Leafing through “Historic Photos of Denver,” you can’t help but be saddened by what Denver has lost. Our city once boasted the Tabor Opera House, where the country’s top stars performed, and the Tabor Block. Well-heeled travelers stayed at the Inter-Ocean Hotel, built by the city’s first black entrepreneur; the Albany (a favorite of cattlemen); or the Windsor, where silver king H.A.W. Tabor died.
Denver’s business elite kept their money at the First National Bank at 15th and Blake streets, attended the movie palaces on Curtis, Denver’s “great white way,” and relaxed in the Denver Club on 17th Street. All of these buildings are gone, the victims of growth, changing times and urban renewal.
But they live again in all their splendor in “Historic Photos of Denver,” compiled by Myron Vallier, a librarian at the Denver Public Library. Vallier was responsible for cataloguing DPL’s vast Western History Department photo collection for the library’s website. All 200 black-and-white photographs in the book, many by the city’s premier photographers, are from the DPL collection, and readers can imagine how hard-pressed the author must have been to cull just 200 pictures from hundreds of thousands of images.
Still, if you have to pick just a few photographs to represent Denver, Vallier made excellent choices. These choice photos illustrate how Denver grew from a modest settlement into a Victorian city and eventually into a modern metropolis.
The author divides the city’s history into four parts – the early years (1858 to 1899); the City Beautiful movement, up to 1920; the roaring ’20s and the Depression, through 1939; and the war and postwar years, ending in 1972, when the metropolitan area’s period of greatest change began.
For anyone who lived here in the 1950s and 1960s, when just about anything that happened in Denver took place downtown, “Historic Photos of Denver” is a nostalgic journey.
Fashionable ladies shopped at the May Co., Daniels & Fisher and Gano-Downs, all on 16th Street, while their husbands immersed themselves in the finance district on 17th; the Equitable and Boston buildings were the most prestigious addresses. The medical profession dominated upper 16th, with doctors’ and dentists’ offices in the Republic and Majestic buildings. Dime stores were farther down 16th, toward Union Station. Remember Neisner Bros., with its rows of tables – you could see everything in the store at a glance – where merchandise really sold for a nickel or a dime? There was a luncheonette in the basement with green counters and stools. In those days, 16th and 17th were two-way streets; so was Broadway.
Points of pride
You dressed up to go to the movies at the Denver and the Paramount, which were just across the streetcar tracks from each other. Later, the trolleys were replaced by electric buses. The University of Denver was a football powerhouse back then, and Bear Mountain at the Denver Zoo was the first natural habitat built in the country. It’s clear from these photographs that past Denverites had much to be proud of.
The city had its shameful side, too, as the photos reveal. The Barclay Block at 18th and Larimer streets, where the Colorado legislature met for a brief time, turned into a flophouse where children were accosted in the hallways by drunks and prostitutes. Pollution hovered over the metropolitan area. Cattle pens edged the city, and when the wind was right, people complained, “You can smell the stockyards today.”
One striking photograph shows a Depression-era shantytown with shacks built of discarded tin and wood in the Platte River floodplain. But the residents had a nice view of the Capitol.
There was more to Denver than buildings, of course, and Vallier includes an 1868 picture of a murderer hanging from a tree in an act of early Denver justice. Old photos show a harness race at City Park, Rough Riders parading through the Mizpah Gate at Union Station and (the best picture in the book) Denver’s “Auto Bandit Chaser.” The 1921 armor-plated motorcar came equipped with mounted machine gun, siren and bell. Alas, the auto operated only a short time before it was felled in an accident.
But captured on film, the bandit chaser and the rest of early Denver live on, thanks to Myron Vallier and “Historic Photos of Denver.”
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist.
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NONFICTION
Historic Photos of Denver
By Myron Vallier
$39.95
