More On Lower Downtown

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I went for a walk through lower downtown Denver last weekend.  The area where I started my walk is where Denver first began in 1858, and it still has a lot of the buildings from those early days (by which I mean the brick buildings that replaced the wooden structures after they all burned down).  There is even a former Wells Fargo Stage Coach Office at the corner of 15th and Market, which is now, of course, some New Age type of shop.  Bat Masterson once managed the Palace Theater and Gambling Hall just down the street at 15th and Blake, where there now stands a condo building called the Palace Lofts.   In the above collage on the upper left is Union Station, the middle of which was rebuilt after a fire in 1901, while the two sides were built in 1881.  The upper right photo shows the Abend Gallery, which used to be located near the bookstore where I work on Colfax, but has now gone upscale and moved to this new Lower Downtown location.  Nothing personal, but when it was on Colfax I never saw anything remotely interesting in there. Maybe they were catering to the Colfax Avenue crowd back then.  Big mistake. In the bottom right is the newly rebuilt train platform for both Amtrack and the local light rail trains, and on the bottom left is a bar called Society Sports and Spirits.  This is where a Denver institution called City Spirit Cafe, a restaurant and bar for an earlier generation of hipsters,  was once located, but it has recently been the home of a series of bars.  It is now a popular spot for hockey and basketball fans due to it's location not too far from the Pepsi Center (The Can).  I myself have never been there, since it is, after all, a hockey and basketball joint.  I'm not a snob, but...