Just for fun, this is the neat looking building I mentioned:
That's the old "Power and Light" building downtown. Covered in lights in the days when electricity was still a novelty. Pretty at night now. They replace some of the white bulbs at Christmas sometimes with red and green.
Did you notice the large non-descript building right next door to the north? That's the "Denver Main" Qwest/CenturyLink Telco Central Office for downtown and the "Terminal Annex". Lots of fiber optics under the street you were standing on.
If you ever get an intercept message with the tag "303-1-T" at the end when placing a call out of Denver, the problem is in that building.
MCI/Verizon's main fiber feeds are out near DIA at their "Denver Junction" facility. Cutely named since their fiber follows the rail line out there.
Old photos of Larimer street look like modern photos of some areas of developing nations today. All the cabling was on poles above ground downtown. Can't hardly see the buildings for all the wiring with the Power building and the Phone buildings both there.
The streets down there in that area were all named for the group of Kansas City "fathers" of Denver who moved here and started battling with Central City for the State Capitol location. "Upper" Downtown at the other end is all named for Civil War Generals with the addition of "Lincoln" of course.
The modern exception is "Market" street in Lower Downtown which originally had one of their names on it, but when he became the town drunk and sat under "his" streetsigns and told folks (loudly and often) that it was *his* street, the city fathers were embarrassed and renamed the street to get him to go away.
Fun stuff, Denver's history. A couple blocks from the building you were at was the red-light district. The infamous Mattie Silks ran brothels that stretched out over half the State.
There was an underground tunnel from that area over to the other end of Downtown near the Brown Palace hotel so the politicians and power-mongers of the day could travel to the red-light district unseen.
The stuff those old buildings have seen. There was an article recently here that praised the folks who fought the steel high rise building trend along the 16th Street Mall to keep the old architecture in the late 70s and on into the construction of the walking mall in the 80s. Much of Denver's 1800's mining rush character and history would have been lost if the high rises had won out.
