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    Denver's Sixteenth Street
    Denver's Sixteenth Street
    Denver's Sixteenth Street
    Ebook221 pages1 hour

    Denver's Sixteenth Street

    By Mark Barnhouse

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    The beloved thoroughfare at the heart of Denver, Sixteenth Street has always been the Mile-High City's "Main Street." Sixteenth Street got its jump start in 1879 when Leadville's Silver King and Colorado's richest man, Horace Austin Warner Tabor, came to town and built the city's first five-story skyscraper at the corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. In coming years, Sixteenth Street became Denver's main retail center as shopkeepers and department store owners constructed ever-more impressive palaces, culminating in the Daniels and Fisher Tower--the city's tallest building for five decades and the symbol of the city. In the second half of the 20th century, Sixteenth Street saw major changes, including the creation of one of the most successful pedestrian malls in the country, an archetype of the power of great urban places and an inspiration to other cities, large and small.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439625163
    Denver's Sixteenth Street
    Author

    Mark Barnhouse

    Join historian and Denver native Mark A. Barnhouse on a journey through time as he presents the past Denver alongside the present one.

    Read more from Mark Barnhouse

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      Book preview

      Denver's Sixteenth Street - Mark Barnhouse

      known.

      INTRODUCTION

      Denver’s Sixteenth Street, like all great urban thoroughfares, is a work in progress. Having been platted as G Street when Denver City was first laid out by Gen. William Larimer, for most of its 150-year history it has served as the main street of one of America’s key regional hubs. Other streets claim prominent roles in the city’s history: Larimer Street, bisecting Sixteenth Street, was home to the many of the early city’s important businesses; nearby Seventeenth Street was for years known as the Wall Street of the Rockies; Broadway and Colfax Avenue, thanks respectively to their great width and length, have been sometimes referred to as main streets; and today East First Avenue in Cherry Creek functions as the city’s most important center for upscale retailers and their customers. But none of these streets have ever been able to lay claim to Sixteenth Street’s central place in the hearts of Denverites.

      It is to Sixteenth Street that people have traditionally come to celebrate the ends of wars, pay tribute to famous people when they have come to town, or brag about the city’s own achievements in the form of municipal parades. During major conventions, it is to this street that delegates have always flocked, from the Elks in 1913 to the Democrats in 2008. For holidays—from New Year’s Eve fireworks to Fourth of July parades and visits with Santa Claus—Sixteenth Street has always been the beloved place to mark annual traditions.

      But it has always been more than just a place for special occasions. People have come to Sixteenth Street to shop, see movies or plays, answer the call of a jury summons, visit a doctor or dentist, mail a package, conduct banking, or ice-skate. Countless thousands of Denverites have worked, and continue to work, on the city’s liveliest street. It is a place where people of all classes, famous or not, have mingled in a most democratic way. Sad and terrible things have also happened here: People have jumped off of buildings, been victims of robberies, and had to flee from an angry mob (such as the anti-Chinese rioters of 1880). Sixteenth Street is a place where real life happens, for better or worse.

      This book is divided into seven chapters, with dates corresponding roughly to major periods of change on Sixteenth Street. By arranging the book this way, the reader will get a sense of the process of change on Sixteenth Street—still an ongoing story—and also of how the wider history of Denver, Colorado, and the United States are reflected in the microcosm of this one 26-block-long place. The majority of images were taken between Broadway and Larimer Street, but there are also scenes and stories from the former industrial area below Larimer (today’s LoDo), the rail yards, and all the way to the street’s terminus at Tejon Street in Highland. All chapters feature historical introductions; the following is an outline of the story.

      In its first two decades, Sixteenth Street was not much different from Seventeenth or Eighteenth Streets—it was not the epicenter of town that it would later become. There were several good hotels, and from Arapahoe to Broadway it was mostly residential. In 1879, Silver King Horace Tabor arrived and put the city’s finest office building, the Tabor Block, at the key corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. Seeing that the fashionable world was moving southeastward, he recognized that Sixteenth Street was a good investment and, thanks to its early public transportation, was likely to become the new main street. He followed his Tabor Block with his Tabor Grand Opera House in 1881, and suddenly Denver was putting on adult airs. The silver-related boom times that changed the face of Sixteenth Street continued until 1893, when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, devastating Colorado’s economy and causing a nationwide depression.

      Denver and Sixteenth Street bounced back slowly but surely from this setback, and by the early 1900s, the city was again thriving, with entrepreneurs putting up new buildings and generating more trade. Throughout the eras of populism, bossism, and progressivism, Sixteenth Street came more and more to assume the main street mantle. Like the rest of America, after World War I, Sixteenth Street saw boom times return, and not unlike the earlier silver boom, the one that ended in 1929 was based on a promise of easy money. Big stores expanded, and new players came to town.

      The Depression, when not much new was built, followed, and then World War II brought material deprivations. By the war’s end, Sixteenth Street was a worn-out looking, though still-thriving place. A wave of modernization followed, with many ornate facades covered up in a vain attempt to make the street look up-to-date. But the great stores on Sixteenth Street could not fight the national trend toward suburbanization, and slowly Denverites began shifting their buying patterns so that, by the late 1960s, it was clear the third boom, that of the postwar period, was over.

      Urban renewal, either government driven or through private enterprise, followed in the wake of downtown’s declining fortunes. Larimer Street had become the epicenter of skid row Denver, and in 1967, voters overwhelmingly approved the Denver Urban Renewal Authority’s (DURA) Skyline plan to demolish 120 acres of downtown for the promise of gleaming new towers. For Sixteenth Street, this meant losing several important buildings, including the Tabor Block that had been so pivotal to the street’s fortunes nine decades earlier. Uptown, several important buildings were lost to the oil boom frenzy in the 1970s and 1980s, when developers grabbed them as sites for maximum-square-footage office blocks, not valuing them for their adaptive reuse potential.

      Finally, in an attempt to arrest and reverse the decline of Sixteenth Street’s importance as the premier retail center of Colorado, downtown boosters in the 1970s decided to build a pedestrian mall on Sixteenth Street. Aided by federal money available during the Jimmy Carter administration, the Regional Transportation District built the Transitway/Mall as a solution to downtown traffic woes, diverting hundreds of buses from the streets to two terminals at either end of the mall, linked by a free shuttle that not only ferried workers to their offices, but also served as a kind of horizontal elevator for downtown visitors at all times of day. That the Sixteenth Street Mall’s arrival did not stop the department stores from leaving (as if anything could when Americans’ buying habits were shifting away

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