Denver's Coronet

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On Denver's flat plain a little sand hill stands up, slopes away to the east. On the edge of the sand hill is a park called the Civic Centre. Long have its buildings been symbols of Denver pride, the weathered State Capitol looking down on a U. S. Mint, a Public Library, an open air Greek Theatre. Last week Denver pride looked to a new and climactic building in the Civic Centre. Facing the Capitol was a fine new white granite City & County Building. It had been abuilding for three years and now its bronze doors (world's largest) were thrown open to the public. Around its semicircular colonnade is an art museum as well as municipal offices. Designed by the Allied Architects Association, the structure suggests a coronet on the city's brow. In it are twelve kinds of marble and $5,000,000 of taxpayers' money, a far advance beyond Denver's first City Hall, a floorless log cabin on the treeless plain of 1860. Where once was heard only the coyote's howl, now stands a clocktower capable of rendering the four-note Cambridge quarters. The clock, crowning jewel of the coronet, is the gift of the relict of Denver's long-time (1904-12, 1916-18) Mayor Robert W. Speer who conceived and planned the Civic Centre on the sand hill.

Few are the cities that house their art with their government. Denverites waiting for an audience with alert Mayor George D. Begole may go up to the fourth floor and contemplate pictures by Rubens. Degas, Rousseau, Ryder and Boardman Robinson, director of the Boardmoor Art Academy at Colorado Springs. In the Art Museum's 14 galleries they may look at a bronze statue by Maillol, at Japanese and Chinese art, at collections of medals, ceramics, furniture.

Some day Denverites will resegregate art and government. Two Denver women, Rachel Schlier and Helen Dill, have already left half a million toward building an art museum in the Civic Centre. It will probably flank the Greek theatre, face the Public Library across an acre of Denver's phenomenally green grass.

Denver's growth from scratch to 300,000 has been accomplished in a human lifetime. And culture has kept pace with commerce on the Colorado plain. Denver's able Civic Symphony Orchestra gives twelve concerts each year. Its A Capella choir is one of the four U. S. best. Denver's businessmen have a literary circle, the Cactus Club which writes and produces its own plays.

The Civic Centre is just south of old Denver where the streets run northwest and southeast along the banks of Cherry Creek. There, where Cherry Creek enters the South Platte, the first cabin was built in 1858 by W. Green Russell & friends, with John Simpson Smith and his squaw Wapoola. Cherry Creek, alternately dry and flooded, divided the settlement into Auraria City (after Russell's hometown in Georgia) and Denver City (after Governor James W. Denver). In 1860 a bridge across the creek was finished, people from both sides met on the bridge by moonlight, shook hands, made speeches and the name Auraria City was dropped. Since bricks were cheaper than lumber where few trees grew, brick houses soon replaced the rows of frame shacks.

The junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte was a natural trail head to the Pike's Peak country. While eager immigrants pressed through to the golden mountains, more & more tarried in Denver, settled there, fought the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, grasshoppers and one another. Saloons were paramount from the first, each with a "fighting ring" to accommodate customers. Rare was a day without a shooting and a spot on the east bank of Cherry Creek became the traditional duelling ground. But new Denverites kept arriving by wagon train and it was a long way back. The nearest rail head was 500 miles away at St. Joseph, Mo. It was unhealthful to ask a man what his name was back East. The rough, tough citizens said: "It's day all day in the daytime and there's no night."

When wheat grains fell by accident in a kitchen garden, it was discovered that great crops would grow in Colorado soil. A degree of permanence began to invade Denver. Some Denverites began to sleep nights. Others carried Denver's early rough-&-toughness to a plush & gilt extreme in the night life of Larimer and Curtis Streets. A block north was Market Street, one of the U. S.'s worst red light districts. Organized gambling and prostitution were open and reputable until 1911.

When silver became king and William Jennings Bryan was its herald, mining and cattle men splashed with their fortunes into Denver. Notable was vulgar Senator Horace Arthur Warner ("Silver Dollar") Tabor who built the pretentious Tabor Grand Opera House, birthplace of Denver's culture, now the Tabor Grand, a cinemansion. Of Shakespeare's picture on the proscenium, Tabor said, "What the hell did he ever do for Denver? Paint him out and put me up there." Eugene Field, then managing editor of the Denver Tribune, wrote the poem "Modjesky as Cameel" as a picture of a frontier first night. At the performance at the Tabor Grand, "Three-Fingered" Hoover ("ez fine a man wuz he ez ever caused an inquest or blossomed on a tree!") rescued "Cameel" from "Armo," just the way the hardy mountaineers stop the show in Showboat. He told her:

I'll marry you myself, and take you back tomorrow night,

To the camp on Red Hoss Mountain, where the boys 'II treat you white,

Where Casey runs a tabble dote, and folks are brave 'nd true,

Where there ain't no ancient history to bother me or you;

Where there ain't no law but honesty, no evidence but facts,

Where between the verdick and the rope there ain't no onter acts.

The early city's friendly and explosive vulgarity still pains finical Denverites in dark, slick Frederick Bonfils' incredibly blatant Denver Post. Publisher Bonfils, onetime river gambler, in whose veins runs Latin blood (some say a Bonaparte strain from Corsica), still personifies Denver's oldtime dash and bravado. His late partner, H. H. Tammen, onetime bartender, personified its humor. To him is credited the inscription over the Post's door, "O Justice! When Expelled from All Other Habitations Make This Thy Dwelling Place." The Post has said of Denver "Everything that comes out of the ground is just a little bit sweeter and a little bit better than that produced in any other portion of our country, and you can lay to that."

The old town is the business, hotel and amusement centre of modern Denver. South and east of the Civic Centre spreads the large, calm residential section, its wide tree-lined avenues running sedately north and south, its citizens moving soberly along them on Sunday mornings to Denver's many churches. Like most second-generation frontier towns, Denver is strongly moral. It has a stern respect for conventional art, religion, home, womanhood. When Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, after brilliant service in the Juvenile Court, declared that scarcely 10% of Denver's high-school girls were virgins and campaigned nationally for Companionate Marriage, Denver cast him out, has all but forgotten him. Denverites like direct action. Last week six of them pledged half a million dollars' worth of property to bail out John B. Williams, an aged merchandise broker who killed his son-in-law for beating his wife.

Denver is a synthetic city. It is off the transcontinental railroad line. The $18,000,000 Moffat Tunnel through the Continental Divide may eventually bring coast-to-coast traffic through Denver, but until it does the city remains at a random spot on the broad bench east of the Continental Divide. The foothills begin ten miles west, the plains region stretches east to the Missouri River. Sixty miles to the south is Pike's Peak, a truncated cone up whose flanks automobiles race every Labor Day. Isolation is a blessing to Denver now that it is grown up. It is dominant and self-sufficient in a vast area, 555 miles from Salt Lake City.

First heroes in making a city out of a wagon-train village at a creekmouth were the men who organized Denver's own railroad to connect it with the Union Pacific at Cheyenne. They included Governor John Evans who founded the University of Denver; David Halliday Moffat, the mining man for whom the Moffat Tunnel is named; Walter Scott Cheesman, Denver waterworks builder. When Bryan's fight for the 16-to-1 silver ratio was finally defeated, silver was ruined, but not Denver. Its railroad enabled it to change from mining city to food city. Modern Denver was built by cattle, sheep, irrigation, wheat and sugar beets. It is the jobbing and brokerage centre for the Far West. It is the centre for Federal offices in the Rocky Mountain region. The presence of a Mint makes it seem appropriate that in Denver, as throughout the Rocky Mountain States, a one dollar bill is rare, silver dollars usual.

Youngest, highest (the Capitol is exactly one mile above sea level), most isolated of U. S. cities, Denver is much like many U. S. small towns. It is full of maples, poplars and elms. The people are placid, brisk, nearly all white-collar workers. The proportion of Rotarians, Kiwanians and life insurance salesmen is said to be higher than anywhere else in the world. It is full of retired invalids who bought Cities Service around 55 (now around 4). There are few factories, little smoke. The clear, dry, rarefied air is equable during the day, cool at night. Denverites claim it ventilates their brains. It has made Denver a centre for the sanitarium industry. The sun shines on an average of 304 days a year. The cost of living is below the U. S. city average (a good twelve-room unfurnished house and garage rent for $1,000 a year, taxes are $32.25, steak is 34-c- a lb.). Denverites drink bad whiskey and gin, little beer. Water is precious yet Denver wastes it. Says the Water Board: "Once you get hold of a flow of water, if you don't use it you forfeit it to someone who will." Last week, however, citizens were allowed to water their lush, green lawns for only three hours in the evening, one side of the street watering one day, the opposite side the next.

Denver's workers live to the west of the Civic Centre in rows of neat cottages set in flower beds. They have their fun at three municipal golf courses, lakes in the city parks, 26 mountain parks owned by Denver, amusement parks (Elitch Gardens, Lakeside). Well-to-do Denverites live east of the Civic Centre on the slightly raised extension of Capitol Hill. They spend their weekends at the Cherry Hills or Denver Country Club or on estates in the mountains. In the summer stock companies play at Elitch Gardens. Rich and poor shop at the big drygoods store of Daniels & Fisher which has a high tower like Venice's Campanile.

A great many Denverites own their own homes. Few live in apartments. A city ordinance has long forbidden frame construction; the houses are all brick, stone or stucco. Politically, the city runs itself. City and county governments are one. The State legislature cannot enact laws affecting the city of Denver. In view of this independence, Denverites hold it fitting that their Civic Centre is now dominated, not by the oldtime gingerbread Capitol, but by the coronet City & County Building, one of the notable public buildings of the country.

Some Denverites: Railroadman George Mortimer Pullman, Shoeman William Lewis Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Assistant Secretary of State James Grafton Rogers, Paul Whiteman, Author Courtney Ryley Cooper, Silverman Simon Guggenheim whose son is named George Denver.

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