Colorado - Day 23 - Denver

Chatfield State Park, Littleton                                                                  Wednesday, 23 September 2020 

today's route

detail of today's route

I spent the day almost entirely in Denver, which is sprawled out as large cities do when they've got the room.  The 2019 population estimate put the city at 727,211, and a 2018 estimate for the metropolitan area was 2,932,000 - indicating this area needs its space.  Denver has 17 suburbs and 2 enclaves (like the Vatican, or the Park Cities in Dallas), several of which I also drove through today.  Denver has the vast majority of the population and the business interests in the Front Range area (the area immediately east of the Rockies), and the Front Range is where 85% of CO's population lives.  So yeah, a lot of people.  And the traffic to prove it.

But US News & World Report ranked Denver #1 in 2016 on its Best Places to Live in the US, and it's #2 this year, behind Austin, TX.  Actually, Colorado Springs is #3 this year.

I stopped off first at a Target to get the liners for Lily's Litter Genie (one of life's basic needs), then drove through a residential neighborhood northwest of downtown.  The houses seemed like nice little 1930s and '40s era houses, but almost all had security gates at their front doors, which seemed an ominous sign.

I passed a yard sign that I think said, "Vote For An Adult 2020" - not one I've seen before.

I passed the Denver Zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, both places I'd want to visit if I were spending more time here.  I passed the National Jewish Health buildings and learned it's one of the top respiratory hospitals in the US.  Wonder if that's a legacy from the TB patients that once came here.

I turned into a residential neighborhood with very nice old houses and duplexes (the kind that were built as duplexes back about the turn of the last century or earlier).  I came across 2 traffic lights some distance apart, but the oddity was that other traffic lights were few and far between, and both these were in the middle of a block and seemed to have been installed specifically for pedestrian crosswalks.  It was just a 2-lane residential street, so that seemed excessive.  But based on the houses, I'm guessing that the residents in this area have a lot of money and, therefore, influence with the city.  There were little areas of small stores here and there, as the urban neighborhoods in Boston, for instance, are set up.  

The Molly Brown House Museum was one of these, and you can see by this internet photo what kind of houses were in this area.

Molly Brown House Museum (online photo)

This is the Molly Brown of Titanic unsinkability fame.  I saw the Debbie Reynolds movie in the '60s, but I've now learned that that movie had little attachment to reality - not really a problem because it was entertaining, but the real Molly Brown deserves, and apparently got, a lot more respect than the movie gave her.  I didn't realize until I read the article at this link   https://mollybrown.org/about that the Ludlow mining strike I mentioned earlier this month owed its settlement at least in part to her efforts.  She seemed to have an amazing life.

As I was driving from her house toward the capitol building, which is only a few blocks away, I noticed this dome (below left) above the nearby houses.  I knew it had to be the Capitol, and later I was glad I'd gotten that view because I couldn't see it when I got near the building.

Once I'd driven around a few blocks, I ended up right in front of the Colorado State Capitol, but my RV cut off my view of the dome, no matter how hard I craned my neck, and there wasn't any place I could pull over nearby.  Needless to say, these photos are off the internet because the only way to take them would be on foot, which I couldn't do.  Parking is a big problem in this town, and not just for me - I heard about it in several places.

This building was completed in 1894 and was designed intentionally to be similar to the US Capitol.

Colorado State Capitol

From there I wanted to see the US Mint Building.  Tours have been canceled due to the coronavirus, but I at least wanted to see what it looked like.

The Denver Mint (online photo)

And this is it. This building covers an entire city block and is the single largest producer of coins in the world.  It actually has an interesting history, given that its predecessor produced a whole lot of gold coins for the best part of 50 years before Congress got around to designating this place an official branch of the US Mint.  I had to read the entire Wikipedia article to find out, in an aside, that this mint was robbed of $200,000 in 1922.  Here's the link.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Denver-Mint

Completely by accident I heard about this Big Blue Bear not far from the mint and went looking for it.  [I'd try to make this page look better, but fighting with this alleged "interface" is just too much trouble right now so we'll just have to go with what IT wants to do, instead of what I want to do.]

Big Blue Bear (online photo)

It was true.  There really is a 40' blue bear looking in the windows of the Colorado Convention Center.  The sculpture's real name is I See What You Mean and it was made in 2005 by an artist who has since died.  I have to say that even though I got closer to the bear than this, it seemed really cute to me.

Here's the convention center itself.

Colorado Convention Center (online photo)

You see where the cars are on the right?  That an actual street - Stout St. - that runs underneath that whole side of the building.  When I saw that's where Google wanted me to go, I came up with an alternate route in case I found it had a 10' clearance or something.  But when I got there, I saw that the ceiling was tall enough for buses (one passed through as I watched), so I turned on in, and it was fine.  Weird, but fine.   

After the bear, I continued to drive through downtown and kept running into major areas of road construction, including one huge section at the convention center that would be in this photo if I'd been able to take it.  It's a good thing I wanted to turn right to drive by the bear, because that's the only direction they'd have let me go.

And besides all the road work, Denver is a maze of one-way streets.  I didn't even think they were all that predictable - you know, this street one way in one direction and the next street in the other direction - no, apparently that would be too logical for Denver's traffic engineers.  The same people who didn't think it was necessary to time the traffic lights on a Friday afternoon.

I drove by a big batch of police who seemed to be dismantling a tent city in an apparently otherwise unused area downtown.  I saw more homeless people here in Denver and its surrounding towns than I have in quite a while.  I don't know why there'd be so many here, because the winter climate can't possibly be easy on them, so am assuming there must be a lot of social services around here.  There must be a "no panhandling" ordinance because I didn't see any asking for money.  They were just everywhere.  I found online that Denver is one of the most expensive cities in the country, beating out even Austin, which I think has gotten way out of hand, and that fact likely answers my question.

While I was waiting at a traffic light, I saw this sign for an art gallery that looked interesting.

(my photo)

Never having heard of Clyfford Still, I looked him up.  I'm more a fan of representational art than abstract, but if I were planning to spend my month in Denver specifically, instead of Colorado generally, I'd probably go to this place to be educated.   https://clyffordstillmuseum.org

I drove by Coors Field twice today.  It's relatively new, having been built in 1995 for the major league baseball team Colorado Rockies.

Coors Field (online photo)

Only a few blocks from Coors Field is this classic place (below).  Denver Union Station was built in 1914 and is still being used as a train station.  But isn't it beautiful?  It's now considered a Beaux Arts masterpiece.

Denver Union Station (my photo)

From there it was just a few blocks to Confluence Park, where Cherry Creek and South Platte River meet, and Commons Park, which follows the S. Platte for quite a way.  I'd hoped to be able to let the dogs out for a bit either in the parks or the nearby neighborhood, but I was completely wrong.  In common with the rest of the town, there was almost no parking available, and when I did manage to find a space I could squeeze into, I noticed probably 70,000 dogs being walked to or in or from the park.  I couldn't even let my dogs out of the RV because of so many dogs.  This is quite clearly the place to go - even on a Wednesday.  But we'd been driving around for quite a while now - ever since the Target - and we all needed a break, but I just couldn't find a place to get us one.

My route took us past St. Joseph Hospital, where I found the most amazing Art Deco building.  A sign said it was the Mullen Building and I'm very sorry that the only photos I could find online were copyrighted.  But I did find this article about it with lots of photos, and you may want to take a look.   http://www.masonryofdenver.com/mullen-building

I was aiming for Cheesman Park.  I thought I'd heard of it, though now that I've looked it up I don't know why: it was originally established in 1858 as a cemetery, but I guess the graves weren't tended and the place became an eyesore.  Likely the town was building up nearby, too, which may have created the impetus for the city to move the graves elsewhere and establish this area as a park in 1907.  There are local theories, though, that the person hired to move the bodies scammed the city by not doing all the work, because occasionally bones are still discovered in the park.  

It looked really nice to me, and I hoped it'd be a place I could park and let the dogs out (by then we were all getting a little batty).  Unfortunately, I found myself the victim of yet another batch of road work that had the park entrance blocked off, as well as several surrounding streets.  I turned off into what I learned later was the Capitol Hill Neighborhood, not far from the Molly Brown House.  Once an elite part of town, there are mansions that still look as if they're single-family homes, but most of them have been converted to apartments and condos.  I saw a few apartment buildings that were probably built in the '60s, but mostly the original buildings still seem to be there.  This whole area, focused as it is on multi-family residences, is what's called a dense urban neighborhood and reminded me a lot of Boston.  Lots of people, but also lots of trees and the original character of the area is still there.  Lots of nearby stores and parks, too, including the one I couldn't get into.

Between the road closures and the one-way streets I got lost, which made me feel even more pressure to find a place to stop and regroup and finally! - like magic - a legal parking spot appeared.  What a relief!  The dogs got their walk, Lily and I used the litter box/bathroom, we all had some lunch, and I pulled out my hot spot and laptop to figure out where we were and how we could get to our next stop.  All in all, a very productive and stress-reducing stop.

It turned out I was only a few blocks from where I'd intended to be, so rerouting myself was easy.  From there we drove down Cherry Creek Drive, which (surprise) runs alongside Cherry Creek.  Unusually, the road ends here and there, and a couple of times I had to cross the creek to pick it back up again.  Denver's Recycling Dropoff center is one of the less scenic locations along this road.   

I didn't know until I got there that it's supposed to be for Denver residents only, and they want to see proof.  Luckily, there wasn't anybody sitting at the entrance station, so I went on in and cleaned out my bathroom/recycling storage area again.  You know, I'd figured Colorado to be enthusiastic about recycling, but that's not what I've found.  The only campground I've been to this month that offered a place for recycling was the Grand Junction KOA.  None of the state campgrounds offers it, and even a town the size of La Junta didn't.  Not in keeping with that environmentally aware image Colorado seems to be presenting.

From there I went through the "Village of Glendale, settled 1859," according to their sign.  I was curious and looked it up and learned Glendale is one of the 2 enclaves in Denver.  It's its own home rule city.  Looks like a nice little place (pop. 4,100).  

Then on through Englewood, which is higher than Denver with an elevation of 5,306'.  I stopped at a Safeway, and from there headed south to Littleton and Chatfield State Park, which is even higher at 5,450'.