. Mini-communities sprang up in areas formerly the domain of prairie dogs and grasshoppers, spawning development in Highlands Ranch, Southglenn and what would eventually become Centennial.
Thanks to the 1974 Poundstone Amendment, which froze Denver’s boundaries, the city had been spared the burden of supplying water or electricity to the new suburbia, but all that tax revenue also remained out of reach. While older towns like Arvada, Aurora and Lakewood experienced a renaissance of new growth, Denver, like many larger cities around the country, lost population. Commerce also decentralized, which led to some reduction of downtown control over the business community, particularly after George Mackenzie Wallace created the Denver Tech Center in the early 1980s, an office megaplex in Greenwood Village.
Although Denver was far removed from the oil fields, the city’s petroleum tycoons reigned, making multi-millionaires out of John and Kenneth King (no relationship), Marvin Davis, Fred Mayer, Jerome Lewis, and Phil Anschutz. When the oil boom fizzled in the early 1980s, followed by significant layoffs by high tech companies, the domino effect led to failure of several large industrial banks, the most infamous being Midland Savings and Silverado. The federal government eventually took over the latter to the tune of nearly $2 billion. Many people lost homes and savings in the recession.
Denver businesses remained stable, however, and the city still looked pretty good to outsiders, with a glistening skyline barely recognizable from the 1950s. Shoveling away downtown’s rubble, developers planted a new crop of office buildings, including the Republic Plaza, the City Center Tower and the 52-story United Bank Tower, lovingly nicknamed the cash register building. The Denver Center for Performing Arts Complex, which had opened in December 1979, brought theatergoers back downtown for the first time in decades.
Concurrent with the preservation movement, a new breed of “urban pioneer,” young, well-educated and relatively affluent, began purchasing and restoring older houses in the downtown vicinity. In the following decades, older buildings and warehouses would be restored as living space and new units built as the “loft and condominium” movement took hold and downtown became a more desirable place to live.
As it turned out, any damage the city might have suffered during earlier decades would be eradicated during the urban renaissance of the affluent 1990s, when people poured into Colorado by the droves and substantial investment in Denver’s infrastructure literally re-created the city.
It would be a whole new world.
