The Auraria Campus

I had to drive over to the Denver Motor Vehicle Department the other day, since I had not yet received the new tags for my car in the mail, and would risk getting a ticket if I didn't get them before the end of the month.  I was truly surprised that it took virtually no time at all to get duplicate tags, and was in and out in a jiffy.  Therefore, on the way home, when I passed by the Auraria Campus, I decided to stop and walk around a bit.  Auraria is the oldest neighborhood in Denver, and a truly historic area.  However, in the early 1970s, it was leveled in order to build a campus for the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State University, and the Community Campus of Denver.  Fortunately, a block of 1870 and 1880 era homes was saved, and is now named the 9th Street Historic District, located in the center of the campus.

This is a really nice park, and is a great example of a neighborhood built at a time not too long after the city was founded. As I mentioned above, what is not so great is that they had to destroy an entire Hispanic neighborhood in order to build this campus, very much like a thriving Italian community on the west side of Chicago was destroyed in order to build the University of Illinois at Chicago, which when I lived in Chicago looked to me like the location for the movie 1984, but not nearly as cozy.

But once again I digress. Many of the homes in the 9th Street Historic District are very nice indeed, such as the one in the photo on the left, and all of them are now used as offices for the school. This campus has a student population of over 63,000, by the way, and the Tivoli Student Center was originally the Tivoli Brewery.  And best of all, the Tivoli Brewing Company has been revived and was crowded as hell when I visited it on a cold, rainy Tuesday.  If I was still a student, that is exactly where I would have spent the afternoon, for better or worse.  Probably worse.