Denver history

Get acquainted with Classic Denver with the landmarks, museums, events, and activities and more that make the Mile High City so special.

The roads in Denver confused people long before cars were in the picture. Today, roads downtown are crooked from the rest of the city. There is an explanation though, and it dates back hundreds of years.

Louis Charles McClure captured Denver's transformation under the influence of the City Beautiful movement.

Before Coors Field there was Mile High Stadium, but there were a number of famous places to play baseball before that.

Does the stress of holiday shopping make you long for a stroll through an early 20th-century department store? Teenager Helen Elizabeth Thompson wrote about her visit to Denver’s legendary Daniels & Fisher Department Store in an English class composition dated March 12, 1917. Helen Elizabeth's mother, Lucy May “Jessie” Thompson (1867-1941), worked as a seamstress at the store for more than 20 years. Helen Elizabeth's composition is part of the Jessie Thompson Papers (WH1870).

Old photos, film, pictures, maps and local history of Denver Colorado #history #UShistory

Despite the turmoil of the time, World War II was a busy period in Denver history, as shown by these 11 rare photographs.

A Brief Walk Along Denver’s Notorious Market Street - From its beginnings as an unruly mining town, Denver was described as “most lively...in any and all kinds of wickedness.” The writer, prospector William Hedges, went on to doubt that there was ever “a place on this continent where a greater amount of evil to the square acre was so spontaneously and openly developed” (quoted in Clark Secrest’s Hell’s Belles). Wickedness ran rampant no more openly than on Market Street, nee Holladay Street…

The City and County building, illuminated in 1965. (Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/Series 3 Photographs/Photobox 1) Decade after decade,