Wynkoop Street: Wholesalers, Warehouses, Reinvention

This stretch of Wynkoop Street between Seventeenth and Nineteenth was built for freight, not company. The four and five story fortresses on either side rose in the eighteen seventies, eighties, and nineties, their thick brick walls raised to hold the mining equipment, dry goods, and groceries that the railroads dumped at Union Station next door. The Oxford Hotel, just off to the side here, opened in October of eighteen ninety one to designs by Frank Edbrooke, and was the most luxurious hotel in Denver when it opened, with some of the city's earliest elevators and a U shaped red brick plan still traceable from the alley.

Tucked into its side entrance off Seventeenth Street is the Cruise Room, an art deco bar that opened on the night Prohibition ended, December sixth, nineteen thirty three. Its walls run a soft pumpkin orange, its lighting glows moody red, and along the panels the artist Alley Henson carved bas relief toasts in ten different languages from cities the Queen Mary called on. One panel, the original German toast, was removed during the Second World War because the salute on it read to the Fuhrer.

Across the street at sixteen thirty four Eighteenth, the wholesale grocer J S Brown Mercantile went up in eighteen ninety nine to the designs of Gove and Walsh, the same firm that raised Union Station. That building sat nearly empty by the late nineteen eighties until October eighteenth, nineteen eighty eight, when a thirty something geologist named John Hickenlooper and three partners opened a brewpub inside it, into a neighborhood with a forty percent vacancy rate, betting their savings on craft beer when craft beer was barely a word. The bet aged well.

Hickenlooper went on to be mayor, then governor, then a United States senator. One block north at seventeen twenty Wynkoop stood the streetcar stables from eighteen eighty two, which later housed the Hendrie and Bolthoff mining equipment shops until the early nineteen seventies. There are stories, mostly told by bartenders, of brick tunnels connecting the Oxford to the brothels on Market Street one block east.

No primary documents prove them. But the basements down here connect to each other in ways the architects never drew.