Denver Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  Empower Field at Mile High

  Six decades of professional football have given Denver some of its most intense moments of civic pride and pain, and you have reached the home of the team responsible, the Denver Broncos. The Denver Broncos were founded in 1960 as a charter member of the American Football League, the upstart league that merged with the NFL in 1970.

• Coors Field

  Coors Field is the ballpark credited, only partly hyperbolically, with saving downtown Denver. When the Colorado Rockies chose this site in 1991, the surrounding warehouse district was largely derelict.

• 
  Union Station

  Notice the great arched windows and the TRAVEL BY TRAIN sign marking Denver's front door for more than a century. Union Station opened in 1881 when Denver was barely twenty years old and the railroads were the arteries of the American West.

• Denver Art Museum

  Italian architect Gio Ponti completed this seven-story tower, the original Denver Art Museum, in 1971, and you are looking at one of the most distinctive buildings in the American West. Ponti, then in his eighties, created a building unlike anything else in Denver: a seven-story tower clad in more than a million gray glass tiles that catch light differently at every hour of the day.

• 
  Molly Brown House

  Picture the newspapers dubbing her the Unsinkable Molly Brown after she survived the RMS Titanic's sinking on April 15, 1912 — this was her Denver home. Margaret Tobin Brown was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1867 and came to Colorado in the early 1880s seeking opportunity.

All 39 stops

• Union Station (LoDo / Union Station)

  Notice the great arched windows and the TRAVEL BY TRAIN sign marking Denver's front door for more than a century.

• LoDo / Lower Downtown Historic District (LoDo)

  LoDo, Denver's oldest district, keeps you among twenty-three blocks of the warehouses, hotels, and commercial buildings of the frontier city that gold built.

• Larimer Square (LoDo)

  Picture General William Larimer driving his stakes into the ground here in November 1858, founding a city on land he didn't own.

• Coors Field (LoDo)

  Coors Field is the ballpark credited, only partly hyperbolically, with saving downtown Denver.

• Confluence Park (LoHi / River North)

  Watch the kayakers ride the rapids where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte.

• South Platte River Greenway (River Corridor)

  Your walk follows a river that both gave Denver life and, in the 1864 flood eight days after the Sand Creek Massacre, nearly destroyed it.

• LoHi / Lower Highlands (LoHi)

  Your route today crosses the bluff locals nicknamed LoHi — Lower Highlands — a landscape of Victorian cottages remade by gentrification.

• Highlands Neighborhood (Highlands)

  Up here in Highland, north of the South Platte River, you are in the elevated streetcar suburb that Denver's aspiring middle class settled in the…

• Sloan's Lake Park (West Denver)

  Picture the local legend: Thomas Sloan plowing this field in 1861 when he struck an underground spring, and by morning a lake had appeared.

• Five Points Neighborhood (Five Points)

  Picture Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Miles Davis playing the clubs here, in the neighborhood once called the Harlem of the West …

• Welton Street Jazz Corridor (Five Points)

  Welton Street, where you are walking, was once the main artery of Black Denver's cultural life, the corridor of clubs, theaters, restaurants, and barbershops that…

• Curtis Park (Curtis Park)

  Your route traces Denver's oldest residential neighborhood, platted in 1868, where Victorian and Edwardian houses still line the high plains streets.

• Colorado State Capitol (Capitol Hill)

  Colorado's State Capitol makes Denver's elevation claim official, visible to you and to anyone looking at the skyline.

• Civic Center Park (Civic Center)

  Civic Center Park is the formal landscape the City Beautiful movement built at the heart of Denver's civic life, connecting the State Capitol to the…

• Denver Art Museum (Civic Center / Golden Triangle)

  Italian architect Gio Ponti completed this seven-story tower, the original Denver Art Museum, in 1971, and you are looking at one of the most distinctive…

• Denver Art Museum — Libeskind Expansion (Civic Center / Golden Triangle)

  Watch how the 9,000 titanium panels of the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, architect Daniel Libeskind's 2006 expansion, shift color as clouds move overhead.

• History Colorado Center (Civic Center / Golden Triangle)

  Here at the History Colorado Center, Colorado attempts to tell itself its own story honestly, including the difficult parts.

• Molly Brown House (Capitol Hill)

  Picture the newspapers dubbing her the Unsinkable Molly Brown after she survived the RMS Titanic's sinking on April 15, 1912 — this was her Denver…

• Cheesman Park (Capitol Hill)

  Cheesman Park rests on one of the most macabre foundations in American civic history.

• Capitol Hill (Capitol Hill)

  Capitol Hill has been the most politically and culturally volatile neighborhood in Denver for a century and a half.

• Colfax Avenue — West (Colfax Corridor)

  Playboy magazine once called Colfax Avenue the longest, wickedest street in America, and you are on it now, a designation the city has spent decades…

• East Colfax (East Colfax)

  East Colfax, the stretch you are on now, has long been a landing zone for new arrivals to Denver: Latino families, Vietnamese immigrants, Ethiopian and…

• RiNo / River North Arts District (RiNo)

  RiNo, the River North Arts District where you are now, transformed faster than almost any other neighborhood in Denver, going from industrial wasteland to one…

• Santa Fe Arts District (Santa Fe)

  Santa Fe Drive, the stretch you are walking, is Denver's oldest arts district, home to galleries, studios, and cultural institutions since the 1980s and carrying…

• Golden Triangle Creative District (Golden Triangle)

  Welcome to the Golden Triangle, the wedge-shaped neighborhood south of Civic Center Park where you'll find Denver's most concentrated cultural district: three major museums, dozens…

• Baker Neighborhood (Baker)

  Baker, where you are now, is one of Denver's original streetcar neighborhoods, a district of Victorian cottages and brick bungalows that grew up in the…

• South Broadway Antiques Corridor (South Broadway)

  South Broadway has been Denver's antiques district since the 1940s, and you are walking a mile-long corridor of dealers, thrift stores, vintage shops, and occasional…

• City Park — Jazz in the Park (City Park)

  Since 1882, City Park has been Denver's primary public green space, and the 330 acres you have entered make it the city's oldest and largest…

• Denver Zoo (City Park)

  At the Denver Zoo entrance, you have reached one of the oldest zoos in the American West, an institution whose history tracks the transformation of…

• Denver Museum of Nature and Science (City Park)

  On the eastern edge of City Park, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, one of the great natural history museums of the American West…

• Denver Botanic Gardens (Cheesman Park)

  Denver Botanic Gardens is one of the most quietly remarkable botanic gardens in America, a 24-acre collection that has developed an international reputation for research…

• Congress Park (Congress Park)

  Congress Park, the residential neighborhood southeast of Cheesman Park, developed in the first decades of the twentieth century as the streetcar extended Denver's eastward reach.

• Auraria Campus (Auraria)

  Under your feet lies the most complicated history in Denver: the site of the original Auraria mining settlement, then a Mexican American neighborhood called La…

• Tivoli Brewing / Former Brewery (Auraria Campus)

  Tivoli Brewing Company, the former brewery in front of you, has stood at this location since 1866 and survived every economic and legal disruption that…

• Elitch Gardens Site (LoHi / Mile High)

  Elitch Gardens, one of Denver's most storied entertainment institutions, operated near where you are in various forms for over a century as an amusement park…

• Buckhorn Exchange (Lincoln Park)

  Buckhorn Exchange is the oldest restaurant in Denver, feeding people in this building since 1893 and preserving something of the Wild West atmosphere of frontier…

• 16th Street Mall (Downtown)

  Beneath your feet is the 16th Street Mall, the mile-long pedestrian promenade that has been Denver's downtown spine since it opened in 1982 and is…

• Empower Field at Mile High (Sun Valley)

  Six decades of professional football have given Denver some of its most intense moments of civic pride and pain, and you have reached the home…

• Red Rocks Amphitheatre — Context (Morrison / Jefferson County)

  Red Rocks Amphitheatre, whose gateway you are near, is a geological wonder fifteen miles southwest of Denver, widely considered the greatest outdoor music venue on…

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