Capitol Hill has been the most politically and culturally volatile neighborhood in Denver for a century and a half. Capitol Hill was Denver's silk-stocking district in the 1880s and 1890s, when the silver and gold economy created wealth enough to fill these blocks with elaborate Victorian mansions and brownstone apartment buildings. The Molly Brown House and dozens of other elaborate residences from this era still stand on these streets.
By the early twentieth century the mansions were being subdivided into apartments for Denver's growing working and middle classes. By the 1950s and 1960s the neighborhood had become Denver's bohemian district — Jack Kerouac's Denver, the city he returned to repeatedly before writing On the Road, was largely Capitol Hill. Neal Cassady, the Denver native who became the model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's novel, grew up on the working-class margins of this neighborhood.
In the 1960s and 1970s Capitol Hill was the center of Denver's counterculture, and the political ferment here produced Federico Peña, Denver's first Hispanic mayor, in 1983. Today the neighborhood remains a dense mix of historic apartments, coffee shops, and the occasional Victorian mansion converted to offices.