What an Old Map of Denver Can Teach a Newcomer

By Andrew Kenney, CityLab
Originally published on November 8, 2019.

I am the target audience for Denver’s marketers. I ski. I hike. I like beer. Maybe I’ve tried weed. And when a good job opened for my partner Elisa, I happily moved to the Colorado capital in 2015. We picked a new building behind Union Station, the fast-redeveloping transit hub of downtown. I arrived jobless, clueless, and exhilarated to finally be out West.

We were among the more than 70,000 new transplants—many of us white, relatively young, and affluent enough to make such a move—who have arrived since 2010 in the city of Denver. Among its many draws: It’s more affordable than many West Coast cities, has more jobs than many Southern cities, and boasts more mountains than either.

But those tourism ads don’t tell you what happens later, when you get tired of the skiing and hiking and complicated beer. There is no television commercial about the loneliness of the endless newly built apartment buildings, or the uncanny recognition of being surrounded by your lifestyle doppelgängers. Within months I felt stuck in a surface layer of the city, and it made me feel shallow too.

There is no newcomers’ guide for urbanist ennui.

Which is where we get to the map that grounded me in history and connected me to people all around Denver. Let me tell you how it happened.

Lacking a job or much direction—I had quit a newspaper reporting gig in Raleigh—I went that first summer to a park near our apartment. In the park I found a hill, and on Google Maps I found a label: “Stoner Hill.” There, I found the stoners. They were mostly teenagers, many lost, often homeless. I spent days with them, eventually reporting a story for the city’s weekly newspaper, Westword, about the ongoing struggle between the kids and the condo-owning adults nearby who wanted to shut them out.

On a deeper level, my first piece of Denver journalism was about who owned the public spaces of my new city. And it made me wonder: What was here before?

The broad-stroke history was easy to find. There were Phil Goodstein’s tomes of Denver history. There were planning case studies about the transformation of a polluted railyard into this riverfront redevelopment zone. There were even plaques around the neighborhood. But nothing could tell me what exactly preceded Stoner Hill, or my own apartment, or any of my other new landmarks.

Deep in my Google searches, I found a skeleton key: “Perspective map of the city of Denver, Colo. 1889,” hosted by the Library of Congress. It was a sprawling illustrated map in the pictorial format that had grown popular in the 19th century as a marketing tool for boomtowns like Denver.

The map captured a sweeping bird’s eye view of the early city. It was distorted and perhaps embellished to impress unsuspecting would-be transplants, not unlike the modern city. But as I pored over its rendition of the South Platte River, I realized I could sync its details to real life, block by block.

On the exact spot of Stoner Hill, delightfully, was a castle. Further research showed it was the “Castle of Culture & Commerce.” (I guess Denver’s priorities haven’t changed much.)
With map in hand, I raced through the history of each building and block around me, cross-referencing the inky details with the Denver Public Library’s digital archives. The pictorial captured details and personality that a traditional map would miss, with context that would fall outside the frame of a photograph.

This mild new obsession would be foundational to the next leg of my career. I soon joined the founding staff of Denverite, one of a crop of hopeful “hyperlocal” online publications that launched in the mid-2010s. We believed that readers wanted to know more about the city’s politics, history, and culture, and we wanted to channel our own interests.

Many of our first stories focused on the city’s most important questions, especially gentrification and displacement. But we found room for whimsy, too, and the old map was an early success. I published a series of map-crops and observations under a curiosity-baiting headline: “Find your neighborhood on the Google Maps of 1889.”

Read the rest of the essay on CityLab.

Through original reporting, sharp analysis, and visual storytelling, CityLab informs and inspires the people who are creating the cities of the future—and those who want to live there. Get articles like this sent directly to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram—where you can show us the view from your city by tagging photos with #citylabontheground.