Rich world of golden Denver

DENVER — St. Louis has its Gateway Arch, New York its Statue of Liberty and the District its Washington Monument. Denver has a big blue bear.

Make that a 42-foot-tall, 10,000-pound, deep-lapis-toned bear, a playful work of public art by University of Denver professor Lawrence Argent that is sure to make Democrats smile when they hold their national convention in the city Aug. 25 through 28.

Appropriately named “I See What You Mean,” the bear stands on its hind legs in the grass along 14th Street, leaning forward and seeming to press its forepaws and snout against the glass-walled Colorado Convention Center like a curious, if fantastically overgrown, child striving for a better view inside.

Denver has more to amuse party animals and tourists, of course, and the staff of the Denver Post had fun compiling a list of “What we have that New York doesn’t” in January 2007, when the Democrats chose the Mile High City over the Big Apple as their meeting place.

“Anything New York can do, we can do better,” the paper crowed. “We’ve got your art (how ’bout a big blue bear?). We’ve got your celebrities (like comedian Josh Blue). We’ve got your sense of history. And we’ve got it all without a $20 cover to leave your hotel.”

The bear was the paper’s tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the Statue of Liberty as “colossal figure.” Mr. Blue, the fourth-season winner of TV’s “Last Comic Standing,” was matched against Jerry Seinfeld as “comic celeb seen on the street.”

In all, the paper’s staff came up with a dozen only-in-Denver landmarks and lighthearted comparisons. Although unaware of the Post’s picks at the time, I found my way to more than half of them last year, plus some that didn’t make the cut. Together, they create an image of a city successfully preserving its past while transforming itself from one-time “cowtown” to contemporary urban center.

An easy way to travel through downtown, I soon learn, is the free bus shuttle on the 16th Street pedestrian mall. Although just 16 blocks long, the route puts passengers within walking distance of most downtown attractions, plus light rail connections that carry them to other city destinations and the suburbs. By its planned completion in 2018, the rail system should cover 120 miles.

My travel-writing friends and I don’t need the shuttle to get to our first landmark, the Denver Art Museum’s acclaimed, titanium-clad Frederic C. Hamilton Building. It’s a short walk from the historic Brown Palace hotel, where we’re staying as guests of Colorado tourism.

A shining collection of jutting angles and diverse geometric shapes inside and out, the Hamilton Building increased the museum’s exhibit space by 40 percent when it opened in October 2006, expanding the total complex to 350,000 square feet.

Architect Daniel Libeskind’s unique design is intended, museum officials say, to mirror the city’s Rocky Mountain backdrop and call to mind rock crystals found in the foothills. I’m intrigued by the building’s many angular juxtapositions, but the sun glinting off all that titanium — Denver boasts of 300 sunny days a year — makes it hard for an amateur photographer like me to capture them.

The new building is in good company architecturally. Mr. Libeskind also designed a glass-and-zinc condominium building, called Museum Residences, and connected it to the Hamilton Building with a landscaped plaza he also fashioned. Across the street from his work is the museum’s 1971 North Building, a 28-sided, double-towered contemporary “castle” by Italian modernist Gio Ponti. Nearby is the 1995 Denver Public Library expansion, which American postmodern master Michael Graves designed to look like a collection of urban buildings.

The museum is internationally recognized for its American Indian, pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial holdings, which are in the North Building. Director Lewis Sharp has greatly strengthened its focus on Western American art, and we view some of that along with the African, Oceanic and contemporary installations in the Hamilton’s angled galleries.

About a seven-block walk from the art museum is the Molly Brown House Museum, a restored monument to a remarkable woman.

The real Margaret Tobin Brown — never Molly in real life — was a suffragette, supporter of the union movement and juvenile justice system, prodigious fundraiser for charitable causes, world traveler and, yes, Titanic survivor, the source of her “unsinkable” legend.

The daughter of poor Irish immigrants, she married a miner and self-taught engineer of modest means, James Joseph “J.J.” Brown, in 1886 in Leadville, Colo. A spectacular gold strike seven years later made him a multimillionaire, and in 1894, the couple and their two children moved to the 14-room 1889 granite-block house in Denver’s prestigious Capitol Hill neighborhood.

She raised a few eyebrows — and no doubt annoyed fellow socialites — by giving her servants paid days off and inviting them to sit in on tutoring sessions for herself and her children, says museum Assistant Director Annie Robb Levinsky. She was far from the rejected nouveau-riche upstart portrayed in 1960s stage and screen musicals, however. Most of the city’s wealthiest residents were, like the Browns, new-money successes, Ms. Levinsky points out.

A frame on one wall contains Margaret Brown’s $27,000 insurance claim for items lost in the Titanic disaster, including “street furs,” an ermine opera cape and “three crates of ancient models” intended for the Denver Museum.

The preservation group Historic Denver came together in 1970 to save the Brown House from demolition and since then has succeeded in having more than 40 districts and 325 buildings designated as historic.

I have a personal interest in one major attraction, the four-block, 12-acre Denver Performing Arts Complex, where nine of 10 theaters are united under an 80-foot-tall glass canopy. I would go there anyway, but an added incentive is that an actress niece of mine, Kathleen Wallace, is enrolled in the three-year master of fine arts program at the National Theatre Conservatory, which is under the same umbrella organization as the complex.

The conservatory’s home is across the street in a restored 1911 former tram-company car barn, where it has 14 rehearsal spaces plus its own 180-seat Tramway Theatre.

About 435 hopefuls applied for eight openings the year Kathleen was accepted into the tuition-free, stipend-paying program, my guide tells me during a tour of the facility, and that’s not unusual. The applicant pool has gone as high as 490. The intensive program leads to a third-year apprenticeship with the Denver Center Theatre Company, a repertory troupe that won the 1998 Tony Award for best regional theater, and an Actors’ Equity contract.

I see the repertory troupe perform George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” one night in the complex’s 450-seat, in-the-round Space Theatre. Another night, I’m upfront for “The Taffetas,” a lighthearted tribute to 1950s girl groups, in the 210-seat, cabaret-style Garner Galleria Theatre.

The complex, which has been growing since 1978, also contains three theaters with more than 2,000 seats each for touring Broadway productions, symphony, opera and ballet. One of them, Boettcher Concert Hall, soon will undergo a complete renovation and enlargement.

No visit to Denver would be complete without stops in LoDo — Lower Downtown — the one name even people who know practically nothing about the city usually recognize. This one-time business and warehouse district, loaded with turn-of-the-last-century buildings, has been transformed into a popular mix of loft apartments, shops, galleries, restaurants, brew pubs and clubs. It’s also where baseball fans come to play, as Coors Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies, is there.

My first LoDo stop, following the route of the 16th Street shuttle, is Larimer Street, where about a half-dozen life-size bronzes of gossiping women and frolicking children in Writer Square make me smile. Knox Gallery has enlivened the public space while promoting its artists.

Larimer Square, where my group dines at chef-owner Jennifer Jasinski’s Mediterranean-inspired Rioja, has a festive air at night with white Christmas lights strung back and forth across the street. By day, it gets an extra spark of energy from college students transporting themselves around town on skateboards and firing up their laptops at Starbucks.

When Toby Keith sings “I should’ve been a cowboy,” he’s likely wearing a shirt from Rockmount Ranch Wear, a Western clothing manufacturer and retail company that has been in the same 1908 brick LoDo building since 1946.

Founder and CEO Jack A. “Papa Jack” Weil, who still goes to work daily at age 107, is as much an institution as the iconic snap-button shirt he invented. He tells reporters he just thought tear-away shirts would be safer for cowboys than buttoned ones, but their popularity has spread far beyond the range and even the Western movie set (think “Brokeback Mountain”) and country music stage.

Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, “60 Minutes” interviewer Scott Pelley and San Francisco Giants catcher Bill Hayes are among a galaxy of stars on Rockmount’s Internet Celebrity Gallery, but we non-notables have a great time checking out the fancy boots, decorative belt buckles, hats and other accessories, chatting all the while with Wendy Weil. Her husband, Steve, “Papa Jack’s” grandson, is president of the company, and his father, Jack B. Weil, was vice president until his death in January at age 79.

Practically around the corner from Rockmount is the LoDo location of the Tattered Cover, said to be one of the nation’s largest independent bookstores. The two-story structure with exposed ducts and joists, a coffee shop and well-used seating scattered throughout, has an inviting “stay and read a while” air. Owner Joyce Meskis is known for supporting authors and stocking books from across the ideological spectrum and for her refusal, upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2002, to turn over a customer’s sales records to police.

The bulletin board near the restrooms is a good place to find notices about what’s happening at local music venues, from dives to the 1,870-seat restored art-deco Paramount Theatre.

Not far beyond Union Station at the end of the shuttle line is the recently developed Riverside area and, beyond that, the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, where Denver got its start after prospectors discovered gold there. A sign at the appropriately named Confluence Park announces that improvements are coming, “Reclaiming Denver’s Birthplace.”

I’m headed for the huge REI-Denver Flagship store across the river, proclaimed a must-see by the Denver Post and my niece. Below me as I cross over the river, a kayaker is maneuvering through small rapids where customers test kayaks. Several cyclists are rolling past on a trail that is part of an 800-mile system of paved biking and pedestrian paths, and two sisters, 4 and 6, are climbing barefooted in the store’s outdoor “Boldering Area” for children.

The store also has its own mountain bike trails and, inside, a 47-foot “climbing pinnacle.”

A meal would be a good idea before a return trip on the shuttle, and choices are plentiful. Zengo, where chef Michael Sandoval serves Latin-Asian fare in a stunning fiery-red contemporary setting, is an upscale option in Riverside. Mr. Sandoval also has a Zengo in Washington, near the Verizon Center.

Wynkoop Brewing Co., the city’s oldest brew pub, is another option. How about beer with green chilies? No? No problem. The choice of specialty and more standard brews runs deep. The pub also has its own comedy club, a pool parlor with 22 tables and private poolrooms, and an art collection extensive enough to require an on-staff curator.

Exciting resources in city

It’s not surprising that every president save one (Calvin Coolidge) from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush has stayed at Denver’s Brown Palace hotel or that celebrities from Buffalo Bill Cody to Tony Bennett and Kanye West have made it their temporary home. Less expected is for a prizewinning steer to parade through the lobby.

The hotel rolls out a red carpet every January for the National Western Stock Show’s grand champion steer. The 1996 winner got spooked, escaped from its handler and trotted down 17th street, inspiring Kathleen Cook Waldron to write a fictional account for children, “Roundup at the Palace.”

“Fun facts” such as that brighten the Web site for the 241-room grande dame: www.brownpalace.com; 800/321-2599.

The 110-room Hotel Teatro, across from the Denver Performing Arts Complex, has decorated the lobby and guest rooms in its 1911 building with costumes and photos from theatrical productions: www.hotelteatro.com, 888/727-1200.

LoDo’s 80-room Oxford Hotel, opened in 1891, was designed by the same architect as the 1892 Brown Palace, Frank E. Edbrooke: www.theoxfordhotel.com; 800/228-5838.

The stock show is a 15-day extravaganza of livestock sales, competitions, rodeos and other entertainment that attracted more than 673,000 people this year, its 103rd: www.national western.com.

The Web site for Historic Denver Inc. has information on special events, Web links to historic sites, and an online bookstore with 21 guides for neighborhood and themed city walking tours: https://historicdenver.org.

One link is to the Molly Brown House Museum: mollybrown.org.

The current season of the Tony-winning Denver Center Theatre Company included three world premieres commissioned by the troupe. One of them, “Gee’s Bend,” won playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, 27, the American Theatre Critics Association’s 2008 M. Elizabeth Osborne New Play Award for an emerging playwright.

Information about the repertory company can be found on the Web site for the Denver Performing Arts Complex, which in addition to theater schedules includes everything else under the organizational umbrella; the degree-granting National Theatre Conservatory; the 30,000-item Jones theater reference library, which is open to the public; and the National Center for Voice and Speech, a research and treatment facility: www.denvercenter.org, 800/641-1222.

Ninety-minute guided tours include the areas where props, costumes, lighting and scenery are created. Click Behind the Scenes and then Take a Tour on the Web site or call 720/931-8687.

The Denver Art Museum’s Web site discusses its architecture and art-conservation techniques as well as exhibits: denverartmuseum.org; 866/942-2787.

The Convention Center’s big blue bear is part of a public-art funding program that has resulted in the installation of more than 150 works in the past 18 years. A downloadable guide to many of them is available at www.denvergov.org/public_art_ program; 720/865-4313.

LoDo has its own Web site, www.lodo.org. The Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau has a wealth of information: www.denver.org; 800/233-6837.