Alley scene, Denver Colorado. Summer 2024.

 

Prairie mural, downtown Denver

 

Colorado Baseball. Coors Field, Denver Colorado.

 

Lower Downtown Denver

 A building baring a variety of old signs in Lower Downtown Denver

Grain/Hay elevator, Lower Downtown Denver.

 A grain and elevator in Lower Downtown Denver, clearly no longer serving that purpose.

Denver in 1859 Mural, Denver Colorado.

 A mural on a building in the Denver Heights district of Denver.

Denver Heights Sign

I'm not sure what this building was, but to the extent that I can read the sign, suitcases and traveling bags are advertised.

The Big Chief Bottling Company, Denver Colorado.

Big Chief was a soda brand that was bottled across the United States including Colorado, where this building housed that enterprise.

Historic Sidewalk Maps, Denver Colorado.

The City of Denver has municipal offices right downtown, and in front of their municipal office building, they have a series of maps in the sidewalk, depicting Denver in prior eras.   These are photos of a few of them.

Baseball mural, 1998 All Star Game. Denver Colorado.

This mural is directly across from Coors field in downtown Denver.  The All Star Game was played at Coors Field in 2021, but this mural celebrates the 1998 game.

Street corner, Denver Colorado.

 

West of Surrender, Denver Colorado.

 

From a bar and grill, West of Surrender, in downtown Denver.

Lex Anteinternet: "Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

Lex Anteinternet: "Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.: .

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

I really wondered how it was hanging on.

I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog.  It wasn't very photogenetic anyway.  But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right.  It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.

COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.

Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.

Denver’s outgrown us.

So stated one of the owners.

I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation.  Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection.  The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day.  It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.

But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there.  A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.

But that's true of a lot of Denver now.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way.  The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are.  But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back.  Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today.  And the change hasn't overall been a good one.

Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living.  It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver.  In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown.  It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.

University Building, Denver Colorado.

What's depicted here is the smokestack of the University Building in Denver Colorado.

The University Building was built in 1910 as the A. C. Foster Building and was renamed in 1921 when it was donated to Denver University.  It contains many art deco embellishments.

A more recent embellishment to the building, which is now an apartment building, has been the painting of its smokestack as a No. 2 pencil, thereby playing on its name.

La Boheme, Denver Colorado.

This is a photograph of the mural on the side of La Boheme in Denver, which euphemistically calls itself a "gentleman's cabaret". By that it means, no doubt, something on the order of "strip club".

La Boheme, which means the female Bohemian in French, is located in what was once a pretty rough downtown Denver neighborhood which went through gentrification after Coors Field was constructed. The transformation in this area was remarkable and its still ongoing, Colorado's legalization of marijuana had reintroduced a feeling of decay into downtown once again.  At any rate, in spite of many old buildings being bought and converted into new upscale uses, and in spite of being located across the street from the downtown Embassy Suites, a nice Denver business hotel, La Boheme keeps on keeping on.

I can't recall this mural being there until just recently, so it's presumably a new addition.  Perhaps keeping in mind where it is, it's not shockingly skanky and is actually fairly well done.  It's placement resulted in a minor debate with my travel companions on whether it depicts Marilyn Monroe, Jenny McCarthy, or none of the above.  The first two choices would in some ways emphasize the tragic nature of the establishments purpose.  Anyhow, it's fairly well done except that the figures left hand, which isn't really visible in this photo, is quite meaty, making for an odd appearance.

Postscript

The image is in fact that of Marilyn Monroe.  I ran across it by accident elsewhere on the net.

Levee murals, Denver Colorado.

The City of Denver has revitalized Lower Downtown Denver ("LoDo") into an area which has become a hot district of the city.  Much of that revitalization involved redeveloping what had been an industrial area into a mixed residential urban district.

Everything depicted here, demonstrates that.

This area was once a very industrial area separating the Denver Heights from Downtown Denver, and it was all pretty gritty in some ways, although the Heights itself had been residential throughout.  Now, it's all redone.

Included in the redoing were these efforts at murals.  I can't say I regard them as a success, frankly, but the project is ongoing.

Wilson Drug Company, Old Highlands District, Denver Colorado

This is a bad photograph, taken from inside my truck, of a building marked "Wilson Drug Co." in the Old Highlands District of Denver.  I don't know how old this building is, but it's old.

The Equitable Building, Denver Colorado.

These photographs depict Denver's spectacular 1992 vintage Equitable Building.

Still used as an office building, the ornate interior of the building more closely recalls a church than an office building, replete with stained glass windows.

Denver has really had its ups and downs over the years.  It's amazing to think that this building has weathered the storm of them.

Scenes from the A Trail. Abstract murals

Scenes from the A Train. Is it art, or graffiti?