Walking from the Brown Palace to the Holiday Inn on a Bridge

Like many cities in what was once called the Old West, Denver is a classic American city of booms and busts. Originally settled as a mining supply town in 1858, the Mile High City is no stranger to swift bursts of economic prosperity and corresponding spurts of population growth. From silver to oil, from the dot-com boom to the hollow gloss of today’s contemporary tech bubble, the very bones of the city read like an architectural palimpsest of economic and social planning. Buildings from any era since the silver rush sprung this city into existence are on display: mid-century mid-rise apartments with a distinct Angeleno aesthetic rise above modest brick Victorians crammed into the city’s former streetcar suburbs, American four-squares and 1950s ranch homes nestle themselves into picture-perfect lots in the outer neighborhoods. And the downtown itself remains an esoteric collection of half-starts and forgotten history that was, in some cases, literally cut down to size by the cult of the automobile and the asphalt annihilation it ushered in.

Among these ambitious but ultimately unfinished projects was the city’s limited skyway system, justifiably overlooked by its more expansive peers in frigid North American cities such as Minneapolis, Calgary, Edmonton. A relative secret even among Denverites, the city’s attempt at creating a skyway network was championed by the Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) as a car-friendly element of urban revitalization in the 60’s and 70’s, one in which the “filth” of what remained of Denver’s historic downtown was swept away to cater to big business and the unchecked growth of the city’s suburbs. Footbridges were envisioned as a way to reclaim downtown streets for an uninterrupted driving experience. The skyways lucky enough to survive the subsequent reconstruction(s) of LoDo primarily serve the downtown office district’s regional petroleum and finance headquarters and the hotels frequented by a traveling professional-class. Like many architectural gems, they refer back to painful origins, sordid politics, and hairbrained schemes. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the skyways for what they are, an interstice neither here nor there; the rare pleasure of walking above roads and between histories.

The Brown Palace/Holiday Inn Express Skyway

On your way to the skyway, you enter the warm and dark interior of one of the first atrium-style hotels in North America. The roar of cars speeding past on the tangle of multi-lane one-way streets is immediately forgotten, washed over by a wave of silence. Once the tallest building in the state of Colorado, the Brown Palace remains an anachronistic icon from the late 1800s in a financial district dominated by vertical office parks. A solid and stout triangle of a building, occupying an unusual lot where the diagonal grid of downtown Denver intersects with the flat grid that dominates the rest of the city, the building’s sandstone skin is etched with innumerable arched window wells that distract the eye from the digital grey and glass curtains of modern downtown Denver, inviting the passersby into one of the only vestiges of an era of design that placed the utmost value on subtle complexity, an indicator of capital, craftsmanship and most importantly, class.

With only a few steps through a revolving door, curious visitors and guests are spirited back to a simpler, quieter age, where the sunlight softens as it streams down through the stained glass ceiling high above. Thick carpet does its part to muffle voices already whispered before the clinking keys of the atrium piano -- the soundtrack of nostalgia: come escape with us.

And what an escape it is! Fancy bars flank the guarded entrances to these hallowed walls, which have seen their fair share of storied guests and Brown Palace intrigue; from Sun Yat-Sen to local mobster Soapy Smith, from The Unsinkable Molly Brown to an infamous pair of carnally-inspired 1911 murders committed to winning the heart of a local socialite, this hotel’s got history, and that has to be what’s beckoned a century of guests to this sandstone wedge or, in our case, the enclosed bridge extending from the buildings western face.

This skyway joins the Brown Palace to its sibling on the other side of Tremont, a pleasant-enough-looking mid-century hotel tower now under the name of the Holiday Inn Express. Taking your first step suspended over the road, eyes adjusted to the late-night fireside chic of the lobby are overwhelmed by a blast of natural light entering from the bridge’s windows. Although not part of the original hotel, the antique aesthetic continues with the skyway’s decor: high-backed armchairs upholstered in green leather rise above ornate carpeting, paired around octagonal end tables where brass lamps and their shades fluoresce in the late-afternoon sun. You know you’re in Denver, but you could swear you’re in a high-stakes spy thriller set in some 1940s beachfront mansion on the coast of England, never mind that the only seas within sight are the ugly asphalt pools of surface parking lots that decimated the Palace’s peers in the name of urban renewal.

The pleasant illusion of escape drains away at the other end of the skyway where the Palace dissipates into a Holiday Inn Express. From the exterior, it makes no attempt to overshadow its Victorian neighbor and instead commits itself to soft, chamfered corners. The interior, unfortunately, is another matter. Where the Brown Palace takes you back in time, the Holiday Inn, its ersatz nostalgia, comes off desperate to simulate a discounted taste of the luxury on the other side. The doors here, they’re all locked. On the second floor, gilded plastic bulls on boardroom furniture invoke the unholy idolatry of the executive caste, which would be less awkward if the gold filigree on the carpets wasn’t dulled to a brown-mustard from neglect. The downstairs lobby has undergone a facelift -- austerity minimalism -- but it doesn’t really matter.

This end of the skyway leaves you with a rotten reminder that there’s only one age you could be in: today’s, torn between the past and the future. The dusty Denver of the past dissolves before today’s Denver, which could easily be Dallas, even Des Moines, as long as it’s familiar enough to be devoid of identity. This cost-effective comfort finds itself conveniently located across the skyway from a palace so perfect that it must be shown to any and all paupers-in-denial, as long as at the end of the day, they trudge back across Tremont Street.

Up next: a review of the skyway between the downtown Sheraton hotel and a building that replaced an I.M. Pei-designed icon, some background on its disastrous demolition, and an open-air skyway providing a connection to a carefully concealed elevated urban park.