Lower Downtown Historic District

You are rolling through Lower Downtown right now, the blocks everyone calls LoDo. This is where Denver began. In November of eighteen fifty-eight, a land speculator named General William Larimer staked a claim at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, drove in his stakes, and laid out a street grid.

Many of those original names are still under your wheels. Wynkoop Street honors the first sheriff of Denver City. Blake remembers an early merchant.

Wazee takes its name from an Indigenous woman. And Larimer Street, of course, carries the general's own name. These began as rough wagon tracks through a mining camp.

Within a generation they were lined with the four and five story brick warehouses that still stand today, built to move groceries, mining equipment, and dry goods off the railcars that converged on Union Station. By the middle of the twentieth century, the freight had dried up and so had the money. Union Station went from dozens of trains a day to one or two.

Hotels became flophouses, and the neighborhood became what people flatly called skid row. Urban renewal crews demolished roughly twenty percent of the original buildings in the nineteen sixties and seventies before anyone stopped them. What was left, one hundred twenty-seven contributing historic structures, finally got protection in March of nineteen eighty-eight, when the Denver City Council created the Lower Downtown Historic District.

That same year, a geologist turned entrepreneur named John Hickenlooper and three partners opened Wynkoop Brewing in a century-old mercantile building at Eighteenth and Wynkoop. It was Colorado's first brewpub, opening into a neighborhood with a forty percent vacancy rate. That bet aged well.

Hickenlooper went on to become mayor of Denver, then governor of Colorado, then a United States senator. Coors Field arrived in nineteen ninety-five, and the lofts, galleries, and restaurants followed fast. The preservationist Dana Crawford had laid the groundwork decades earlier, saving the eighteen hundred block of Larimer Street, which became Denver's first designated historic district in nineteen seventy-one.

Today those same Victorian brick walls hold cocktail bars and coffee shops, and the sidewalks on a Friday night look nothing like skid row.