In the heart of Denver’s Central Business District are 43 buildings that constitute the Downtown Denver Historic District. From the Brown Palace Hotel to the Equitable Building to the Daniels & Fisher Tower, these are the icons and landmarks that serve as the foundation to the downtown urban fabric and as outstanding exemplars of the architectural styles and craftsmanship common during our city’s first decades.

We lost quite a few notable buildings in Downtown Denver during the city-wrecking days of the 1960 and 1970s when the urban renewal mindset viewed old buildings as disposable remnants of a bygone era. Fortunately, thanks to Historic Denver and others who advocated to preserve our historic buildings as important connections to our city’s past, we now have thousands of buildings across the city that will be with us for generations to come. By the 1990s, even the Denver Urban Renewal Authority was playing a key role in the preservation of Denver’s historic treasures by providing gap financing for the restoration of many downtown structures, such as the Denver Dry Goods Building, the Boston Building, and the Rio Grande Building.

In 1988, the Lower Downtown Denver Historic District was created, preserving and protecting over 120 historic mercantile and warehouse buildings in the LoDo area, and in 2000, the city created the Downtown Denver Historic District, a non-contiguous historic district comprised of 43 individual buildings in the center of Downtown.

In 2006, I set out with my 4-megapixel camera and my fledgling photography skills to photograph all 43 buildings. I posted four photos of each building on the original DenverInfill website as a Special Feature. Since our new WordPress theme includes a photo gallery template, I decided to dust off those 2006 images and present all of the photos I took of these 43 buildings at a more generous resolution as our first DenverUrbanism photo gallery.

To view the gallery, click here or use the Photo Galleries link on the menu bar at the top.

Many of the buildings today are largely unchanged from these 2006 images except for a few, like the Steel’s Department Store building (aka Fontius Shoes building) at 16th and Welton, which was in disrepair in 2006 but was restored a few years later and is now known as the Sage Building. I’m tempted to reshoot these buildings with my improved photography skills and fancy 20-megapixel camera… we’ll see. But for now, please enjoy these photos of our most important historic buildings in Downtown Denver!