Coors Field

Off to your right is Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies since nineteen ninety-five. Before this ballpark existed, the Rockies spent their first two seasons, nineteen ninety-three and nineteen ninety-four, playing at Mile High Stadium, drawing over four and a half million fans in that first year alone, the most in baseball history at the time. That crowd pressure actually changed the blueprints: designers added an entire upper deck section during construction to squeeze in more seats.

The ballpark was designed by HOK Sport, the same firm behind Camden Yards in Baltimore, and you can see the philosophy written into every brick. The architects sank the field twenty-one feet below street level so the walls would match the height of the surrounding LoDo warehouses, then clad the whole structure in the same hand-laid red brick and stone trim you find throughout this neighborhood. The cost was two hundred fifteen million dollars, about three quarters of it covered by a one tenth of one percent sales tax that six surrounding counties voted to approve in nineteen ninety, before Denver even had a team.

The park opened on April twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-five, with Colorado beating the Mets eleven to nine in fourteen innings. Look up at the upper deck and you will spot a single row of purple seats running all the way around. That is row twenty, marking exactly five thousand two hundred eighty feet above sea level, one mile high.

Underneath your feet, the story gets stranger. When crews broke ground at Twentieth and Blake, they unearthed actual dinosaur bone fragments, now housed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The discovery was modest, just a few small pieces, but it inspired the team to pick a triceratops as its mascot.

Dinger was born, hatching theatrically from a prop egg back in nineteen ninety-four, before the ballpark was even finished. Out in deep center field sits the Rockpile, a bleacher section so far from home plate that seats there originally sold for one dollar. Beyond it, three waterfalls and seven fountains erupt forty feet into the air after every home run and every win.

And this whole neighborhood around you, the restaurants, breweries, and lofts, most of it came to life because Coors Field landed here first.