Given the evidence, I believe these errors due to author ignorance of the actual location and re-use of the earlier articles’ mistakes in the later one. also included is a copy of a photograph of the exterior of the building City and County of Denver Worlds Aid Day proclomation (1997). (Note: I cannot clarify the discrepancies found in both the Municipal Facts and Rocky Mountain News accounts that place the “Barnard Block” between Santa Fe and Inca and the numbers of floors as either 3 or 4, then 2 or 3. Collection contains a poster of the gay bar: The 1942 the bar was once located at 1942 Broadway, Denver, Colo. Condemnation would come again by 1951, when it was discovered that a presumably solid concrete foundation was actually crumbling brick underneath. Denver Sanitary Laundry was another ground floor use noted.
insurance company’s offices there for many years. The building was owned by the Van Hummell family since 1908, and housed their Van Hummell, Inc. Machinists from the Denver and Rio Grande also reportedly opened Colorado’s first “co-operative store” during a difficult strike in 1907. It also was known as a center for “business”, housing a mortuary on the SE corner that was reputedly used in evenings as “boxing arena and poker palace.” Evidently, caskets make good hiding places during police raids. Some old timers recalled fond memories of climbing a steep, winding staircase to deliver groceries, laundry and sacks of coal to those dramatic residents.
The upper floors were called the “Iona Apartments” then “Casa Loma,” and were once inhabited by “many social leaders of that more leisurely day…before moving up to Capital Hill.” In the summers, it was filled with performers from Elitch’s theater productions and housed some Hollywood up-and-comers, such as Douglas Fairbanks. Barnard as a wealthy pioneer businessman and cattleman that built Denver’s “first so-called skyscraper” with this building.
It was constructed around 1892 and is a landmark of the gay nineties. Famed ‘New’ Barnard Block Is Crumbling, Wreckers’ sledges and bars are crumbling the famed “new” Barnard block at West Eighth avenue and Kalamath street.