A Cloverleaf on the Valley Highway in 1959

The Story of Denver traffic—100,000 cars in 1945 and 200,000-plus today

In Denver in the early Twentieth Century water wagons to keep down the dust were an institution. In the 1930′s road oil was sprayed on many streets to keep down the dust and thus eliminate the water wagons. By the start of World War II Denver had a fairly good street system, adequate for the traffic, and attractive in its tree-lined setting.

The wartime and post-war boom unhinged a lot of things in Denver, but streets most of all. The road oil streets flew to pieces. There hadn’t been much for the oil to mix with—they were almost useless against heavy traffic.

But this was just one part of the problem. One-way street systems had to be installed on a wholesale basis, traffic control systems had to be revised, new routings became essential and planning, in general, had to leap ahead by years.

Mayor Quigg Newton, whose regime coincided with these early days of stirring growth, led the fight for another phase: the Valley Highway. This great system, knifing across the city southeast to northwest, was completed in late 1958. It has brought the Twentieth Century to Denver more than any other public work. Motorists can speed across the city in about one-half hour, or go to work downtown from a suburban residence in 20 minutes.

Denver citizenry was at first shocked by the swiftly changing traffic surgery brought on by growth, things like the “anyway-walk” system to allow pedestrians full use of each intersection during their own phase of the stop light.

But no one has questioned the need for all this. It’s been startling: 100,000 cars in Denver in 1945—205,000 in 1959. And this doesn’t even count the mushrooming suburbs.

Note: Text and image from “This is Colorado – a special centennial magazine section of the Denver Post, June 21st, 1959″

William H. Clark and the cabin he built in 1859 at 5041 Pearl Street.
Photo courtesy of Wilbur F. Stone, ed., History of Colorado, Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1918.

William H. Clark was a natural choice for the first mayor of Globeville, for he been there from the very beginning. Twenty-three-year-old Clark was one of the hoards of fortune seekers who descended on the territory when gold was discovered in Colorado in 1858. He traveled with a party of fourteen men across land that belonged to the Arapaho and Sioux, arriving at the collection of tents and shacks that would become Denver on October 28, 1858.

Clark built a small cabin in an area north of Denver, farming, prospecting and hunting wild game to survive. His neighbors were native Americans and a few other settlers. With other pioneers, he formed a “claim club”, an organization that held and protected the land on which they “squatted” until it was surveyed. He was able to purchase his property, about 40 acres, from the government for $1.25 an acre in 1863.¹

Homesteaders continued to move to the area, and Clark was active in the growing community. He served on the first school board, which was responsible for a little country school built in 1873 at 51st and Washington, which later became the Globeville School.

Clark had lived in the neighborhood 20 years when the region’s first smelter, the Boston and Colorado, was built in an area now occupied by Denver’s “Mousetrap” interchange. Two other large smelters, the Grant and the Globe, were constructed in 1882 and 1889, followed by railroads, brickyards, foundries and meat packing plants. Clark witnessed the evolution of the district from a rural outpost to an industrial area. He also observed a change in the area’s population from native-born homesteaders to that of Eastern-European immigrants. When the population voted to incorporate as the town of Globeville in 1891, Clark was chosen as the first mayor.

After his mayoral term ended in 1894, Clark returned to farming. He was known to everyone in Globeville as “Uncle Billy” and, at 59 years, was an old-timer by the standards of the day, recognized as a pioneer. Clark enjoyed receiving visitors and would share his memories with anyone who had time to stop and listen.²

A January 25, 1920, issue of the Denver Post proclaimed “‘Uncle Billy’ Clark, pioneer, still lives in squatter cabin” and is “hale and hearty at the age of eighty-four years.”

On June 26 the following year, he was found dead in his cabin of “advanced age” and laid to rest under the auspices of the Society of Colorado Pioneers and the Pioneer Ladies’ Aid Society at Fairmont Cemetery. There is no marker on his grave. A street sign between 47th and 48th Avenue in the Globeville neighborhood is the only known tribute to this pioneer.

-Mary Lou Egan
maryloudesign@comcast.net

Clark Place and 47th Avenue in Globeville

sources:
1 The Denver Post, January 25, 1920, “Uncle Billy” Clark, Pioneer, Still Lives in Squatter Cabin
2 Denver Post, June 27, 1921, “Uncle Billy” Clark, Pioneer of Pioneers, Dead in Rude Log House He Built in Days of ‘59”.

Rainbow Music Hall Gala Opening Tonight, January 26th, 1979

The Rainbow Music Hall Gala Opening, January 26, 1979

Jerry Jeff Walker at the Rainbow, 1979

B50 Note: Thanks to Kim Allen for providing the opening night program.

The Rockmount Building celebrates its 100th birthday this year, but the history of the site goes to 1859. As my family has been working at this building for 3 generations it feels like part of the family. I began researching the building several years ago after I discovered it was designed by Fisher & Fisher who designed some of Denver’s finest buildings. I have a huge archive on the building as well as our business Rockmount which is notable for making the first western shirts with snaps and Papa Jack who was the oldest CEO. On display in our store is a triptych panel of photos of the building and the street over the years.

We have the original abstract of the building, which dates to 1859. It has signatures of many of Denver’s founding fathers: Amos Steck, David Moffat, Frederick Ebert and others who tie in to the city’s history prominently.

Amos Steck was the first mayor and for whom the Elemementary School is named. David Moffat and others brought the railroad spur from Cheyenne to Denver without which we would be Cheyenne and they would be Denver. Frederick Ebert platted LoDo and the roads to the Central City mines. He and his wife gave the land for the first school. Today Ebert Elementary is named for him.

Of note is that Wazee was part of China town, though most people think its border was Blake. The Rockmount abstract shows Chinese owners in the 1880s. Many of their businesses were off the alleys.

The Wolff Building, circa 1909. Designed by Fisher & Fisher. Photo Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society.

History of the Rockmount Building:

Built in 1909, this building has been Rockmount’s home for 3 generations since 1946. First our warehouse, we later moved our offices here in 1980. After nearly 50 years of wholesale only we opened the retail store and museum in 2002. We undertook a historic renovation to preserve the building in 2004, returning the first floor much to its original state.

This “Prairie” style building was designed by Fisher & Fisher, perhaps Denver’s Finest architects. Where as many earlier nearby buildings are soft brick this is a costly construction with fully fired brick throughout and heave timbering far exceeding structural requirements. Warehouses were once architectural gems reflecting the commercial lifebood of a growing community on the frontier. This was a time when warehouse architecture expressed the great pride of other citadels such as civic, chuch, and corporate edifices.

The Rockmount building reflects Louis Sullivan’s Modern Commercial design, the emerging Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Beaux Arts movement, which Arthur Fisher studied in New York. This building is a complete departure from the more derivative Victorian classical motif style, characterizing much of the neighborhood.

1909 – 1927 Wolff Mfg Co. (wholesale plumbing showroom & warehouse)
1928 – 1938 Colo Wholesale Drug Co., later Mckesson-Colo Wholesale Drug Co., Mckesson & Robbins Wholesale Drugs
1940 – 1946 U.S. Government Work Projects Administration Warehouse
1946 – 1980 Joy Mfg. Co. Mining Machinery, Schloss & Shubart Machinery & Engineering
1946 – Present Rockmount Ranch Wear Mfg. Co.
2002 – Rockmount opens Retail Store & Museum
2004 – Exterior, 1st floor historic renovation, basement garage added

McKesson Drug Co., September 1, 1938

Inside the Rockmount Showroom

The Rockmount Building will be open on Saturday and Sunday, April 18th and 19th, as part of Doors Open Denver 2009, a program of the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs. For more information, maps, and a list of participating sites (there are lots of them!) visit the Doors Open Denver website.

“1921 marked the start of one of the most serious aberrations in the state’s history—the rise of the Ku Klux Klan under the Grand Dragonship of a strange Denver physician Dr. John Galen Locke. Many residents of Colorado, like Americans everywhere, found themselves full of fears after World War I—fears of hard times, of the communism of Karl Marx, of Eugene Debs and his American socialism, of the Industrial Workers of the World and their violence, of spies in the land working for foreign governments.

To these fearful people, especially in the Front Range cities, Locke’s program of “One Hundred Percent Americanism” had great appeal. They found joy in Klan activities, dressing in sheets, burning crosses on Table Mountain near Golden and atop Pikes Peak, and boycotting the businesses of their opponents. They persecuted Catholics and Negroes and, especially, successful Jews such as Jesse Shwayder, the son of a Polish immigrant who had created the huge luggage firm, Samsonite Corporation.

The Klansmen took advantage of the unemployment to attack recent immigrants to Colorado from Greece and Hungary who had jobs in the Denver smelters around the Globeville section and at the C. F. & I. steel works of South Pueblo. The Klansmen advised Denverites to cease patronizing restaurants bearing “foreign” names like Pagliacci or Benito or Ciancio or Wong or Torino.

By 1924 the Klan membership was large enough to elect the state’s governor, a senator, the mayor and chief of police of Denver, and a majority in the general assembly. But within months most of these Klansmen turned out to be inept public officials. And when Locke resigned in June of 1925 as Grand Dragon after being jailed for contempt of court in an income-tax matter, the power of the Klan ended abruptly and completely.”

B50 Note: It is difficult to imagine the amount of power and influence the Klan held in Denver and Colorado between 1920 and 1926; Mayor Ben Stapleton and Governor Clarence Morley were both members of the “Silent Empire.” Eighty years later, Colorado is the only state in the country to have both houses of its legislature headed by African-Americans (Terrance Carroll and Peter Groff).

Marshall Sprague was a author and historian, well known for his prose about the American West. Images are courtesy of The Denver Public Library Western History Collection. The definitive resource on this topic is “Hooded Empire: the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado” by Robert Alan Goldberg, published by University of Illinois Press in 1981. A review of the book (from 1987) is available on Dark Cloud’s site.