DenverUrbanism Blog

In this third post in our special series, we will take a look at the geography and architecture of Denver’s single-family detached homes built during the 1890s. For previous installments in the series, please use these links:

1870s (plus series introduction)
1880s

The 1890s was the city’s fourth full decade of existence. From that decade, about 5,900 single-family homes are still in existence today, comprising about 70% of Denver’s surviving Nineteenth century housing stock. As Mark notes below, the city experienced in this decade the worst economic crisis in its history: the Silver Crash of 1893. Nevertheless, Denver still experienced solid net growth in the 1890s and affirmed its position as the preeminent city of the Mountain West. Denver’s population grew from 106,713 in 1890 to 133,859 in 1900, a growth rate of 25%.

Where did Denver grow in the 1890s? Let’s take a look (click/expand to biggify). Parcels with single-family homes built during the 1890s that remain today are colored red. Parcels with homes that were built in a previous decade that remain today are colored gray.

In the 1890s, Denver continued to grow primarily in three directions relative to Downtown: northwest, east, and south. As we saw in the 1880s, a lot of growth occurred in Northwest Denver, but the growth was widely dispersed across today’s Highland, West Highland, Berkeley, Sunnyside, Jefferson Park, and Sloan Lake neighborhoods. Much of this area in Northwest Denver was, at the time, part of a separate municipality, the Town of Highlands. For more on that fascinating aspect of Denver’s history, click here.

Growth continued to the east from Curtis Park/Five Points into the Cole, Whittier, Clayton, and City Park West districts, while Elyria-Swansea to the north and Capitol Hill and Cheesman Park to the southeast remained popular places with steady development. Farther east, Congress Park started taking off, while scattered development continued in Montclair and the first few homes started appearing in Park Hill. New homes also started being built in the Country Club and the Cherry Creek districts during the 1890s.

South of Downtown, the Lincoln Park, Baker, Speer, and West Washington Park neighborhoods saw steady growth, extending the crescent-shaped residential development pattern farther to the southeast and south into Washington Park, Platte Park, Rosedale, and Overland. New development also got underway in the University Park neighborhood.

Here are the 1890s parcels colored in red over a current Google Earth aerial:

Next, Mark’s architectural photos and descriptions:

The decade of the 1890s was defined by the end of an era. The panic of 1893 and subsequent depression ended the Victorian-era building boom. While 2,338 building permits were issued by Denver in 1890, only 124 were granted in 1894. The Victorian styles continued to fade in popularity and, by 1900, Neoclassical and Colonial Revival became the current fashion. Denverites followed the national trend moving away from the extravagance of the Gilded Age designs into more economical, standardized ones.

1. Eclectic. A vernacular poly-chromed townhouse sub-type of the Gothic style. A flat roof with a false gable, the sunburst patterns displayed in the gables, the elaborate cornice, and the upper brackets which form extensions of the vertical strips of masonry are all features of the sub-type.

2. Queen Anne. Built a decade past the Gothic Revival period, this house features many elements from that period’s style. The decorative verge-boards topped by finials, window crowns, and the undecorated masonry that stretches into the gables are all characteristics of the Gothic Revival style.

3. Queen Anne. Side gabled with a two-story side bay, the front-facing two-story curved bay forms the base of a conical shaped corner tower. Pediments and the turned porch supports add decorative detailing.

4. Richardsonian Romanesque. Built of rough-faced stonework with a front-facing gable and a corner tower, the tower above the corner bay windows features decorative battlements or crenelations. Rounded (Romanesque) arches are a key feature of the style as well as the row of arched windows near the gable. The columns often feature cushion capitals and the arch springs from heavy piers, columns, or wall surfaces.

5. Dutch Colonial Revival. A defining element of the style is the gambrel roof which this house features as the steeply pitched side-gabled type. Front-facing dormer windows and a full-width front porch are also common elements of the style.

6. Dutch Colonial Revival. This home features the more common front-facing gambrel roof with a cross gable at the side; the side or rear gable will often be a gambrel as well. An oriel window and diamond shingles are interesting details.

7. Foursquare (known locally as the Denver Square). Early squares typically had two stories with a rectangular plan, and a hipped roof featuring a central attic dormer. The roofs were high and steep with ornamentation limited to brackets or modillions under the eaves, such as this home. The early style had a single-story full-width porch with Tuscan columns and a simple wooden balustrade. The plain Foursquare later proved ideal for experimentation and became progressively more elaborate.

8. Classic Cottage. Known as a “Cottage Home” in real estate descriptions, these were a plainer, more affordable one-and-a-half story counterpart to the Denver Square and are similar in plan, roof type and ornamentation. Constructed of red brick with a rusticated stone foundation and window trim, the house has a small porch with clustered Tuscan columns and a gable roof accented with a bas-relief. The cottage home became the entry-level home of choice supplanting the one-story, front-gabled Queen Anne.

Next in our series, the 1900s!

Here’s the next installment in our special series exploring Denver’s single-family detached homes by geography and architecture. Today we’ll look at the 1880s.

While there are just a handful of homes remaining from the 1870s, there are quite a few homes from the 1880s still standing in Denver today, around 2,600. Here are two maps that show the location of these homes (click and zoom to view at maximum resolution). This first one shows each parcel with an 1880s-era home on it colored in red along with Denver’s statistical neighborhood boundaries and names.

What’s evident from the map is that the greatest concentration of 1880s homes is in Curtis Park/Five Points and spilling over into Cole and Whittier. A few homes are found in Capitol Hill, Cheesman Park, and City Park West, although I suspect originally there were more 1880s homes in Capitol Hill but that many of them were replaced in the mid-Twentieth century by apartment buildings. Another area with a high number of 1880s homes is Lincoln Park and Baker; the crescent shape south of Colfax broadly formed by the Platte River (and its industrial uses) on the west and Cherry Creek on the east is clearly visible. Southeast of Baker, the Speer and Washington Park neighborhoods were just taking off in the 1880s as is evidenced by the scattering of homes there. Likewise for Platt Park.

Highland and the rest of Northwest Denver, as well as Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, also contain quite a few 1880s homes, although they are spread across a much larger area than the relatively compact concentration of 1880s homes in Curtis Park/Five Points. Finally, you’ll note a few homes in the historic Montclair neighborhood far to the east, which was founded during the 1880s as its own municipality but was annexed as part of the consolidation into the City and County of Denver in 1902.

This next image shows these 1880s parcels highlighted on a current Google Earth aerial:

Now, here are Mark’s photos and architecture assessment:

Single-family detached brick housing was the primary residential style in Denver in the 1880s and is still evident today. Good clay, cold winters and fireproof construction ordinances helped create a brick city. Denver homes in the Nineteenth-century typically occupied one or one and a half 25 by 125-foot lots with very small or non-existent side yards. The Victorian styles dominated: Gothic Revival, Second Empire, Italianate, Romanesque, and Queen Anne were at the height of their popularity.

1. Second Empire. Features the distinctive mansard roof – a four-sided gambrel-style hip roof characterized by two slopes on each of its sides and often containing dormer windows. The Second Empire style was largely passé by the mid 1880s.

2. Italianate. Classic red brick two-story corner Italianate . Richly ornamented, the home features a hipped roof and elaborate metal cornice with a matching metal porch roof.

3. Italianate. A trio of homes that were once identical but have since lost their original front porches. Two-story front bays and bracketed cornices with metal cresting are common characteristics.

4. Many homes from the Victorian era mixed elements from the various Victorian styles. This one and a half story home appears to have elements from both the Italianate and Queen Anne styles. Features a corner tower turret and hipped roof with a front facing gable.

5. Romanesque. Features a rough-faced stone façade with stone columns topped with eggplant finials and a center gable eyebrow window. Stone block radial voussoirs crown the round-arched Romanesque windows. Romanesque ornament usually includes geometric motifs and grotesque animal or human forms and this example contains both: the not so subtle face near the top of the gable and the bead or egg pattern above the second-story windows.

6. Victorian. This house contains mansard elements in the roofline that demonstrate the transition from early Victorian to the subsequent Queen Anne style. The home is symmetrical, with a full-width front porch differing from the asymmetrical Queen Anne style.

7. Queen Anne. Some of this home’s many features common to the style are its asymmetric shape, front facing gable with fish-scale shingles, the off-set front porch and rusticated stone voussoirs. Vernacular characteristics include the Tuscan columns, the elaborate Tudor style chimney and the Romanesque eyebrow dormer.

8. Queen Anne. Queen Anne style varies from elaborate “castles” to restrained single-story designs. This home has many common features of the style such as the steeply irregular roof, fish-scale shingles, and the elaborate ornamental porch spindles. Oriel and dormer windows as well as the coffered porch pediment are additional embellishments.

This is the first of a 15-part exploration of the geography and architecture of Denver’s roughly 129,000 single-family detached homes—one decade at a time.

Understanding the manner in which cities grow and evolve over time is a topic of great interest to me. One idea I’ve had in mind for many years was to visualize Denver’s geographic growth over the decades while simultaneously visualizing the prevalent architectural design and building forms that constituted that growth. With the help of the excellent GIS department at Matrix Design Group, about a year ago I put together this “Denver’s Single-Family Homes by Decade” research project, a small part of which I’m sharing here with DenverUrbanism readers.

The Denver Assessor’s office maintains a database containing information on the approximately 171,000 discrete real estate parcels within the City and County of Denver. This information can be accessed by anyone through the Assessor’s website or the entire parcel database can be obtained from the city. Using the full database as of October 2010, I queried the “Year Built” field (which reports the year a structure on a parcel was constructed) for only single-family detached residential properties, and aggregated the data by decade. Then, with the assistance of the Matrix GIS team, I developed the maps that will be presented in this blog series. An important thing to remember is that these data represent the single-family detached homes built in each decade that are still standing (as of October 2010), and not all the homes that were originally built during the decade.

To incorporate the architectural component, I recruited Mark Zakrzewski to collaborate with me on this project. Mark is a long-time Downtown Denver resident who is not only an urban enthusiast and a fan of architecture and Denver history, but he’s also a passionate amateur photographer; the camera allowing Mark to combine his love for all things urban through a single medium. In each post, Mark will feature photos of representative homes from the decade and descriptions of their architectural styles and features.

So let’s get started:

Denver was founded in 1858, but no single-family detached residential structures (per the Assessor) that were built in the 1850s or 1860s remain standing. That brings us to the 1870s, where there are 25 residences in the city that are still with us today that were constructed during that decade. Viewing only 25 highlighted parcels at a city-wide scale becomes nearly impossible, so for this decade only, the maps will be different than the rest of the decades to come. Below, using GoogleEarth and my parcel data in KML format, I’ve zoomed in on the areas north and south of Downtown Denver. The 1870s parcels are colored in red (click to embiggen):

As you can see, Denver’s few 1870s homes are scattered in Lower Highland, Curtis Park/Five Points, La Alma/Lincoln Park, and Baker.

Now for Mark’s contribution. Here are eight of the homes built in the 1870s, according to the Denver Assessor’s office:

The majority of 1870s single-family residential structures in Denver were built without the services of an architect and many lacked a definable style. Most homes were constructed of wood in a frame vernacular style that reflected Denver’s boomtown, gold-rush roots. Building permits weren’t required until 1889, and heights, manner of construction, and class of building weren’t regulated until 1904.

1. Early Vernacular Cottage. The curious pediments above the front windows are faithful re-creations of the originals while the turned wooden porch posts in the Queen Anne style were most likely added in a later restoration.

2. Frame Vernacular. This home is a surviving territorial house located in the San Rafael Historic District. A “territorial” house is one built prior to Colorado’s 1876 statehood. Wood frame construction was subsequently banned in Denver.

3. Italianate. A rather unique brick one-story with side bay that features a bracketed cornice with dentil molding. The hipped roof is highlighted by a protruding dormer window.

4. Italianate. Constructed of red brick with a bracketed cornice and a two -story side bay and featuring a transom window over the front door displaying the home’s historic address.

5. Frame Vernacular. Denver’s version of the “Shotgun Shack” found across the American south. Originally wood frame construction, this house and its next door neighbor have been redone in stucco, a trend I’ve seen with a number of oldest wood frame houses.

6. Second Empire. Constructed of red brick with a full mansard roof, this house was once a modest single story dwelling. The home once had an elaborate half length covered porch which was lost around the time it was remodeled and enlarged.

7. Frame Vernacular. Many of the earliest homes were very basic and lacking any ornamentation similar to this home in the Highlands, however the majority seem to have been altered with additons, porches etc.

8. Eclectic. Brick construction with hipped roof and two-story front bay.

Up next: the 1880s.