As I have mentioned before on this blog, I sometimes take a walk down 17th Street here in Denver from the Tattered Cover Bookstore, where I used to work as the bookkeeper, to Union Station, where I take the light rail train home. It is a lively street, with plenty of restaurants (it is known locally as restaurant row), and has lots of interesting sights. Close to downtown is the Mile High Center, seen in the foreground of the photograph on the left, with the Wells Fargo Center (nicknamed the Cash Register Building because of the shape of it's roof) in the background. The I.M. Pei designed Mile High Center was built in 1954, while the Wells Fargo Center was built in 1983 and designed by Phillip Johnson - no slouch of an architect himself - under a master plan by Pei. Denver's 16th Street Mall was also designed by I.M. Pei, I might add, proving that Denver does have some architectural gems. The Wells Fargo Building, then known as the United Bank Center (which to me looks like a giant mail box, actually), was the site of the Father's Day Bank Massacre back in 1991, when 4 unarmed bank guards were killed execution style during a robbery.
Just across the street is the Brown Palace Hotel, as seen in the photograph on the right. It was designed by well known Denver architect Frank E. Edbrooke, and opened for business in 1892. The Brown Palace was the site of an infamous double murder back in 1911, detailed in the book Murder at the Brown Palace, written by former Denver Post newspaper columnist Dick Kreck. When I worked at the Tattered Cover, we used to sell dozens of copies of that book to the hotel, which resold them to guests wanting to know about that sordid affair. The place is reputed to be haunted, too. What I want to know is whether they charge more for rooms that are haunted? Why am I so convinced that the answer to that question is a resounding yes? How did I ever become such a cynic?
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