Search Results for "golden"
Centennial City
These beautiful storybook amusement park buildings were built in 1958 for W. F. Cobb for his Magic Mountain, the original themepark built at the location of what is now Heritage Square. They are a mixture of Second Empire and Gothic Revival, among other architectural styles. The town was named Centennial City as it was approximately 100 years after the construction of original cities of the area, Denver, Auroria, Arapahoe City, Golden City and Golden Gate City.
Cobb had intended to build his park on South Table Mountain not far from the former site of Arapahoe City, but the Applewood residents did not want the traffic. Instead, he built on top of the former ghost town of Apex City at the mouth of Apex Gulch. Apex City was itself built on top of ancient indian campgrounds dating back 7,000 years!
These buildings were created by Marco Engineering and use the technique of forced perspective to make the buildings look taller than they are. Marco Engineering was a company of former Hollywood art directors run by C. V. Wood. Wood had just finished building Disneyland prior to work on Magic Mountain, where he had used the same techniques in the construction of Disney’s Main Street U.S.A.
Unfortunately, W. F. Cobb ran out of money in 1960 and the original Magic Mountain park was never completed. To read the full story, check out this excellent Magic Mountain website by Richard Gardner of the Golden Landmarks Association.
Marco Engineering went on to build many projects including Lake Havasu City (where C. V. Wood brought the London Bridge!).
This includes two larger parks which are considered sister parks to Magic Mountain, Pleasure Island in Massachusetts and Freedomland in the Bronx, NY, both of which are gone today, leaving Heritage Square with it’s Centennial City as the sole survivor of the trio of parks.
November 25th, 2012 / 2 Comments » / by Tom Lundin
1959 & 1963 Denver ads
Get a color TV at Downing’s! The first was at 33rd & Downing.
Color television was around in primitive form since 1953, but didn’t really take off until this year, 1963 (ads in this posting are from 1963, unless stated otherwise). By 1965 it became almost mandatory, as most networks started broadcasting most of their new programs in color.
This 1959 ad shows Downing’s was around since 1922!
Or maybe you need your television combined with your radio and record player as in this unit from Denver Dry Goods? (1959 ad)
Earl Muntz TV Center of Denver. Now this location is part of the Hi-Dive! (1959 ad)
Penney’s Downtown
Woolworth’s Downtown. These 1963 Christmas ads are from November (of course!)
Norman’s! I wish I had a photo handy, but this is that really cool, pitched-roof mod building on E. Colfax that houses the Cafe Africana Ethiopian Restaurant & Bar. (1959 ad)
Just a small illustration of Westland Auto Center, who were part of May-D&F in ‘63.
Typically cool International-style garage, gone now.
Nice illustration of The Vogue Furniture Store on S. Colorado, now gone. (1959 ad)
Ad for Design Center in Cherry Creek, 1959. This dark, mod building still survives at 3rd & Fillmore.
King Soopers was started in 1947. The ad shows five locations where you could get King Soopers Drugs, but they were up to nine stores at the time.
Fred Schmid Appliances, all of them gone now, I think. I assume the Denver location was in that building that Cricket on the Hill was in. Here is a Fred Schmid commercial from Colorado Springs in 1989:
Beautiful illustration for Roberts Carpets. This was in the building to the right of Famous Pizza on E. Colfax.
The mighty Buckhorn Exchange, still thee place to take out-of-towners when visiting Denver. Denver’s oldest restaurant, they have Denver liquor license number 1! (1959 ad)
Mountain States Telephone ad… fun read.
At the time of this ad in ‘63, the Western Federal Savings building (designed by Raymond Harry Ervin), was only a year old.
Close-up of the illustration, so you can see the ‘W’ peaking out over the top.
1959 ad for the Colorado Insurance Group Building in Boulder, still standing today (though altered and under-appreciated). Designed in 1955 by Boulder’s premiere International-style architect James Hunter, I think this also once housed a Joslin’s.
Close-up of the illustration.
Transistor radios at Joslin’s (You can click any of these ads to make them larger).
Lefty Martin’s, with a nice shot of Lefty.
Duffy’s Delicious Drinks’ ad with a shot of Frank Duffy. Looks like Duffy’s started in 1929, according to this 1959 ad.
Duffy’s lost their drink recipes in the years after Frank Duffy’s passing, but then they rediscovered all his old recipes in Frank’s unopened safe in 1995! Today, Duffy’s Rowdy Root Beer is made with the original recipe.
Robert Waxman ad from 1963. Waxman’s got rolled into Wolf Camera. Wolf’s are all closing soon.
The Electric Eye! The early days of auto-focus and auto-exposure from the Camera Exchange of Colorado in 1959.
Don’t know much about Shopper’s Mart except from the former addresses at the bottom of these advertisements, but there sure are a lot of fun items to see in these ads!
Cool toys from King’s Self Service Dept. Store in the Alameda Shopping Center. This shopping center has been recently redone and is now Alameda Square with the Pacific Ocean Marketplace.
More cool 1963 toys, this time from Spartan. One was at 44th & Wads, the other was in the shopping center at Sheridan & Jewell.
Gate’s Rubber tire ad. You could probably dig a foundation for a house doing burnouts in the mud with these babies.
Wrought-iron patio ad from ALSCO.
Another patio company, Pati-Port in 1959 (located next door to the Concrete Cowboy).
Fan Fair Discount City ad! Compare the illustration at the bottom of the ad to the photo below to get an idea of what it looked like back then.
This concrete-shell construction building is still standing in Aurora, though it will be taken down soon.
Built two years earlier than the 1963 ad by William Muchow in 1961, it was engineered by Denver concrete-shell specialist Milo Ketchum.
1963 four-eyed fashions at Lee Optical downtown.
Thrift-Way food markets, with a Scottish cartoon mascot, no less. And notice the other cartoon, “Mighty Slimmin for us Women”.
Probably the only surviving Thrift-Way sign, now a home for pigeons.
Denver Drumstick ad from 1963. These were famous for having a railroad motif with a minature train running around the upper walls and serving chicken in boxcar boxes. All gizzard order?!
Here is my illustration of the Denver Drumstick building as it appeared in the JCRS Shopping Center on W. Colfax (same mall as Casa Bonita). The building is still there, though barely recognizeable. It is the empty standalone building in the parking lot that used to always house bingo.
1959 ad for The Normandy, which was replaced by a mod Muchow building in the late ’60s,
I think.
Awww!
Patsy’s Inn, still around today! Though today’s ads say 1921, this 1959 ad declares “since 1889″!
John Wayne sex-comedy-western(?!?) ad from 1963 for the Paramount, the sole surviving theater from the classic era of downtown Denver movie palaces.
Racy ad for the Lakeshore Drive-In, over by Sloan’s Lake and KIMN radio.
The Lakeshore is no longer. (That is Eve Meyer, Russ Meyer’s wife)
Esquire theater ad from ‘63. Even then, advertising “Unusual films”!
The Bandbox jazz club was not related to the ’50s-’60s Denver Band Box record label. It was originally a Pik-A-Rib, then the Bandbox (run by Al Levin), then it became Hawk’s, then Le Bistro a Go Go, then The Mad Rushin, then The Factory, then Good Friends and is now the perfect location for Annie’s Cafe! (1963 ad)
And here is close-up of top ’50s jazz guitarist Johnny Smith. He came a huge star in 1952 with his hit recording of Moonlight in Vermont (with Stan Getz). At one point he gave it all up and moved to Colorado Springs in 1958 where he still lives today! Other interesting facts: He had to relearn the guitar after slicing his hands up in a fishing accident and he wrote Walk, Don’t Run, the Ventures first hit!
Bill ‘Honky Tonk’ Doggett at the Rainbow Ballroom in 1959! Not the Rainbow later made famous by Barry Fey, but a rhythm & blues club that carried national acts like Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Tiny Hill, Chuck Willis, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Locklin, Roy Milton, The Medallions, The Five Royales, Little Willie John, Lloyd Price, Freddy Rodriguez and Dizzy Gillispie.
Where was it? Well, maybe you can help me out if you know the whole story. This is what I think, please feel free to write in and correct me. O.K. Farr ran this place in the ’40s at 475 Lincoln. In ‘57 it was listed as at 5th & Broadway. In ‘59 it was listed as 38th E. 5th where it was run by Leroy Smith of the legendary Five Points Rhythm Record Shop. Then it was bought by Verne Byers and moved downtown to 1346 Stout. 1346 Stout became the Academy Ballroom and then later the Astronaut’s night club, Club Baja.
It may surprise you to know that drag shows are nothing new and in the ’50s & ’60s were advertised in the paper right alongside Disney movies and toy ads. This ad is for the Victory Theater at 14th & Curtis (the intersection where the entrance to the Denver Performing Arts Complex is now).
A small ad for The Tropics with some fun names.
1963 ad for The Exodus, a folk club in the basement of the Raylane Hotel. Judy Collins and The Smother’s Brothers played here before they were famous. The Raylane is gone.
The Vincent Brothers at the Keyboard Lounge in the Mesa Motor Inn on W. Colfax. The Keyboard Lounge was run by Morey Amsterdam who also ran Denver’s Finer Arts record label. The Mesa Motor Inn is still there!
The Merry Go-Round Lounge on N. Pecos. Still there and still called the Merry Go-Round!
The Snug Harbour Tavern and The Captain’s Table located in the ‘fabulous’ Four Wind’s Motor Hotel on W. Colfax. The hotel is still there, though they painted over the original colors with dark drab a few years back. “Neutralized”, as Shannon likes to put it.
Get gassed-up at Big Al’s Gashouse in ‘63.
Laffitte’s, the seafood restuarant on the corner of 14th & larimer.
Paul Black and Joni Wilson were notable jazz players here in town in ‘63.
The Chez Paree, a strip club near The Brown Palace.
The Four Seasons Nite Club was a country bar way out on E. Colfax
on the other side of 225. Long gone.
The Olin Hotel still stands, though it’s an old folks home now (so not so much twistin’ going on).
The College Inn is still around today, or course.
The Mon-Vue Village in the old gas station at Garrison and Alameda, home to the Queen City Jazz Band, a still-extant Dixieland ensemble that held court here for 30 years or so. Today this bar is called the Paradise Cove and is right next door to the Mile Hi Church.
Ernie, Mac & Bill, another outfit similar to The Taylors, playing their regular gig at the Red Embers. There is an art-deco looking building here now, with the shop Platinum Cleaners. I am not sure if it is the original building, or it came later.
Close-up of Mac.
Al Fike, the Modern Minstrel Man, here playing El Rancho in Evergreen.
Al also was a regular at Taylor’s Supper Club.
Another Evergreen dinner spot, the Brook Forest Inn. Just call Evergreen 263. (1959 ad)
List of locations of Denver Compass Drive-In movie theaters from 1959. The old spot for the
West Drive-In is still vacant. The speaker poles might still be there.
List of Denver movie theaters from 1959. The buildings for The Golden, The Gothic, The Ritz (now Thrillseekers), The Federal, The Westwood (adult theater), The Holiday and The Santa Fe (The Atzlan) all still stand. From this list, only The Alladdin and The Victory are gone.
One more movie theater list from ‘59. The Centre, The Denver and The Aladdin are gone, but The Esquire, The Aurora Fox, The Mayan, The Ogden, The Bluebird, The Boulder Fox and The Longmont Fox still stand. Not sure where in Littleton The Woodlawn was located. Out of all three of these ads, only The Mayan and The Esquire function as fulltime movie theaters today.
Bob Jones Midway Motor Co. in 1959. Now a new location of Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
Bill Dreiling Motor Co. ad from 1959. If I am not mistaken, this is the home of Heidelburg Motors, Shannon Stanbro’s favorite German car mechanic.
A 1959 ad for Merchant’s Oil Company showing Denver’s first gas station! How cool is that? Merchant’s Oil gave us the Phillip’s 66 gas stations with the notable canopies. You may recognize the ghost of these stations around town, as they look like this:
And finally, a sad note from the year 1963.
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Note from an Eyeballer: If you have old Denver newspapers from the ’50s and ’60s you would like to donate (or just loan) to us, drop us a line at Tom’s email address in the “About The Eye” tab. Also write if you would like your historically mod house or a favorite neighborhood structure photographed and posted on The Eye!
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October 31st, 2012 / 3 Comments » / by Tom Lundin
1959 Denver ads
This is the first of a big batch of new Denver ad scans we are working on
here at The Eye. For this post, all scans are from 1959. (You may have
seen some of these here before, but now in better quality)
The Colorado Visitor’s Bureau. This building still stands in that traffic island
behind the Wellington Webb Building.
Lou Coffee’s in the Colorado Hotel on 17th (hotel now gone).
The Senate Lounge in the Argonaut Hotel, where jazz vocalist Effie The Blond Tigress
held court. The Argonaut is still there across the street from the state capitol, of course.
Click on this and you can compare the original Albany Hotel with the modern facade created
by Red Rocks Amphitheater architect Burnham Hoyt in 1936. (The Albany is gone now)
Ad for the Cosmopolitan Hotel, torn down in 1984, as can be seen here:
An ad for Empire Savings at 1654 California St, now a parking lot.
Ad for William Zeckendorf’s Webb & Knapp firm. These were both I. M. Pei & Associates projects. As the ad says, the Mile-High Complex on top, the Denver-Hilton on the left and the Court-House Complex bottom right. (Click ad to enlarge)
The Mile-High Center
Another ad of the Mile-High Center, this one showing the Matchless restaurant
in the barrel-roofed Transportion Center building.
A photo of the Denver United States National Bank (part of Mile-High Center)
that shows the United States map artwork on the side.
The modern expressionist drive-through addition to the Central Bank of Denver at 15th
and Arapahoe. Designed by Charles Deaton, most famous for the Sculptured House
of Gennessee (the flying saucer house). You can see the D&F Tower behind the older
bank building.
First Federal Savings & Loan. The building is still there at 38th & Lowell. I believe this
is William Muchow Architects.
National City Bank at 99 S. Broadway. The bank is still here, the footprint is about the
same, but it seems to have been altered quite a bit. Still a nice building.
First National Bank on 17th, Denver’s tallest building in 1959. Designed in 1958 by
Raymond Harry Ervin. Still there, though modified a bit. It still retains it’s ’50s charm.
The Sky Deck on top of the First National Bank (click to enlarge ad). Not open to the
public anymore, this would have been a beautiful rooftop vantage point of downtown Denver.
Jefferson County Bank at Colfax and Wadsworth in Lakewood. This modernist building
has been replaced.
The ‘fabulous’ Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Do yourself a favor and
take your relatives here for an epic brunch sometime. (click to embiginate)
The Harvest House Hotel in Boulder at 28th & Arapahoe. Part of a larger project that included the Arapahoe Village Shopping Center and the Harvest Manor Apartments in back. Designed by Ralph Peterson in 1958, he also designed Denver’s incredible Usonian Calvary Temple.
A more accurate view of Boulder’s Harvest House
Great ad for Gates Rubber Company. Still a great big company, the ruins of
the old factory still reside at Broadway & I-25.
Ad for the Old Navarre, a bordello built in 1880.
(still there across the street from the Brown Palace, of course)
The Melody Lounge, ‘Denver’s Birdland’. Look at the lineup of top shelf jazz who played here in 1959: Cal Tjader, Johnny Smith, Terry Gibbs, Georgia Auld, Slam Stewart, Johnny Griffin, Phineas Newborn, Horace Silver, Conte Condoli, Art Pepper, Ben Webster, Charlie Ventura, Buddy DeFranco, Sonny Stitt, Herbie Mann and Anita O’Day! I think this is now the Alpine Motel, but I am not certain.
The Chez Paree burlesque club/clip joint. Dinner for $2.00! Hmm…
I thought this place was supposed to have burned down in the ’70s,
but there seems to be an old building still standing there today.
The Patio on S. Sante Fe. Notable not just for Buzzie serving cocktails, but you could see
the Billy Wilson Trio here before he opened his own place on W. Alameda, the Tally-Ho.
The Profile Room in the Stanley Plaza Hotel, a building standing today in all it’s original glory.
Furr’s Supermarkets, a Texas company that spread to Colorado. Some of the former Furr’s buildings in this ad still survive like the building at 38th & Harlan and the huge thrift store at Sheridan and Jewell. Furr Food!
Taylor’s Supper Club, a Las Vegas style club on West Colfax in Lakewood that
ran from the 1940s through the 1970s. It was run by Sammy Toole and starred
The Taylors, The Lawmen and many other local favorites.
Beacon Supper Club, another club similar to Taylors, but much more short-lived.
They had a singing cashier!
The Tiffin Inn at Writer’s Manor of S. Colorado Blvd and I-25. This has all been replaced by various office buildings.
There is still a Luigi’s Italian restaurant in Centennial, I assume they may be related.
This 1959 Luigi’s was over by Gate’s Rubber. I just like to marvel at the drink prices.
The Chicken Box! Your last stop on W. Colfax/Highway 40 as you head into the mountains.
This is not a great ad, but I included it because this drive-in restaurant building is still there.
It has changed hands a few times in the last few years, you may know it as the green building
that housed Wuthering Heights and various biker bars.
Andy’s Smorgasbord was a popular place. Before it was Andy’s it was the El Morocco
Supper Club. After it was Andy’s it became the longtime home of Shotgun Willies!
The park in the Top of the Park name refers to the fact that this building sat on the north end of Washington Park. The Park Lane Hotel was replaced with multiple apartment buildings.
The Keyboard Lounge was in the Mesa Motor Inn on west Colfax.
The lounge was run by Morey Bernstein who also ran Denver’s
Finer Arts record label. The Mesa Motor Inn is still there.
You used to be able to see the ghost signage of the King Cole Show Bar on the upper north wall of The Broadway night club. But after it became Club Vinyl, the roof collapsed under a snowstorm and the signage was gone after the rebuild. Bob & Sylvia did comedy & music at the King Cole from 1959 to 1964. Someday I will post their crazy LP on this site.
The old Tropics building on West Mississippi is still hanging in there. It’s currently housing The Stone night club and the neighborhood has been dubbed BuCu, ‘Where business meets community’.
Usually, nationally-famous stripper-attraction Tempest Storm was the star here, but on this night, Tura Satana, later star of Russ Meyer’s ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!‘ film, topped the bill.
A close up of The Tropics ad so you can further appreciate the drawing of The Tropics
and, of course, Tura Satana.
A night at the Venus Lounge with rock & roller Don May in Aurora.
Dig these prices to see the Denver Bears!
This Englewood Speedway ad is confusing me with the Safety With Speed slogan, followed
by a drawing of an exciting racing accident.
Midget racing right next door!
Ad for the Mile High Kennel Club dog track in Commerce City, with Rusty the Rabbit mascot.
Ad for horse races at the Centennial Race Track in Littleton.
Fun ad for Chuck-O-Luck’s Sporting Goods, with snelled hooks and mustad sliced shank.
Wolfberg ran the downtown Paramount Theatre and most of the drive-in theaters scattered around Denver. The West Drive-In lot at 6th & Kipling has been vacant for decades, too bad they haven’t been showing films all these years. The North Drive-In lot in Broomfield and the East Drive-In lot in Aurora have also been vacant and unused about just as long.
In 1959, Fox ran all of the coolest theaters in Denver. The Mayan, The Aladdin,
The Bluebird, The Ogden…
Ad for the Denham Theatre, located at 18th & California. Now gone, of course.
Denver had an incredible theater district downtown filled with movie palaces,
but the only theater that survived in downtown Denver was The Paramount.
Atoz Theaters.. many of these buildings survive, The Gothic, The Oriental, The Golden,
The Santa Fe (Atzlan), The Federal… OK, that’s enough for now.
October 14th, 2012 / 5 Comments » / by Tom Lundin
Mountain mod
The Fleck House deep in the woods on Lookout Mountain above Golden. Built in 1981,
it is one of the last houses built by Boulder master architect, Charles Haertling.
September 9th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Tom Lundin
Beautiful CO!
A view of Golden from the foothills. Click to enlarge!
I have been a little slow in posting as I have been trying to assemble photos for a new series.
Stay tuned, I think you will like it!
July 23rd, 2012 / No Comments » / by Tom Lundin
House on the Mesa
As everyone should know by now, there are *no* official Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Colorado. When you inevitably see his name dropped by ill-informed Colorado real estate agents in their ads, feel confident that they are quite mistaken.
Wright did design two structures for Colorado, his unbuilt version of The Horseshoe Inn in Estes Park in 1908 and his 1932 entry into the the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the unbuilt House on the Mesa.
The House On the Mesa was a four-car luxury home made of steel, glass and concrete with a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains. A long building, it extended 360 feet on a flat site of several acres. A concrete blockshell wall faced the major highway that ran past the property. The house featured a swimming pool covered with a cantilevered roof and an open lake with surrounding woods.
It is not likely there was ever a true location identified for this building in Denver or even in Golden where two large mesas separate the town from the rest of wider Denver. No location in the area fits all of Wright’s plans, orientations and descriptions.
The House on the Mesa was designed for a moderately wealthy American family of considerable culture — master, mistress and four children, cook and two maids, chauffeur and gardener.
Their architect intended to help them make something of machine-age luxury that would compare favorably in character and integrity with the luxury of the Greeks or Goths, within the limits of an expenditure of some $125,000. -Frank Lloyd Wright 1932
Wright’s inspiration of the wealthy American family of considerable culture comes from a visit in 1930 to give a speech at the Denver Art Musuem. He was invited to stay at the home of George Cranmer, who lived in a Italian Renaissance Revival villa designed by J.B. Benedict in 1917. The house still sits today in the Hilltop area on the edge of Cranmer Park with the mountains viewable to the west.
Robery Sweeney’s book Wright in Hollywood states “Wright explained later that he had used the Cranmers’ family and situation merely as an ideal American family … as an example to the country, when designing House on the Mesa; their set up seemed worth interpreting. He added that he had no idea whether they would at all like the interpretation.”
In 1935 George Cranmer became manager of Denver’s parks and recreation system and oversaw the construction of Red Rocks Ampitheater, the Valley Highway (now the Denver portion of I-25), the Boulder Turnpike, Winter Park and the purchase of the land for Stapleton Airport.
(Information and photos borrowed from SaveWright.org’s WrightChat using information from Robert Sweeney’s book Wright in Hollywood, [©1994 Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press] and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer’s third volume of collected writings [Rizzoli, 1993, pp 126-30]).
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June 26th, 2012 / 2 Comments » / by Tom Lundin
500th post! Lakeside extravanganza!
This is the 500th post to The Denver Eye!
Tom Lundin here, Eyeballer #1. I first took up architectural photography in 2006 to
supply myself with source material for my technical illustration habit. Photography quickly
became an obsession.
To celebrate I am posting these Lakeside Amusement Park shots from that year, 2006. Lakeside doesn’t always allow you to photograph freely, but these were all taken before that became an issue. All I had in those days was a point-and-shoot-camera with all the distortion and poor shadows that come with a smaller digital sensor and static lens. And on that day I dealt with weather that I could not control. But the subject matter stands out no matter what the circumstance!
Lakeside Amusement Park started as a White City in 1908. White Citys sprung up in various places across the United States as imitations of the White City set up at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. There, they built a Beaux-Arts style city with hundreds of thousands of light bulbs provided with electricity by the competing technologies of Thomas Edison (direct-current) and Nikola Tesla (alternating-current).
The Tower of Jewels above is decorated with 16,000 light bulbs.
Lakeside is one of the oldest remaining amusement parks in the U.S. After Benjamin Krasner bought the park in the 1930s, he gave it an incredible Art Deco makeover with the aid of architect Richard Crowther.
When Richard Crowther moved to Denver, he was an expert at neon lighting as he had just lit up the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition Fair of 1940. Crowther became a famous Denver modernist architect, designing the Neufeld House in 1956. He designed multiple Cinerama theaters including Denver’s Cooper Theater on Colorado Blvd (now gone), and achieved his greatest fame as a pioneering green architect in Cherry Creek, noted for his use of Passive Solar Heating.
The Cooper Cinerama Theatre, from 1961.
Lakeside is filled withoutstanding examples of Art Moderne or Streamline Modern signs, ticket booths, gardens and other features. The parts of the park that are not Art Deco are from the original White City and are often reused elsewhere in the park.
The Starride ferris wheel from the earlier days of the park.
A minature diesel version of the Zephyr!
When this tower was built in 1908, it was the tallest structure in the state!
Looking out over Lake Rhoda.
Lakeside Speedway closed in 1988 after 50 years of racing!
Lakeside’s famous Merry-Go-Round. Four rows filled with the widest variety of animals you will ever see on any merry-go-round.
White City’s Casino Theatre
This steam-powered minature locomotive has been running here continously since the opening of the park in 1908!
6
June 5th, 2012 / 7 Comments » / by Tom Lundin
Coors Mansion
If you were ever driving to Golden along the Coors highway and wondering where the 22-room Coors family mansion was located amongst all of the massive brewery buildings, here is sits in the center of this photo, one third up from the bottom of the pic (click to enlarge).
Construction was started in the late 1800s and at one point it was
moved several hundred feet to make room for more brewery.
When it was first settled, this was one of the most beautiful spots
in the region, nestled in between two mesas along Clear Creek.
Golden is still quite beautiful today.
May 18th, 2012 / 1 Comment » / by Tom Lundin
Phil Urso home movies
Denver jazz great, the late Phil Urso, hamming it up with fellow members
of the Elliot Lawrence Band in this rare 1950 8mm home movie.
This happy, short clip features Howie Mann, Joe Techner and Phil Urso
in suspenders.
Phil Urso had a great tone, somewhere between Lester Young and Sonny
Rollins. He played with many jazz legends but is best known for his mid-’50s
sides with Chet Baker.
Here is a much longer clip of the Elliot Lawrence Band from 1949, touring
around Golden, Lookout Mountain, Mt. Evans (Urso showing up at the top of
the mountain around 5:50 & 6:15), then off to Utah where Phil Urso and Jimmy
Padget look parched (at 7:50). Phil shows up one more time at about 9:15!
One last clip, the first solo on this wonderful Elliot Lawrence recording
Elevation is Phil Urso on tenor. Dig that tone!!
January 26th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Tom Lundin
