Spencer Penrose and the Broadmoor

Spencer Penrose arrived in Colorado Springs in eighteen ninety-two as a young man from a prominent Philadelphia family with no money, no prospects, and a reputation as the family embarrassment. His brother Richard, a successful geologist, wrote with news of a gold rush in the mountains west of town. A friend named Charles Tutt offered to front him a stake.

Penrose took the deal. He spent the next decade turning a modest Cripple Creek real estate business into a gold-processing operation and then, with the proceeds, co-founding the Utah Copper Company in nineteen oh three. That company, which eventually became part of Kennecott Utah Copper, would account for ninety-five percent of his total wealth.

By the time Penrose was middle-aged he was one of the richest men in the American West, and he spent the rest of his life spending it. In nineteen sixteen he purchased a run-down resort site at the base of Cheyenne Mountain that had been built by a Prussian count named James Pourtales. He paid ninety thousand dollars for the land and then spent more than two million dollars building what he intended to be the finest resort hotel in the country.

The architects were Warren and Wetmore, the New York firm responsible for Grand Central Terminal. The Broadmoor opened on June twenty-ninth, nineteen eighteen. The room rate was ten to twelve dollars a night, which included three meals.

The lobby, furnished personally by Penrose's wife Julie, was decorated in Italian Renaissance style. Three hundred fifty guest rooms opened on the first day. Penrose also built the Pikes Peak Highway, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and the Will Rogers Shrine.

In nineteen thirty-seven he and Julie established the El Pomar Foundation, which by recent decades has given more than four hundred twenty-six million dollars to Colorado institutions. He died in nineteen thirty-nine. The Broadmoor remains in continuous operation.