Denver Magazine / Denver Magazine November 2008 / Secrets of the City

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Secrets of the City

By Brian Melton, Dana R. Butler and Kevin Rucker

Illustrations by Dustin Q. Johnson

November 22, 1858 is the date our Queen City was born on the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek in the heat of the Colorado gold rush. One hundred and fifty years is a heck of a long time, and as our city celebrates her sesquicentennial, we thought it'd be fun to peek into her closet and air some of our favorite pieces of dirty laundry.

In a city created by golden greed, filled with scoundrels, outlaws, gamblers and madams, the well of secrets runs pretty deep. So we hunkered down in the Denver Public Library, grabbed a few-dozen history books, and snagged one tour-giving history professor from the streets of LoDo to put together our birthday present to everyone's favorite claim-jumping, beer-swilling, rough-riding Rocky Mountain cow town.

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Denver! Denver! We'll return

roaring across the City & County

Building lawn which catches the

pure emerald flame

streaming in the wake of our auto.

This time we'll buy up the city!

I cashed a great check in my skull

bank to found a miraculous college

of the body up

on the bus terminal roof.

But first we'll drive the stations

of downtown,

Poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail

Whorehouse down Folsom

to the darkest alleys of Larimer.

"” Allen Ginsberg, The Green Automobile, 1953

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The Denver Mint Robbery

Despite its name, this most famous of brazen daytime armed robberies took place only in the vicinity of the Denver Mint. The mint had previously been robbed twice with varying degrees of success, but on December 18, 1922, as a Federal Reserve truck pulled up outside the mint to collect $200,000 of the reserve's money that the mint was simply storing, gunmen jumped into action. Two guards stepped out of the mint each carrying a bag containing half the money and were met with a spray of gunfire. In the chaos, a third thief grabbed the bags of money, and although all three got away, one of them was mortally wounded. One guard lay dead in the street. Three weeks later, the getaway vehicle was discovered in a Capitol Hill garage with the injured man, now dead and frozen in the front seat.

Both the Denver Police and the Secret Service investigated thoroughly, hampered only slightly in their efforts by the fact that the Feds had reissued the stolen cash with identical serial numbers, making it, let's say, difficult to trace the missing money. And both organizations eventually "” separately and many years apart "” announced they had discovered the culprits, yet no one ever served a day in jail for the robbery. We suppose that's one way to lower the "official" crime rate.

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Born in a Bar

There's a good reason why Denver has the distinction of being America's most drunken city "” it's in our blood. Our city was born in a saloon, over pints of beer and incessant gambling, and our history as a state is irrevocably tied to booze. In 1859, approximately six months after the establishment of Denver as a trading camp during the early days of the Pikes Peak gold rush, the leaders of the city gathered in "Uncle Dick" Wooten's tavern to cut ties with the Kansas Territory, establishing a constitution that would create Jefferson Territory. In the years leading up to 1894, legislative meetings were held in taverns all over the city, from the Criterion to the Windsor, and many a city ordinance was passed by way of inebriation. Lawmakers were so used to having alcohol on hand for important votes that they installed a "lubricating room" in the newly built capital, which remained in use until 1916, where even as senators debated prohibition, they could do a bit of first-hand research into the effects of alcohol on the body.

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Give Me Liberty or Give Me "¦ Steak?

In the decades leading up to World War I, German immigrants made up a large part of the city's population, contributing greatly to Denver's arts scene and the growing beer industry of the late 1800s. However, with the advent of prohibition in 1916 and the First World War, anti-German sentiment consumed Denver. Public schools outlawed German language classes, and just for good measure, local restaurants began renaming menu items, referring to hamburgers as "liberty steaks" and sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage," nearly 90 years before the war in Iraq would prompt the American Senate to begin using the term "Freedom Fries."

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The Italian Murders

Denver's history with immigrants was, admittedly, less than stellar. Nowhere is this more evident than in regards to the city's Italian population in the late 1800s. On October 21, 1875, in a small tenement house on Lawrence Street, four bodies "” one older gentleman and three boys "” were found by a police officer who had been dispatched to find the cause of the swarming flies around the house. A trapdoor in the kitchen led to the bodies, all of which had their throats cut ear to ear. The murders made national headlines, as The New York Times reported, "the murders are believed to be the Italians who vacated the premises." The outrage the crime caused culminated in 1893 during the "Death to the Dago" Riot, in a public lynching of Daniel Arata, an Italian saloon owner who was accused of killing Benjamin Lightfoot, a 60-year-old Civil War veteran.

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A man walks into a soda shop in Denver, hung-over from a night of drinking, and orders a soda water with cream from Otto P. Baur, owner of the Baur's Confectionary Shop on Curtis Street. The cream had not arrived for the morning, so Baur suggested a scoop of ice cream instead. In the years following 1871, the ice cream soda would become quite the success.

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Protesting the Poppy

Although most of the city concerned itself with alcohol and gambling in the late 19th century, there was one faction of Denver's population that relied on another source of income. While the city's few policemen were entrenched with monitoring (and playing in) gambling halls, opium dens began popping up near the 1600 block of Wazee. By 1880, the city had 17 known opium dens spread throughout Chinatown "” a close, cramped section of downtown known as "Hop Alley." Anti-Chinese sentiment was stoked by cheap immigrant labor, and although the 1880 census reported only 238 Chinese individuals in Denver, the Rocky Mountain News added fuel to the fire, alleging that if the Republicans were to win the Garfield/Hancock presidential election, "Chinese hordes would descend upon the Mile High City."

Tensions erupted on Halloween 1880 in John Asmussen's saloon while two Chinese men were playing pool. Four drunken white men walked into the bar and began taunting them. One of the Chinese men was hit with a pool cue, and the other, seeing his friend assaulted, pulled out a gun and shot at the attackers, missing every one of them. The result of the skirmish was the "Hop Alley Riot," in which a crowd of 3,000 European immigrants, African-Americans and Caucasians gathered together to call for the eradication of the Chinese. Special officers were called in to handle the situation while firemen sprayed the crowd with hoses, inflaming the mob and leading to the lynching of Sing Lee, the owner of a nearby laundromat. The mob destroyed most of Chinatown, and the State Department, high on the anti-Chinese sentiment of the day, refused to pay the claim of $53,653 filed by the Chinese embassy.

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The Ballad of Soapy Smith

Jefferson Randolph Smith II, Denver's most notorious confidence man, was born in Georgia in 1860, the son of a powerful attorney whose family lost its fortune after the Civil War. The Smith family relocated to Texas when Jefferson was 16, and it was there that he began working as a cowboy. Adrift in the city of Abilene, Smith encountered a shell game artist, who took Smith for an entire week's pay. Although Smith was broke, he looked upon the shell game as an opportunity. He had learned it was easier to swindle than work on the range.

Smith arrived in Denver in 1886, drawn to the city's tolerance of gambling, and opened the Tivoli, a gaming club on the second floor of 1701 Larimer. To keep himself occupied, Smith would stand at the corner of 17th and Larimer streets, open a suitcase full of bars of soap and begin to gather a crowd. "Cleanliness is next to Godliness, my friends," Smith would pitch. "But the feel of a good crisp greenback in the pocket is paradise itself. Step up, my friends, and watch me closely." Smith would place $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills in selected pieces of soap and would sell them all for $5 a bar. Members of Smith's gang would buy bars of the soap and win the hidden money, enticing the crowd to make a purchase. No one but

Smith's confidants ever won the money, earning him the nickname "Soapy" Smith.

By March 15, 1894, Smith had nearly every politician in town on his payroll. Word of his success got back to the newly elected Governor, Davis H. Waite. When Waite threatened to remove the corrupt politicians, those in opposition barricaded themselves in City Hall while the National Guard marched on the city. Smith gathered a militia of gamblers and outlaws to ambush the National Guardsmen as they made their way down Larimer. No violence occurred during this "City Hall War" as Waite agreed to withdraw his troops and let the Colorado Supreme Court decide the fate of the officials. Its decision gave Waite authority to remove the offending politicians and to chase Smith out of town.

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Mademoiselle Tight-Rope

There was entertainment in the evenings on Larimer during the summer of 1860. George Clayton purchased the land office building on 15th and Larimer and added a false front. Clayton strung a wire over to Edward Chase's Criterion Saloon, and at night, Mademoiselle Carolista came out and performed her tight-wire act for bemused spectators. The act really captured attention after Carolista consumed three shots of whiskey, tied a blindfold over her eyes and pushed a whiskey barrel over the tight wire. Much to the dismay of the crowd below, Mademoiselle Tight-Rope never fell.

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In 1894, in an attempt to drum up business for his Cereal Machine invention, Henry Perky began distributing whole-wheat cereal squares from a horse-drawn wagon on the streets of Denver. When the squares proved to be more popular than his machine, he took his cereal to Massachusetts and began the Shredded Wheat Company.

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A Bad Day to Be a Reporter

The American frontier was always a safety valve for the East. If you fell behind with creditors or committed a crime, you just headed west to reduce the chances of apprehension. It is safe to say, during the Colorado gold rush, the prospector camps had more than their fair share of unsavory characters. In April of 1859, William Byers began publishing the Rocky Mountain News on the second floor of Dick Wooten's saloon. Byers, always an advocate of law and order, would decry the lawlessness pervading the gold camps in scathing editorials. Every so often, a target of accusation would be sitting downstairs and see his name printed in the News. To express his displeasure, the accused would fire a couple of rounds from his revolver into the ceiling. Bullets came ripping up through the floorboards, causing Byers to lay triple planks to protect himself and his staff.

Across the street from Larimer's land office at 15th and Larimer was Ed Jump's Criterion Saloon. On July 12, 1860, Charley Harrison, a notorious gambler, gunned down a well-known black gambler, "Professor" Charles Starks. In response, Byers wrote an editorial: "The man who has shot down an unarmed man, and then repeats his shots while his victim writhes at his feet, is unfit to live in a civilized community. All rowdies, ruffians, shoulder-hitters, and bullies that infest our town stop or face vigilante committees!"

On July 31, 1860, Harrison's gang kidnapped Byers at gunpoint and dragged him down Larimer Street to the Criterion, tossing a rope over the eave of the building in an effort to hang the editor. Harrison, disturbed by the commotion, told the men to release Byers. Harrison offered a warning, telling him to run back the News to arm himself. Thirty minutes later, half a dozen men came riding by on horseback, firing their guns into the building. Thanks to Harrison, Byers and his employees were armed and ready, firing back and killing one of them.

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"Big Ed"

Oh, to be a criminal in the days of gunslinging, gambling and saloon politics. Edward "Big Ed" Chase was the king of the underworld, whose stranglehold on the seamy side of the city lasted from the moment Chase arrived in Denver in 1860 until his death in 1921. Chase dominated the world of Denver gambling in a town filled with gamblers, opening his first saloon, the Arcadia, on Blake Street. In 1863, Chase replaced the Arcadia with Progressive Hall, home to burlesque dancing, vaudeville acts, gambling and, of course, plenty of drinking.

It was the two-story Palace Theater that solidified Chase's place as Denver's most notorious saloon owner. Located at 15th and Blake streets, the Palace was primarily a burlesque theater, seating 750 patrons. But the big attraction was the gambling chamber adjacent to the stage. The gaming room was known as the roughest in town, its crimson carpets allegedly hiding gallons of blood from numerous fights and alleged murders. Chase, who would eventually serve on the city council, was connected to several prominent politicians, keeping him out of jail and his establishment open.

The last standing building of Chase's empire is the Navarre, located across the street from the Brown Palace Hotel on Tremont. Originally a girls' boarding school, the building was converted in 1890 into a gambling hall and bordello. To accommodate the high-class clientele staying at the Brown Palace, Chase utilized an underground railroad tunnel between the two locations, so prominent businessmen and politicians could travel back and forth without being seen. The Navarre, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places, stands in testament to the legacy of Big Ed, who left his wife more than $600,000 in stocks and real estate when he passed away at 83.

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The Denver Omelet, an eggy collage of diced ham, onions and bell peppers (also known as the Western Omelet) is credited to Denver restaurateur Albert A. McVittie who tossed the ingredients together and sandwiched them between two slices of bread creating the "Denver Sandwich," thus popularizing the breakfast dish.

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Although there are several men who claim to have placed the first slice of American cheese on a round piece of ground hamburger, only one gent has the trademark. In 1935, Louis Ballast of Denver's Humpty-Dumpty Drive-In was

awarded the distinction of at least coming up with the term if, in fact, he didn't actually think of it first.

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What's a Wewatta Anyway?

We know Wynkoop Street was named after Denver co-founder and prominent local actor, Edward W. Wynkoop, but where do the names Wewatta and Wazee come from? William McGaa was a British mountain man of upper-class ancestry who was living on Cherry Creek when William Larimer claim-jumped his way into Denver. McGaa, a founding member of the Denver and Auraria Town Companies, named the LoDo streets after two of his Indian wives. As a side note, Glenarm Place was named for his family's estate in Scotland, and Champa was the name given to McGaa by his Arapaho Indian family.

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The Big Mitt

Robert W. Speer arrived in Denver in 1878, a tuberculosis patient looking to take advantage of the fresh air and abundant sunshine. He soon returned to full strength and jumped into the world of local real estate and politics. He got himself appointed to the boards overseeing both the police and fire departments and the public works projects involved in building the city's streets and parks. By 1900, he was the leader of the Big Mitt, an alliance of professional politicians, well-connected land developers, contractors, real estate speculators and the public utility corporations.

Come election time, the city's workers found themselves torn between middle class crusaders for good government and the Democratic Big Mitt machine. However, the Big Mitt showed an interest in the city's workers, sensing an opportunity to sway votes "” or, more accurately, to create votes where there were none or many votes where there should have been only one. First there were votes to reject the Reformers' proposed city constitution in 1903, then votes to ratify the Big Mitt's proposed constitution in September of that same year "” this one provided for the election of a mayor to oversee the city council "” and finally to elect Speer mayor in 1904, an election he narrowly won with the help of a good 10,000 to 15,000 fraudulent votes.

Ultimately, Speer was good for Denver. He threatened city regulations that would hurt the utilities and railroads that didn't take steps to make services user-friendly and assist in creating some of the city's infrastructure such as bridges and viaducts. His "City Beautiful" movement focused on building parks and gardens, including the Civic Center and the landscaping of Cherry Creek from the Denver Country Club at Downing to City Hall, which then sat at 14th and Larimer. Sure, he and his cronies were major investors in property that sat long this stretch, but the work is part of what makes Denver so gorgeous today. But Speer's devotion to the city was lost among the sheer amount of money the public works efforts and real estate deals made for his friends and backers. He was driven out of office in 1912, but without a powerful mayor, the city floundered, and he was back in office in 1916.