Significant Events
During the 1920s, Denver flew into the air age with construction of Denver Municipal Airport. Mayor Benjamin Franklin Stapleton encountered shrill opposition led by The Denver Post, which ridiculed "Stapleton�s Folly" and dubbed the proposed Sand Creek site in northeast Denver "Simpleton�s Sand Dunes." Why build an airport so far away from downtown when there were better, closer sites? If God meant for men to fly, he would have given them wings. This boondoggle, fumed the Post, had been conceived to allow the mayor to squander municipal money buying out landowners, most notably the mayor�s crony, H. Brown Canon of Windsor Farm Dairy, at inflated prices. "Rattlesnake Hollow," as other cynics called the site at East 32nd Avenue and Quebec Street, was blasted as a taxpayer subsidy for a few rich kids who liked to play with airplanes. Sure enough, the power-elite, whose offspring flocked to the new sport of aviation, endorsed the plan. Denver�s first families swamped the grand opening celebration, October 17-20, 1929 � one week before the stock market crash. The city paid $143,013 for the 640-acre site and another $287,000 to build the airport with four gravel runways, one hangar, a tiny terminal, and a wind sock. Three days of dedication festivities drew crowds estimated at 15,000 to 20,000. Rubberneckers watched the climbs and dives, the loops and rolls of airplanes overhead. Sightseers thronged around Boeing�s "Leviathan of the Air," a 14-passenger biplane equipped with Pullman sleepers, a kitchen, and a dining room. Coloradans celebrated "The West�s best airport...a model for further airport development...a great center on America�s aerial map.... large enough and level enough to meet all future needs of long distance passenger flying."
Due to the depression new things had to be done to help the people. Mayor Stapleton in 1935 appointed Cranmer as manager of Improvements and Parks, giving him a chance to realize his dream. Stapleton regarded Denver�s Red Rocks Mountain Park as a giant rock garden. Cranmer, conversely, wanted to make a giant outdoor theater by leveling the boulder-strewn area between two massive outcroppings for seating. He convinced CCC officials to proceed quietly with plans to clear the area. Workers took several days to set all the dynamite charges. Then they blew up all the baby boulders at once �pulverizing Stapleton�s rock garden. Denver architect Burnham Hoyt designed the stage and seating in harmony with the natural setting, making the theater an architectural as well as acoustical triumph. Another New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put Denver�s unemployed to work repairing schools, fixing gutters, planting trees, killing rats, and filling chuckholes. Larger WPA projects included installation of sewers, reinforcing the banks of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, and constructing West Alameda Avenue Parkway to Red Rocks Park. The WPA hired women to make clothing, stuff dolls, prepare school lunches, and run nurseries. It supported weavers who repaired old Indian and Hispanic textiles at the Denver Art Museum. At the Colorado Historical Society, researchers gathered historical data and compiled an excellent state guidebook: Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State.
Oil and the automobile age reshaped the Mile High city. Denver�s emergence as an oil hub rivaling Houston and Dallas was not accidental. As early as the 1950s, the Denver Chamber of Commerce began sponsoring an "Oil Progress Luncheon." Hundreds of oil and gas men, with their lackeys and lawyers, were treated to a display of Colorado�s climatic and recreational advantages. They were assured of Colorado�s favorable tax laws for oil companies, including minimal land use costs and no severance taxes. The chamber also advertised Colorado�s advantages in petroleum trade journals and in publications such as Petroleum Information, a large Denver clearinghouse and information center for the oil and gas industry. Major oil companies as well as wildcatters flowed to Denver to open new headquarters or branch offices. The city�s new royalty were oil kings and queens, including Colorado�s first two billionaires�oil men Philip Anschutz and Marvin Davis.
In 1868, a 24-year-old German stowaway landed in Denver, where he came to appreciate the frontier virtue of not questioning a man�s past. Orphaned at age 15, this youngster was running away from personal tragedies and long, compulsory�and often deadly�military service in the Prussian army. Like some 50,000 other foreign-born immigrants reaching Denver before the 1920s, Adolph Kuhrs wanted a chance to start anew in a new world. Kuhrs changed the spelling of his name to Coors and established what would become the world�s largest single brewery. America attracted 55,000 Germans�and almost 500,000 immigrants�the year Coors arrived in Denver. Germans were the most numerous of many immigrants coming to Colorado between the 1860s and the 1920s, when the U. S. began officially restricting immigration.
Denver and the South Platte Valley were classified as "the Great American Desert" by Major Stephen H. Long, who led the first scientific investigation of the area in 1820. The desert theory, along with others, can best be explored at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The Gardens sprouted in the 1940s, thanks to a coalition of socialites and plant lovers who first tended gardens in City Park. In the 1950s the city acquired the Catholic portion of the old City Cemetery on the east edge of Cheesman Park for $80,000. As part of the deal, the city agreed to remove the remaining 6,000 corpses to Mount Olivet Cemetery. Crews worked rapidly at night to transplant most of the remains, yet expansion of the Botanic Gardens unearths a corpse every now and then. The well-fertilized gardens have expanded in recent decades to cover more of the former boneyard with alpine, cutting, herb, High Plains, Japanese, vegetable, and water gardens. DBG�s large domed Boettcher Conservatory shelters an extensive garden of tropical plants.
