Colorado History: A birds-eye view of Denver 100 years ago

As the nation’s 25th largest city, Denver could boast a population of 213,381 in 1911, a respectable gain of nearly 80,000 people during the first decade of the new century. The city had finally recovered from the Depression of 1893, a disaster that, coupled with an earlier switch to the gold standard, had crushed silver kings like Horace Tabor. As heavy industry and agriculture replaced mining as the state’s economic base, Denver turned to entrepreneurs like flour miller J.K. Mullen, brewers Adolph Coors and Philip Zang, cement manufacturer Charles Boettcher and rubber products producer Charles Gates, realizing that diversification would be key to survival. These new kings of industry would form the backbone of a new industrial era.

By 1911, Denver was back on its feet, still struggling to overcome the raw frontier town image created by Eastern journalists and Ned Buntline’s 10-cent paperbacks. As the National Western Stock Growers Association built a 6,000-seat arena in 1906 to host the January stock show and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured the country, Denver waffled between promoting and repudiating its cowtown heritage. When the city boosters, headed by Mayor Robert Speer, scored the 1908 Democratic Convention, it went a long way toward gilding the lily. That year, hoping to put the city on the map, Denverites built an ultra-modern auditorium to accommodate the doomed Democrats and their free silver candidate, Williams Jennings Bryan. The Neoclassical showplace became Speer’s first major architectural coup.

The most powerful politician Denver has ever seen, Robert Walter Speer served as mayor from 1904 – 1912 and 1916 – 1918. His genius for politics, coupled with charisma and bulldog determination, made for ardent supporters and bitter enemies. A self-proclaimed political “boss,” the mayor transformed the dusty and uninviting mining and rail center into a modern city with verdant parks and gardens and a tree-lined boulevard and parkway system. His blue ribbon project, a downtown thoroughfare along Cherry Creek, was later renamed Speer Boulevard in his honor. As one friend said upon his death, “Denver is and always will be his monument.”

Downtown Denver during the holiday season, circa 1911.

In 1911, Denverites took pride in the newly-constructed Daniels and Fisher Tower, said to be the third highest structure in the country, The Civic Center Park and the Pioneer Monument and Fountain also debuted in 1911, the latter once again paying tribute to the rip-roaring past. When sculptor Frederick MacMonnies tried to top the fountain with a bronze Indian, however, irate Denverites with long memories insisted on a figure of Kit Carson instead.

Like almost any metropolis, Denver was a city of contrasts, with pollution, poverty and deplorable slums not far from millionaires’ palatial mansions. The city’s flat terrain made rapid construction of a rail system possible, allowing a spread to the suburbs as early as the 1870s. Although Denver had at least 3,000 automobiles in 1911, unpaved bumpy roads were the rule. Most people still traveled by streetcar, which allowed families to escape the city’s saloons, congestion, crime and pollution for pleasant communities like Park Hill, Highlands, South Denver and Montclair.

The less affluent, particularly recent immigrants, could not afford to live in the suburbs, or even pay a streetcar fare. Many formed compact neighborhoods such as North Denver’s “Little Italy” or the Globeville, Elyria, Argo and Swansea districts populated by Slavs and German Russians. Russian Jews centralized in West Colfax neighborhoods and the most populous group, the Germans, still lived primarily in the Auraria (west Denver), as did the Irish until after the turn of the century. The poorest of the poor, regardless of nationality, eked out a living along the river bottoms of the South Platte.

City life, although simpler than today, held numerous hazards. Medicine was still primitive before antibiotics and diphtheria, smallpox and scarlet fever kept mortality rates high, particularly among infants and children. Tuberculosis suffers continued to flock to Denver, where sunshine, dry air and the pristine climate often affected a miraculous cure.

: Families who could afford automobiles enjoyed Sunday outings.

For the working class, life was hard. In 1911, Denver judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey and journalist Harvey J. O’Higgins published The Beast, a scathing indictment of city leaders like William Gray Evans, who owned the Denver Tramway Co. Lindsey blamed most social ills on the greed of the economically privileged and the illicit connection between business and government. In the days before Workman’s Compensation and Social Security, workers had no pension plans and no protection in case of industrial accidents. Employers ignored child labor laws and legislation mandating an 8-hour workday, forcing people to work 12-hour days, six days a week just to provide necessities. Labor unrest was rampant during the early years of the century, evidenced by the violent Ludlow Massacre of 1914 and the Tramway Strike of 1921.

Life wasn’t much easier for the average housewife. Caring for a home and family was an exhausting proposition, especially for those who could not afford to hire help. Laundry had to be cleaned on a washboard or a newfangled washing machine and took two full days, including ironing. Baking took at least another day, not to mention daily cooking on coal or wood-burning stoves. Dusting, cleaning mirrors, airing out bedrooms and cleaning linen, scrubbing floors and polishing furniture had to be done at least weekly. During the requisite seasonal overhauls, the house would be scrubbed from the attic to the cellar, rugs and curtains cleaned, furniture repaired or reupholstered and every room-disinfected floor to ceiling.

On the bright side, however, in 1911 people were far too busy to talk much about “stress.” Our great-grandparents took pleasure in simple things, like a streetcar ride to Elitch Gardens, a City Park Band Concert or an automobile trek along the Lariat Loop on a Sunday. Swimming and boating were favorite pastimes at Sloan and City Park Lakes, and winters were cold enough for ice skating and sledding down Eighth Avenue. An entire Saturday at the movies still cost just a few pennies, as did a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.

Across the ocean, however, whispers of World War I were already in the wind.

Coupled with the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, the War impacted the city in ways no one could have imagined. Within a decade, for better or worse, the face of America and life in Denver had changed forever.