LoDo, Denver's oldest district, keeps you among twenty-three blocks of the warehouses, hotels, and commercial buildings of the frontier city that gold built. LoDo was the heart of Denver from the 1860s through the 1890s, when the mining economy poured money into brick construction that still lines these streets. By the mid-twentieth century the district had declined into a skid row of flophouses and vacant warehouses.
The turnaround began in the 1980s when artists moved in for cheap rents, followed by the Historic District designation in 1988, the opening of Coors Field in 1995, and the restaurants and bars that now make LoDo one of the liveliest neighborhoods in the West. The iron-front commercial buildings along these streets are architectural cousins of those in New York's SoHo — prefabricated cast-iron facades bolted onto brick structures that went up fast to house a city in a hurry. Look at the cornices and columns; this is frontier prosperity expressed in iron and brick.