Larimer Square
Colorado
You are passing Larimer Square, the oldest commercial block in Denver. William Larimer laid it out in eighteen fifty-eight during the Pike's Peak gold rush, and it grew into the city's first real commercial corridor, lined with hotels, saloons, law offices, and dry goods stores. Most of the brick Victorian storefronts you see went up between the eighteen seventies and the eighteen nineties.
By mid-twentieth century the whole stretch had declined badly, and urban renewal plans called for the wrecking ball. In the early nineteen sixties, a preservationist named Dana Crawford organized investors to buy the block outright rather than let it be bulldozed. She made the case for adaptive reuse at a time when the idea was not yet widely accepted: restore the buildings, keep the streetscape, bring in new tenants.
In nineteen seventy-one, Denver City Council designated Larimer Square as the city's first official historic district, protecting the storefronts, the cornices, and the scale of the block. The move was a watershed moment that helped inspire the revival of all of Lower Downtown in the nineteen nineties. Crawford's Crawford Hotel at Union Station is named for her.
Today the block is dense with restaurants, bars, and boutiques, liveliest after dark on weekend nights.
