DenverInfill Blog

I remember the Windsor definately has its place in 'beat' history, with numerous references from 'on the road'...

from tomchristopher.com

Denver continued to grow. Street cars, pulled along their tracks by mules, delivered residents to the first suburb of Curtis Park beginning in 1871. Gas lights were installed downtown in 1873, and by 1880 the city sported 80’ telephone poles. By 1880 the population was 35,000 and Denver attracted a group of English investors interested in building a half million dollar hotel, The Windsor. In the nineteenth century hotels were the measure of civilization for cities, and with the opening of The Windsor, internationally noted, with its 300 rooms and staff of 140 persons overseeing a miniature city including a Western Union Office, a barber shop, two bars, three restaurants, a library, a laundry, a wine cellar, a tobacconist, and a maze of parlors, meeting rooms and suites, Denver became a destination in itself.
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The New Metropolitan had never been a great hotel. Denver had great hotels. The Windsor was the first and was followed by the Tabor, and the Barclay, with The Brown Palace the last of the great ones.
 

Ugh. Looking at those pictures is just depressing. What were the DURA people thinking? I suppose hindsight is 20/20, but that era must have been one of collective insanity.
 

Wow.. that Windsor hotel was a beautiful structure. If that had been spared, it would surely have been refabed into a mixed use commercial/residential unit. It's sad that it no longer stands, but it's obvious to see from the pictures the wholesale destruction that took place as Denver made room for the automobile.
 

Off topic, but wow, that is shameful that the Windsor Hotel was torn down and replaced with the current monstrosity. The Windsor looks like it was a beautiful building.
 

i'm amazed the brown palace was never torn down.
 

Too bad the Windsor is gone.

Looks like a great building.
 

I like to look at pics of the Windsor as it aged over time. The owners truly abandoned that hotel to time...and it was an easy target for DURA. If only that building could have been saved. It was quite a charmer.
 

The majority of the old grand hotels were torn down because most were former brothels at one time and then into the 50's and 60's had fallen into disrepair.. so to get rid of that negative image they were torn down.
 

There was a group of people that tried to save the Windsor, along with several other historically and aesthetically significant 19th century buildings that lay in the path of the DURA bulldozers (about 8-10 buildings overall, I think), but they were shouted down by the city's business and political power structures. The only building in Skyline that managed to escape the wrecker's ball is the D&F Tower--and of course the rest of that building WAS torn down.

Collective insanity, per the anonymous posting above, was the primary factor--along with fear. Skyline happened, as similar travesties happened in cities all over the country at the same time, because people feared urban decay. This part of town wasn't a nice place--it wasn't all Disney-fied the way Larimer Square and LoDo are today. Down here there were real social problems, and decades of neglect by property owners that made the social problems worse in a kind of negative feedback loop--more poverty begat more neglect begat more poverty....

On another note, I really appreciate Ken's inclusion of the Bank One tower (back then it was Denver National Bank) under construction, because you can see what the Skyline parking lots looked like. I remember back in the mid-1970s, when my parents let me come downtown on the bus by myself for the first time (I was about 13), crossing these blocks was a grim experience. In their destruction of the old, DURA had simply paved over everything, and many of these blocks lacked basic things like sidewalks. To get from 16th to Larimer Square meant walking next to the curb, risking your life practically.

Denver is lucky that Skyline is essentially complete. Some cities that tore down their "decay" areas in the 1960s and 1970s are still home to lots of surface parking lots. Our surface parking lots now are more the result of individual bad decisions rather than collective ones like Skyline (which was approved by a majority of Denver voters, including, probably, my own parents).
 

true..but wait - does that mean that the best solution to changing a negative image is to TEAR DOWN 120 blocks of old denver?
 

lol, i didnt say it was smart. The leaders at the time felt it was best for the time. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Can't save everything, if we did, Denver would have died along time ago.
 

Sure wish I could have gone in to see the Windsor Hotel before it was torn down. My parents lived in Denver in the 1940's, and told me it was a truly charming & grand hotel. They said it had a FLOATING
ballroom floor that was so fascinating, and the building was just beautiful! We even have some kind of old mermaid-type coat hook from there, that they bought when it was going to be torn down. How sad that our nation/people can't take better care of our great buildings -- especially when you see buildings that are still in pretty good shape in Europe or other places, and they are much, much older.