“Historic Preservation and the Imagined West: Albuquerque, Denver, and Seattle,” by Judy Mattivi Morley (University Press of Kansas, 216 pages, $29.95)
It’s no surprise to Denverites that Larimer Square is one of the premier historic preservation districts in the United States and its founder, Dana Crawford, a preservation icon. Once called the most powerful woman in Denver (maybe she still is), Crawford pioneered preservation techniques, such as corporate ownership of virtually all of Larimer Square’s historic buildings, which give the district a central authority. She also adopted a shopping center management style.
Larimer Square almost wasn’t saved. Urban renewal was breathing down Crawford’s neck when she put together Larimer Square Associates, with funding from preservation visionaries, including Pat and Jim Schroeder, then Denver attorneys, and began acquiring the buildings on the 1400 block of Larimer Street.
The surrounding blocks, filled with architectural gems, were acquired by the urban renewal authority and bulldozed, and Larimer Square is all that’s left of what Crawford called the West’s most historic street. It may not be, but hyperbole is another preservation technique.
So it is not surprising that Larimer Square is one of the featured cities in “Historic Preservation and the Imagined West,” a look at how preservation works in our part of the country. The West’s development, with its myriad boomtowns, was different from settlement patterns in the East. The West had few factories with their accompanying tenements, and politicians viewed their cities as free from labor strife. Without the large in-migration of factory workers, Denver boasted a higher level of education among residents, and fewer slum-dwellers. For good or bad, Westerners, especially residents of Los Angeles, led the flight to the suburbs.
The interest in historic preservation in the West coincided with a national preservation shift away from saving rare buildings to salvaging structures that were representative. Denver did both, of course, saving the Molly Brown House at the same time Larimer Square was being developed. Most of the city’s preservation efforts have gone to finding adaptive use for old buildings. That success has been in part because of preservationist/developers, such as Peter Dominick, who saw ways to make old structures economical. Judy Mattivi Morley, author of “Historic Preservation and the Imagined West,” includes a chapter on LoDo.
Morley makes a real contribution to preservation by writing in detail about Denver as well as Albuquerque and Seattle and the pioneering efforts that worked (and failed) in these three cities. She tells how urban areas of the West flourished – and floundered – and includes brief histories, only slightly flawed.
As the founder of Denver History Tours, she ought to know the brothels in Denver were on Market Street, not Larimer (although the pimps hung out in the gambling halls in the 1600 block of Larimer), and that the Navarre was a gambling parlor, not a whorehouse. But maybe that’s more preservation hyperbole.
“John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier,” by Albert L. Hurtado (University Oklahoma, 416 pages, $34.95)
John Sutter has come down in history as a grandiose dreamer and generous man whose fortune as well as his way of life were destroyed when gold was discovered in his millstream. Poor Sutter could have been the richest man in America and possibly the world if not for greedy ’49ers.
Well, according to Albert L. Hurtado in “John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier,” that’s not exactly the truth. Oh, gold seekers illegally claimed Sutter’s land, but it was Sutter himself who was responsible for his business debacles. One contemporary called him a “sappy-headed fool.”
Sutter arrived in California years before the gold rush, when the Spanish ruled the West Coast. He quickly assembled a huge amount of land near present-day Sacramento and built an agricultural empire dependent on Indian labor. But he was easily flattered and prey to any schemer, and he accumulated huge debts. He expected the gold rush to help his financial situation, but he encumbered his property so much that in the end, he wound up with nothing. Readers are left with little sympathy for the foolish Sutter.
“John Sutter” is an in-depth look at Sutter and his times. Readers may get bogged down in the details, but it’s a great story of how a man squandered a great fortune.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on regional nonfiction.
