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 Alma that thrived for a century, and now a sprawling higher education campus built after that neighborhood was demolished in the 1970s. Auraria was founded across Cherry Creek from the Denver City camp in the fall of 1858, named for a gold-mining town in Georgia from which some of the first prospectors came. The area west of Cherry Creek developed over the following century into a working-class and Mexican American neighborhood with its own churches, businesses, and social institutions.
In the 1970s the city and state built a consolidated higher education campus here for three institutions — the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University, and Community College of Denver — clearing the neighborhood through eminent domain. More than 300 families and dozens of businesses were displaced; the process is remembered in Denver's Latino community as one of the most painful episodes of urban renewal. The campus that replaced it enrolls nearly 40,000 students today, and a small historic district preserves fragments of what was lost.