A Boxing Day Walk Down 17th Street

The day after Christmas (Boxing Day) was sunny and in the 40s here in Denver, and so I decided to forgo searching the stores for after Christmas bargains, and instead once again walked down 17th Street from the Tattered Cover Bookstore - where I once worked as the bookkeeper - to Union Station and the light rail train home.  This was once considered a sketchy area, but is now a haven for hipsters, with many restaurants, bars, and both old and new apartments and homes, such as the 19th century row houses seen in the photograph on the left.

I think my favorite building on this street is the Dow-Rosenzweig House, built in 1882 by carpenter Charles L. Dow, and then occupied by members of the Leopold Rosenzweig family from 1888 until 1970.  It is a beautiful Italianate structure, as seen in the photograph on the right, and is now occupied by a law firm.  Just for fun, I checked it's history on the internet, and found nothing more than the few details mentioned here.  I then checked my copy of historian Tom Noel's Buildings of Colorado, and the only additional information I found was the name of the man who restored it and turned it into an office complex.  No stories of murder, ghosts, scandals, or anything untoward.  How incredibly boring.  You would think that a building almost 140 years old would have some kind of legend attached to it. All I can say is those Rosenzweig's must have been a pretty dull bunch.

A few blocks from the 16th Street Mall and the downtown area, the street gives way to high rises, a number of which I have recently featured on this blog.  Just beyond this point, 17th Street functions as Denver's financial district.  Most of the banks on this street are now very large national and multinational corporations, such as UMB Bank, seen in the photograph on the left.  This reminds me that when I first moved to Denver, I opened an account at University National Bank, a local operation just across the street from the University Hills Mall, where I managed the Hatch's Bookstore located there.  Over time it was absorbed by larger and larger banks, eventually being taken over by the second largest bank in the country, which wound up having to apologize for accepting slaves as collateral and actually owning slaves as a result.  I think they eliminated this practice a few years ago, but you never know.  Perhaps we should google it.