United States Mint at Denver

That granite fortress on West Colfax is the United States Mint at Denver, one of the busiest coin factories in the world. Denver's facility began as an assay office in eighteen sixty-three, opened after the gold rush sent raw ore flooding into Colorado that needed to be weighed and valued before it could move east. For more than four decades it only tested bullion.

Coinage did not start until February of nineteen oh six, when the facility was upgraded to a full branch mint. The current building, completed in nineteen oh four and clad in Pikes Peak granite, was modeled on the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence. About three hundred fifty employees run fifty-six presses here five days a week, with a capacity topping fifty million coins per day, making it the largest coin-producing facility in the world.

Every coin leaving here carries a small letter D, the mint mark that lets collectors trace a piece back to Denver. Treasury reports have indicated roughly one thousand three hundred sixty tonnes of gold bullion stored behind these walls. A gang hit the place in nineteen twenty-two, the first successful mint robbery in United States history, a story that gets its own track.