Last week I had the rare privilege of visiting the top floors of the Daniels & Fisher Tower—the downtown Denver icon.
When completed in 1910, the 22-story tower was the tallest building between the Mississippi River and California. For decades, the tower was Denver’s tallest building and an essential part of the city skyline.
But in the 1950s, mid-century modern skyscrapers started sprouting up in Denver, removing the tower’s original claim to fame. A few years later, the city’s much-maligned urban renewal program tore down much of the original built context around the tower—including the flagship department store it once anchored—and, cut to today, left the tower standing as an odd remnant along a very different 16th Street.
The tower was renovated several times over the years, but there wasn’t much—failing some pretty extreme and costly construction, I should add—that any owner could do to truly modernize the tower, much less make it ADA-friendly.
The result is an event space on the upper floors that can’t legally be used as an event space: the elevator just doesn’t go all the way up. (I’m leaving out the sinuous set of staircases and strange HVAC-necessitated steps you have to navigate.)
The 21st floor of the tower once served as the observation deck for a Denver that no longer exists. A narrow balcony, perhaps two-feet deep with a four-foot parapet, encircles the floor. Because the tower doesn’t abut any of the many clunky office towers of downtown Denver, there’s a pretty decent view from all sides, though the boring midsections of those clunky office towers obscure what would have in the tower’s heyday been a stunning panorama of the growing city and the towers beyond.
The tower and its observation deck offered a lesson, or a least a reminder, of how difficult it is to appreciate the perspectives of those in the past. This was, of course, a literal perspective—but the view itself hinted at the other more internal views. I can imagine a sense of civic pride, standing on the tallest building in the still-rugged West of the US. I can imagine a real delight, today harder but still possible to summon, of being up at such a height and looking down, thinking that only birds go this high.
But in the glittering city evening, these were phantoms against the reality of a historical tower slowly whiling away, struggling to serve its original purpose and hard-pressed to serve its new ones.
Taylor Coe 