DENVER — Denver has had its ups and downs when it comes to historic preservation.
Entire blocks of downtown buildings were leveled in the 1960s and ’70s in the name of urban renewal. In many cases, that meant scraping away the structures and laying down asphalt for parking lots.
That period also birthed efforts to save some of the city’s most significant spaces, a movement that has remained strong since Larimer Square became the city’s first historic district in the early 1970s. Today there are 59 legally protected historic districts in Denver and more than 350 individual landmarks.
Annie Levinsky has been at the forefront of efforts to preserve and celebrate Denver’s historic buildings and places for almost two decades through her work with preservation-focused nonprofit Historic Denver. After a nearly 14-year run as Historic Denver’s executive director, Levinsky is leaving the organization this summer to take a role with the statewide historical society, History Colorado.
In the wake of her impending job change, The Denver Post asked Levinsky to list the five most important historical saves in the city in her opinion. Here is her list:
1) The Molly Brown House
The drive to save the home of Titanic survivor and women’s rights advocate Margaret “Molly” Brown at 1340 Pennsylvania St. is what got Historic Denver off the ground.
A group of Denver residents incorporated as Historic Denver Inc. in 1970 to restore and protect the roughly 7,000-square-foot Capitol Hill mansion that Molly Brown owned (originally with her husband and then later by herself) from 1894 until her death in 1932. The so-called “House of Lions” was set to be demolished to make way for, that’s right, a parking lot.
Today the house is a museum highlighting Brown’s life including her travels, her philanthropic efforts to support the city’s poor around the turn of the century and her advocacy for women’s rights. According to Historic Denver, an average of 45,000 people take guided tours of the property each year.
Originally built in the 1880s in a mix of Classic Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque styles, Molly Brown and her husband J.J. added to it significantly over the next three decades including adding front and back porches and a third floor, according to Historic Denver research.
In 2018, the organization completed a $1.3 million restoration and update project to return the house to its Victorian splendor but also add bathrooms and a lift to make the house more accessible to people with disabilities.
2) Ninth Street Historic Park
The destruction of Denver’s oldest neighborhood to make way for the Auraria college campus on the southwestern side of downtown has had effects that have reverberated through generations of families.
The 50-year anniversary of that displacement is being recognized this year. Full-ride college scholarships are available to people who lived in the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood prior to the takeover and their descendants.
There is a piece of the original Auraria neighborhood still standing, the block-long Ninth Street Historic District. Designated in 1973, according to city records, the district, located along Ninth between Curtis and Champa streets is home to roughly a dozen original houses.
Officials with the University of Colorado Denver announced plans this year to restore some of the homes to be more true to the area’s history. The plans also call for moving some university offices out of the homes to dedicate them to more community-driven uses such as a possible office for the scholarship program.
Described in simple terms on the History Colorado website, the Ninth Street District is a “surviving block of Victorian era residences (that) typifies a modest Denver residential neighborhood spanning the years from 1873 to 1905.”
Now it’s surrounded by a modern university campus.
3) The Five Points Historic Cultural District
Designated as a historic district in 2002, this six-block street of Welton Street between 24th and 30th streets was created to honor, protect and shine a spotlight on Denver’s Black history.
Five Points and particularly Welton Street were the epicenter of Black culture and community in Denver in the early part of the 20th century. The area even earned the nickname the “Harlem of the West” when its clubs and venues were attracting jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.
The historic character of the neighborhood is anchored by a handful of landmark structures including Fire Station No. 3 at 2500 N. Washington St. and the F. Douglass Undertakings Building, which was home to Douglass Undertaking Co., a Black funeral home rumored to be started by the son of Frederick Douglass.
The crown jewel of the district is the Rossonian Hotel, home to the city’s preeminent jazz club in its heyday and the hotel of choice for the musicians and other influential members of the Black community, according to city research.
Dense, new development has popped up in the district in recent years. The city released a package of design standards and guidelines in 2016 aimed at fostering preservation but also clearing a path for the area to draw new investment to support it as a commercial hub into the future.
The renewed development focus has not been without controversy. Denver native and former NBA All-Star Chauncy Billups was attached to an effort to rehab and reopen the Rossonian Hotel, which has been vacant since the 1990s. Billups pulled out of the project in 2019, his manager told BusinessDen earlier this month, citing the property’s controlling owner, development firm Palisade Partners, changing the vision and direction for the still yet-to-get-going effort.
4) Denver Union Station
It seems silly that Denver Union Station, the transit hub that in recent years has become a bustling and trendy place for a night out in Lower Downtown, could ever have been viewed as anything other than a historic landmark.
As historian Tom Noel put it in a column for The Denver Post in 2014, “Union Station, undoubtedly the most important building in Denver’s history, opened in 1881 as the city’s largest and most stylish structure. The train station transformed Denver from a little village in the middle of nowhere into the rail hub of the Rockies. ”
But the station itself wasn’t made a city landmark until 2004, city records show.
After train travel fell out of favor with the American public, Union Station and the area around it became blighted and neglected. Things started to turn around in 1988 when the Lower Downtown Historic District was created, Noel noted in that 2014 column.
Union Station is not technically in the LoDo district but it is undoubtedly the neighborhood’s crown jewel, standing out at the far end of 17th Street.
A more than $450 million renovation to the station that wrapped up in 2014 brought in new features including the Crawford Hotel, named for Dana Crawford, the city’s most celebrated preservationist and a catalyst for the station being restored.
5) Larimer Square
It was Crawford’s efforts to protect the 19th century buildings clustered along the 1400 block of Larimer Street that kicked historic preservation work in Denver into high gear.
Larimer Square became Denver’s first historic district in the early ’70s with other iconic corners of the city like Civic Center following shortly thereafter.
There are 22 historic structures on the block, some dating back to the 1880s. Today the block is lined with fashionable boutiques and fine dining restaurants, a must-see for many out-of-town visitors.
While it has been celebrated and held up as a testament to the value of preservation, even Larimer Square faced pressure from Denver’s development boom of the last decade.
Previous owner Jeff Hermanson and his partners with the real estate company Urban Villages floated plans in 2018 to build a tall apartment building and hotel in the opposite alleys behind the historic buildings. The motivation, they said, was to bring in new money to help pay for $130 million in overdue maintenance for the historic buildings.
The plans faced considerable blowback from Crawford, Historic Denver and others and never got off the ground. Hermanson sold the block to a North Carolina real estate investment firm in 2020.
On her list of biggest historical saves in Denver, Levinsky lists Larimer Square twice, noting that preservationists had to twice thwart redevelopment threats. Honorable mentions included the Emily Griffith Opportunity School building at 1250 Welton Street, the La Alma Lincoln Park Historic Cultural District that honors Chicano heritage in west Denver and the John Henderson House at 2600 Milwaukee St. Henderson was the state’s first licensed Black architect.
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