From the creative team at Eyeosaur, this is a segment of Fringe Art of the Front Range featuring artist and collector Jerry Simpson.

This segment is part of a larger film made with a grant from the Mayor’s Office of Art, Culture and Film for the Denver International Airport.

Kim Shively and Chris Bagley of Eyeosaur recently premiered their documentary “Wesley Willis’s Joyrides” at the Denver Film Festival.

Brown Palace Dinner Menu, November 19, 1904

I’m a Denver native. And by Denver, I mean Denver; my family rarely ventured west and into the mountains. They were dangerous places full of bad weather, sharp turns and the antisocial. We were plains folk. We liked to be able to see people coming.

Denver in the 60′s and 70′s was a small but growing city and it had its perks. My parents took full advantage of the many museums, parks and libraries. Sundays were spent, not in church, but at the library downtown or classes at the art museum, natural history museum or the Forney.

The Forney Museum in the 1980s

When the trolley system went caput in the 1950′s the Forney Museum moved in. The Forney was (and is) a transportation museum. It’s a collection of cars, horse drawn carriages, trolleys, train cars, motorcycles and bicycles, anything that will get you from A to B. It’s a Colorado museum soup to nuts: the collection originated with Mr. Forney, who started modestly with his own cars and eventually traded tools for unused and unloved vehicles until he found himself with a collection that needed housing. It’s first stop was the then *new and glamorous* Cinderella City for two years before settling in Platte and 15th.

This was a grand and dusty place to visit. The building dwarfed the vehicles. Inside the place offered independence from parents; a kid could wander alone up and down the cars, it seemed to go on forever. In the yard there were train cars you could climb on and cars you could sit in. The weeds were knee high. The place had the feeling of being an underdog. I bought a conductors cap when I was seven and wore it for a year.

By my teens I had become immersed in the suburbs and school and downtown was lost to me. All these places that had been second homes fell away in favor of Houlihan’s, Skate City, and parks filled with kegs and kids. I left for college in 1982 and returned to Denver in ‘87.

In 1989 I moved into the Highlands and the Forney became my neighbor. I also worked as a waitress at My Brother’s Bar, a close companion to the Tramway Building for over 100 years. I became reacquainted with the museum. My newly minted art school sensibilities—so observant and superior—were numbed by visits to the Forney. It was so earnest, so beautiful, and without irony. You couldn’t take a bad photograph in there. There were pigeons roosting that came and went through the high broken windows, and dusty paths of light that created a cathedral effect. It felt like yours too, a still hidden gem no one had claimed. Best of all, in my absence they had added a wax figure diorama of Alfred Packer.

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This is Carlos Fresquez’ digital story titled “Rhythm of the Neighborhood” from the Colorado History Museum’s Imagine a Great City: Denver at 150 exhibit. This story was made in a workshop facilitated by The Center for Digital Storytelling’s Denver office. Posted in conjunction with Mile High Stories.

Carlos is now Assistant Professor of Art at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where he works in the same Auraria neighborhood he visited as a child. You can find out more about Carlos from this article from the Metro newspaper.

Amy Semple McPherson, the great evangelist of the 1920s, comes to Denver, coincidentally with the Greatest Stock Show ever; the French harp, or harmonica, makes a comeback; the hanging tree at Sixth and Walnut meets its doom; the stock pages and society columns mix for the Livestock show; the Vanderbilts and distance swimmers were hot news a few years before the collapse; putting a man on the moon was a foolish dream indeed – read all the details; on the same page that one of Custer’s troops is mourned, a Klan Cyclops runs for Congress; Clayton College, located at what is now Colorado Boulevard and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, helps half-orphans become useful citizens; America’s auto industry is growing, and car camping takes off for the hills on July 4, 1926; the Jazz Age has already become history; girls paint designs on their legs for the sake of allure; what we know as the Hagia Sophia was rumored to become a disco; Mutt and Jeff and The Katzenjammer Kids, with their German accents, ruled the funny papers, the only part of the news in color, Sundays only; Classified Ads still brought in the bucks; a trout-fishing resort on “4 acres, a nice hotel, a 5-room cottage, 9 cabins” all to be sacrificed for $6,500; and finally, what was cut out between “‘Billy’ Adams” and “Her Worst Worry”?

M Thornton

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