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Denver, Colorado
Friendly faces everywhere, humble folks without temptation
It seems like it hasn’t been all that long since I was last in Denver and already things look different right from the start. At the airport, the long planned A Line opened and damn it, I was going to ride it right into town. If given a choice of renting a car or not renting a car, I’m all about not renting a car. Although when traveling domestically there are only a handful of cities where this can actually work. I’ve done this in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Atlanta and St Louis, all work fairly well (or, more accurately, fairly well enough) with direct airport rail links and a mass transportation system (and/or a walkable downtown) that then gets you to most of the places that you want to go. I’m excluding Philadelphia, Washington DC, Boston and New York only since I’m more likely to take a train than fly there, even though I’ve flown into each of those airports at some point or another for reasons that (likely) made sense at the time.
Anyway, back to Denver and the A Line. It’s damn convenient, fairly fast, brand new, a little pricey but probably the best way to get from the far away airport to Union Station and Downtown Denver.
And just like that we’re already downtown.
The core of Downtown Denver is the 16th Street Bus Mall, the mile (or so) long street that connects Union Station (where you can get the A Line to the airport or the C/E/W to Pepsi Center) and Civic Center Station (where the museums, library and mile high State Capitol Building are). In between there are shops, hotels, restaurants, tourists, some pretty sketchy locals and, of course, buses- you can’t have a bus mall without buses after all.
This is a view of the Civic Center that includes some of the highlights. The State Capitol Building is on the left and Michael Graves’ Denver Public Library is on the right. Not visible from this view are the nearby Colorado History Center, the not too far away (and quite nice) Molly Brown House and the Clifford Still Museum. Also not visible (possibly because the picture is being taken from inside it) is the Denver Art Museum. More about that one next.
The star of the Civic Center and of Downtown Denver very well might be the super angled Denver Art Museum, a very Daniel Libeskindy Daniel Libeskind building. From the outside (not pictured this time) and the inside (pictured below), its all about the big pointy angles and the resulting space and structure inside. This is not meant as an insult in any way, since its those big pointy angles and the resulting space and structure inside that keeps me coming back to the Denver Art Museum again and again.
This time there was more to see than big pointy angles at the Denver Art Museum. The featured, special exhibition was called “Star Wars and the Power of Costume” and it featured all of your favorite costumes and props from all of the Star Wars movies you could think of. In a way, this was a preview of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a museum that was first planned for Chicago, then San Francisco and is now actually under construction in Los Angeles near USC and the Expo Line.
If you’re in Downtown Denver without a car, you’ll notice that there are really two downtown on the 16th Street Bus Mall. The downtown near the Civic Center (referred to as “Downtown”) and then another, slightly more hip and bricky one (referred to as Lower Downtown or LoDo). LoDo includes Union Station and a lot of restored buildings, and its heart (although not its geographic heart) very well may be Laramie Street, with all of those lights and flags doing their best to distract you from all those brick buildings everywhere.
Longtime fans of the slideshows know that if you’re reading about a random North American city and it looks like late March or early April outside, then you’re reading about another hockey trip. As a part of a continuing series of birthday trips, I have been taking my father to out of state hockey games for years and years now, and this year we visited the relocated Quebec Nordiques at their longtime home in Denver.
The Pepsi Center is close enough to walk from downtown, but we still took the train from Union Station anyway. There is nothing incredibly distinctive about the Pepsi Center (sorry, Pepsi Center), but the seats were close and the game was pretty good, ending with the Avalanche beat the visiting St Louis Blues in a shootout. What more can you ask for?
So if you’ve gotten this far reading about this weekend trip to Denver, you’ve probably reached two conclusions. The first is that there’s no way that I’m going to Denver and not finding some excuse to visit Walter Netsch’s spectacular United States Air Force Academy Chapel. The second conclusion is that despite extolling the virtues of the A Line and a rental car free weekend in Denver, that there’s no way that I didn’t give in and rent a car to take on that miserable drive down to Colorado Springs.
Of course both conclusions would turn out to be right.
It is impossible to have a soul (or even just working eyesight) and go to the USAFA Chapel and not take a hell of a lot pictures. I dare you. And now its impossible not to take those pictures and really start to over process them. The first thing you’ll do is to assemble them as panoramas, ways to try and capture as much of the interior space as possible, accepting all of the distortions as an inevitable side effect. Then you’ll take it another step further by creating fake processed HDR photos to get the stained glass to really pop and as much detail as possible. Then you’ll spend way too much time trying to pick which six of the forty five USAFA Chapel pictures to actually include in this slideshow. And that last step always proves to be the hardest of them all.
