Larimer Square: From Skid Row to Saved

As you drive along this block, you are passing the front of Denver's beginning. The four story brick storefronts here, the fourteen hundred block of Larimer, went up almost entirely between the eighteen seventies and the eighteen nineties. The earliest, Apollo Hall, opened on September fifteenth, eighteen fifty nine, as a saloon and billiard parlor run by a man named Libeus Barney.

In September of eighteen sixty, Denver's founding fathers gathered upstairs from the bar, in a room that smelled of whiskey and tobacco, and chartered the People's Government of the City of Denver. The city government was born inside a saloon. Two doors down is the Granite Building at fourteen sixty Larimer.

Two brothers named George and William Clayton put it up in eighteen eighty two, William having served a term as mayor. They built it from rusticated blocks of pink Pikes Peak granite quarried up the South Platte Canyon near Buffalo Creek, set on cast iron columns from Colorado Iron Works. The McNamara dry goods operation inside it employed thirty six clerks year round, swelling to two hundred at Christmas.

Across the street the Kettle Building from eighteen seventy three was a butcher shop owned by George Kettle, who had walked into Denver in April of eighteen fifty nine. At the corner of Fourteenth stands the Miller Building. From eighteen eighty nine into the nineteen thirties this corner was Gahan's Saloon, owned by a city councilman named William Gahan and full of the same politicians and reporters who worked across the street at City Hall.

When Colorado went dry in nineteen twelve, Gahan's became Gahan's Soft Drink Parlor, with a speakeasy in the basement. It survived Prohibition while four hundred other Denver bars went under. By the nineteen sixties the entire block was skid row.

The Denver Urban Renewal Authority, which preservationists called the Denver Urban Removal Authority, was lining up demolition orders. In nineteen sixty four, a woman named Dana Crawford incorporated Larimer Square Associates, raised the money from New York Life Insurance after every bank in Denver turned her down, and bought eighteen buildings on this block. In nineteen seventy one, Denver City Council made this the city's first historic district, the first proof in America that a block like this could be adaptively reused instead of bulldozed.

Every storefront rolling past your window right now is here because of one woman.