“Why lie? I need a beer.”
“Spaceship crashed. Need money to get back to Mars.”
“Homeless. Anything helps. God bless.”
Museums often focus on the rich, the famous, the sensational and/or the artistic. Those celebrities, of course, can help subsidize exhibits about themselves or find wealthy patrons who will promote them and their achievements.
History Colorado is preparing a very different sort of show at its center at 1200 Broadway. It will spotlight folks that many hope will just go away. Yet the homeless always have been and always will be with us. The exhibit will focus on a population that will not support it or even scrape together the money to see it.
Bill Convery, the outgoing state historian, maestro of exhibits and a huge loss in the recent cuts at History Colorado, reports that the idea began with James Peterson, assistant curator for artifacts.
Peterson was fascinated by some of the signs used by street beggars. “I wondered,” he said, “what in that person’s life led them to this street corner to depend on the generosity of passersby simply to survive.”
Out of his own pocket, Peterson paid street corner beggars up to $20 for their signs and stories. He also offered them a fresh piece of cardboard and a marker.
Peterson placed a jar and his own sign, “Brother, can you spare a dime for an oral history?” in the break room at the History Colorado Center. His colleagues donated generously.
This proposed exhibit wound its way upward through museum channels not always excited about an unprofitable and controversial exhibit. Somehow, this bottoms-up proposal has turned into reality: “Searching for Home: Homelessness in Colorado History” is scheduled to open at the History Colorado Center on Nov. 7, about the time the homeless will be hunkering down for the onset of freezing temperatures or heading for warmer climates.
Many of the fortune-seekers rushing into Gold Rush Colorado Territory were homeless, at least for awhile. A few, of course, struck it rich and built mansions and opera houses. Such is the story of Horace Tabor and his second wife, Baby Doe. During the flush 1880s, they were one of the richest couples in Colorado, and were even able to buy Horace a U.S. Senate seat.
The silver crash of 1893 changed all that. The Tabors lost their mansion, their opera house, their mines and their fortune. Baby Doe wound up in a shack in Leadville, where she was found frozen to death in February 1935. As the History Colorado exhibit will point out, the Tabor tale is a reminder that any of us could become homeless. This exhibit also tells the story of Blair Griffith, Miss Colorado 2011. She found herself homeless when significant health issues plagued her family.
Visitors will learn about the changing relationships between the Denver Police Department and urban homelessness and read differing viewpoints on whether the Unauthorized Camping Ordinance criminalizes homelessness.
Peterson emphasizes that “this exhibit is not about panhandlers. The signs are what the broader general public often associates with the down-and-outs. As such, they are really only the entry point into a much more deeper conversation about the enormity and complexity of the homelessness experience.”
Tom Noel, who teaches Colorado history at CU-Denver, welcomes your comments at .
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