“There have been during my two week’s sojourn, more brawls, more fights, more pistol shots with criminal intent in this log city of one hundred and fifty dwellings, not three-fourths completed, not two-thirds inhabited, nor one-third fit to be, than in any community of no greater numbers on earth.”
— Horace Greeley, writing in “An Overland Journey” from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859.
It’s not a cow town anymore. So if you have bypassed the mile-high city to head to higher ground and some glitzy ski resort, you’ve made a big mistake. And if your treks to Colorado have all been for winter fun, you have compounded the faux pas.
Don’t believe it? Ask the half-million people who have made Denver home in the past five years. A sampling of their Denver:
– Beer capital. Boasting Coors Brewery in nearby Golden and the Wynkoop Brewing Co., the nation’s largest microbrewery, as well as 15 brew pubs and microbreweries all within walking distance in a newly spruced up downtown, Denver offers more than 40 brewskies.
– Bibliophile’s mecca. Denver recently opened a $64 million public library with 47 miles of bookshelves and a superb Western History collection. With more library cards per capita than any other city, Denver is also the home of the Tattered Cover Bookstore, the country’s largest independent bookstore.
– Outdoorsmen’s paradise. With more than 200 parks within city limits, 70 golf courses, and 130 miles of paved, off-street biking and jogging paths, Denver is the ideal destination for avid and amateur sports types. And the sun shines more than 300 days a year.
– Arts center. The new Denver Performing Arts Complex, which seats 9,000 patrons in nine theaters, is second only to New York City’s Lincoln Center as the nation’s largest such complex.
It is no wonder that Denver was selected as the site for the Summit of the Eight, a consortium of the heads of state of the seven largest industrialized countries and Russia, this summer.
After a multiyear hiatus, I returned to Denver with my husband in June to visit family and attend my 10th-year high school reunion.
My first encounter with my hometown awed me: The new Denver International Airport is stunning. The roof of the main terminal is Teflon-coated fabric shaped into 34 peaks, symbolizing the Rocky Mountains. Inside, it is airy and spacious and filled with real greenery and lovely art. In fact, DIA has an enormous public art program with a $7.5 million budget for local and national artists to create works for it. Unlike its predecessor, the 2-year-old DIA made you feel like you had arrived at a world-class city.
And it should, for the $4.3 billion that was spent to build it. One thing to note, however: You will pay for it. When we rented our car, we were charged a $27 airport user fee.
We began our tour of the city in the newly refurbished Lower Downtown, known to locals as LoDo–a moniker a la New York’s SoHo.
As a Denver resident for a half-dozen years and one who has relished trekking to downtown’s 16th Street Mall and Larimer Square, I was shocked by LoDo. Once a crime-ridden ghost town of empty warehouses and showrooms, LoDo has been ingeniously transformed into an entertainment area bustling with young people. LoDo’s Victorian-style brick buildings–once home to Buffalo Bill Cody and other lively characters–are now filled with hip restaurants, more than 70 sports bars, brew pubs, 40 art galleries, and lots of other shops–all within 26 square blocks and walking distance to Coors Field.
It was the 50,000-seat ballpark that brought back Lower Downtown, locals say. The trick: creating parking for 5,000 fans only, thus forcing everyone else to park in nearby downtown and walk through LoDo. But it was more than that. A beautiful brick structure, Coors Field is unlike other urban ball parks that stick out above the skyline like monstrous spaceships. Coors Field has character and keeps with the local architecture.
The so-called cheap seats, by the way, are cheap, and watching a game there is a pleasure. Views of the field are fantastic from every seat–and so are the views of the mountains. The ballpark has great food and lots of brews, too, most from the Denver area. Not surprisingly, it also boasts a brewery/restaurant, the Sandlot Brewery, right inside the park. And the fans are crazy to boot. The Rockies set 11 all-time attendance records in its first year of play.
While in LoDo, be sure to stop in at the Oxford Hotel, Denver’s oldest hotel, which has withstood the rough times in this area near Union Station. Head to the Cruise Room Bar, which looks just like it did when it opened in 1934. Patterned on a watering hole on the Queen Mary, the Cruise Room has lovely Art Deco scenes etched on its walls, which are bathed in pink neon. With Sinatra crooning from the jukebox, delight in a martini–the best of Colorado, according to The Denver Post. Ice cold and smooth, they come to you in a small pitcher that will fill your glass more than twice for less than $6.
From LoDo, stroll toward Tabor Center and the 16th Street Mall, making your way to the lovely State Capitol, Civic Center Park and the Denver Mint. You will find plenty of sidewalk cafes and breweries where you can quench your thirst and fill your belly along the way. Or you could stop someplace for takeout and eat on one of many whimsical benches, which, surrounded by flower pots or set in tiny green spaces, give the city an upbeat feeling.
A visit to Denver cannot be complete without a stop at The Tattered Cover Bookstore, either in LoDo or in Cherry Creek, southeast of downtown. Filled with overstuffed chairs and couches and dotted with lamps, this independent bookstore has what the mega-bookstores of today lack–knowledgeable clerks, unique charm and books chosen not for their marketability but just because people should be exposed to them.
Tattered Cover encourages shoppers to sit for a spell. Books abound, in standard categories such as philosophy and health as well as more obscure findings such as the afterlife and farming and ranching. If you visit Tattered in Cherry Creek, you might take in a meal at Fourth Story, the restaurant on the fourth floor, where you can nibble while you read.
If you really love books, as we do, you might also consider dropping in at the Denver Public Library, which opened in 1995. An impressive building constructed of honey-toned woods and brushed metals, the library is filled with comfortable desks. Among the highlights are a children’s library and a wing devoted to genealogical research and Western history.
Among our favorite destinations in every city we visit are zoos, and Denver’s was right up there with the more memorable ones. Consistently rated one of the top 10 in the country, the Denver Zoo is home to 3,500 animals, including 29 species of some of the world’s most endangered primates. The year-old, $14 million Primate Panorama boasts one of the largest gorilla habitats with lots of roaming space.
The day we visited, the zoo’s four gorillas were behind the glass pane in the indoors exhibit, giving us an unbelievably up-close and personal look at their lifestyles. Koundu, who weighs in at 580 pounds and is one of the largest gorillas known in captivity, calmly looked at us with curious, shiny eyes. Jo-Ray-K, one of two females, scurried about the enclosure with Cenzoo, her clingy year-old baby.
We loved the zoo’s many natural habitats as well as its free-roaming peacocks and ducks, which literally have the run of the place, scurrying across walkways and climbing into exhibit areas at will.
Denver also has a lovely Botanic Gardens and many museums, including the Museum of Natural History, the fourth-largest such in the country; the Denver Art Museum, which has what many consider to be one of the finest collections of Native American Art; and both the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center and the Colorado History Museum. Top that with Elitch Gardens, a $100 million amusement park that moved downtown a few years ago, and you can see there is plenty to do in this oft-forgotten city.
And much is still to come. The downtown area will be even more abuzz with the arrival of a Hard Rock Cafe and a Nike Town that will be part of a two-block-long shopping and entertainment complex along the 16th Street Mall. Called the Pavilion, it will be completed in 1998. Stadium Walk, another such complex near Coors Field, will feature Planet Hollywood and 100,000 square feet of shopping. Colorado’s Ocean Journey, a $93 million project, is scheduled to open nearby in 1999 as the first aquarium in the Rocky Mountain region.
All in all, Denver offers a Rocky Mountain High any time of the year, not just when the snow bunnies descend on the region.
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For information, call the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau at 800-393-8559 or www.denver.org.
