Nineteen Forty Two Market: Jennie Rogers and the House of Mirrors

As you pass nineteen forty two Market, its third story carries five carved stone faces, one woman and four men. Local legend says they represent Jennie Rogers and the four people she blackmailed to build this house. Jennie was born Leah Tehme in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on July fourth, eighteen forty three, and came to Denver around eighteen seventy nine.

She bought her first Market Street property in eighteen eighty for forty six hundred dollars. She purchased this lot on March twenty third, eighteen eighty eight, and opened the House of Mirrors here in eighteen eighty nine, the chief rival of Mattie Silks. It was the only building in Denver designed and constructed from the ground up to be a bordello.

The architect, William Quayle, was the same man who designed Trinity Methodist Church and West High School. Inside were twenty seven rooms. Sixteen bedrooms upstairs at tiered prices, seventy five cents for the cheapest, two dollars for a heated room in the Colorado winter.

Four parlors on the ground floor for greetings and drinks. A wine room. A kitchen.

And the ballroom that gave the house its name, hung floor to ceiling with mirrors three feet wide in oval frames carved with figures of nude women, lit by crystal chandeliers, walked on oriental carpets, with a grand piano in the corner. The blackmail story is this. Jennie's accomplice procured the skull of a Native American woman, buried it in the yard of a Denver businessman named George Splevin, and then knocked on Splevin's door posing as a peace officer with a forged warrant.

They dug, found the skull, and accused him of murdering his missing first wife. Splevin paid roughly seventeen thousand seven hundred and eighty dollars to make the charges disappear. That money raised this building.

Jennie's personal life ran on the same fuel. She married a bartender named Jack Wood in eighteen eighty nine. A few years later in a Salt Lake City rooming house, she walked in on him with another woman and shot him.

He lingered with the wound until eighteen ninety six, then died at age thirty eight. In April of nineteen oh four she married a man named Archibald Fitzgerald at Hot Springs. Six months in she learned he was a bigamist with two other wives, one in Kansas City and one inside Denver itself.

His spending nearly bankrupted her by nineteen oh eight. She died on October twenty ninth, nineteen oh nine, age sixty six, buried at Fairmount Cemetery under the name Leah Wood. Mattie Silks bought this building for fourteen thousand dollars and ran it until the federal anti vice laws closed Denver's brothels in nineteen fifteen.

After that the building became a Buddhist temple, then a warehouse, then restaurants. It is Dierks Bentley's Whiskey Row now. The faces are still up there, watching the traffic go by.