Tabor Center

The complex stepping back from the mall is Tabor Center, finished in nineteen eighty-four and designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. One Tabor Center, the office tower, climbs thirty floors to four hundred eight feet. A glazed galleria of shops runs along the Sixteenth Street side, and a nineteen-story hotel fills out the block.

The name traces back to Horace Tabor, the silver baron whose Tabor Block of eighteen eighty stood on this same ground. Tabor's story is one of the great Colorado rises and falls. In eighteen seventy-eight he grubstaked two prospectors in Leadville who struck a massive silver lode, and within a year he owned the Matchless Mine, earning at his peak roughly two thousand dollars a day from that one claim.

He built opera houses in Leadville and Denver, financed a bank, served as lieutenant governor, and held a brief term as United States senator. Then in eighteen ninety-three, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Silver prices collapsed and Tabor lost everything, his mines, his properties, his Denver mansion.

He died in eighteen ninety-nine, broke. The glass tower above this corner carries his name over the same block where he once set the terms for half the city.