Brown Palace Hotel

On your right stands the Brown Palace Hotel. Henry Cordes Brown homesteaded Capitol Hill and held onto a triangular plot where two street grids collide at an angle, which gave the building its distinctive wedge shape. Brown hired architect Frank Edbrooke, and the hotel opened in eighteen ninety-two.

Edbrooke clad the nine-story steel and iron frame in Colorado red granite and Arizona sandstone, and the structure made the cover of Scientific American as one of the first fireproof buildings in the country. It was designed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy. Inside, eight floors of guest balconies wrap a soaring central court topped by a stained-glass ceiling.

The lobby walls are lined with Mexican onyx in shades of topaz and cream. The hotel draws water from a private artesian well sunk deep underground. Afternoon tea is a long-running tradition here.

Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower have slept here. Eisenhower used the hotel so often that it earned the nickname the Western White House. The meeting that led to the founding of the Denver Broncos took place in the lobby in nineteen fifty-nine.

The Beatles, John Wayne, and Helen Keller all passed through the lobby. More than a century on, it still operates as a hotel.