Baker, where you are now, is one of Denver's original streetcar neighborhoods, a district of Victorian cottages and brick bungalows that grew up in the 1870s and 1880s along the South Broadway corridor south of downtown. The neighborhood was platted during Colorado's first decade of statehood — Colorado joined the Union in 1876, the centennial year, earning the nickname the Centennial State — and its housing stock reflects the modest prosperity of Denver's working and middle class during the silver and gold era. Baker went through the familiar twentieth-century trajectory of decline and renewal but arrived at a distinctive character: younger, more artistic, more politically engaged than many Denver neighborhoods, with a concentration of tattoo parlors, record stores, vintage clothing shops, and independent restaurants along South Broadway that gives it a counterculture energy that feels genuine rather than performed.
The Baker Historic District encompasses hundreds of structures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the neighborhood's flat, walkable grid makes it easy to appreciate the variety of Victorian residential architecture across every income level.