Local writers tackle a world of subjects, from West Denver to travel in India
Denver’s designations are confusing. Most of the city west of Broadway is North Denver. West Denver is a triangle bounded by the Cherry Creek, West Sixth Avenue and the Platte River. Its history is hardly that of empire building. Nonetheless, under the pen of urban historian Phil Goodstein, West Denver emerges as an integral part of the city.
For most of its existence, West Denver was an industrial and middle-class neighborhood. It dates to 1858 as a settlement called Auraria. The El Dorado Hotel and the Tremont House were there, along with a saloon run by Uncle Dick Wootten. The Rocky Mountain News was housed over the saloon. Carriage and trolley factories, scrap metal shops and foundries were part of West Denver. The famed Denver Boot was designed in the area.
West Denver also had food manufacturers. Potato chips, flour, pickles, crackers, cookies and bakery goods were produced there.
The area even had its own share of celebrities. Harry Huffman, movie theater entrepreneur, opened his Bide-A-Wee Theater at 1038 W. Colfax Ave. Band Leader Paul Whiteman lived at 1073 Kalamath, and artist Herndon Davis, best known for painting the face on the barroom floor at the Teller House in Central City, had a studio at 1323 Kalamath.
Goldstein, whose work is always opinionated (one reason his books make interesting reading), goes into great detail about the Chicano movement that was centered in West Denver, the growth of the area’s Latino population and the rise and fall of West High School.
West Denver is not the most elegant part of the city, nor is it the most interesting. But its history is worth preserving, and Goldstein gets credit for doing just that.
In spring 1825, Rowland Willard, eager for adventure, joined a company of merchants headed for New Mexico. Willard wasn’t a trader. He was a doctor, and his trip, which included three years in Chihuahua, was recorded in two diaries as well as an autobiography. They’re republished with heavy footnoting.
At first, Willard had little respect for the Latinos he treated. He writes of calling on a patient and finding the house “thronged with men, women & children, so much that I was unable to approach her. … This was a scene of superstition.”
He also found scenes of poverty. The doctor was approached by a man with a kidney stone. “On inquiry found he had nothing to pay and accordingly dismissed him,” he recorded. Still, the doctor treated so many indigent patients that his practice made little money, and he left New Mexico for Chihuahua, where he saw an average of 20 patients a day. The practice there was lucrative. He apparently was a competent doctor, although his favorite method of treatment seems to have been bleeding.
As he got to know the priests, Willard’s attitude toward them changed. He advised a weak patient not to fast for Lent. When she consulted her priest, she was told her to follow her doctor’s advice. And Willard admitted at the end of his stay that he had “experienced constant demonstrations of their high regard for my welfare and happiness.”
The trip home proved more perilous than his stay among the Latinos. On Willard’s journey to New Orleans, his clothes and horses were stolen. At one point, he dismissed a servant when the doctor discovered the man planned to rob and murder him.
Instead of a lavish wedding, Boulder writer Joshua Berman and his bride, Sutay, decided on a simple at-home ceremony so they could save their money for a trip to Pakistan, India, Ghana and Gambia.
The two, former Peace Corps volunteers, knew the joys and the hazards of trekking in out-of-the-way places. On their honeymoon in 2005, they endured filthy hotel rooms, questionable food — Sutay once sucked a cockroach into her mouth through a straw — sweaty, swerving buses, groping cab drivers and theft. After $500 was stolen from their hotel room, the desk clerk not only was unsympathetic but told them the theft was impossible. But nothing seemed to get them down.
Berman’s detailed account is filled with stories of the people and places the couple encountered, the exotic sites and warm relationships they formed. They were not just touring but had a destination. In India, they spent weeks studying the health effects of workers at tea plantations. Several plantations were closed, and gone were the medical facilities they once supported. That meant starvation and economic chaos. Former workers survived on ferns and jungle plants, but even then, six children under four years of age, whose parents worked on the plantation, died of the effects of malnutrition.
Most touching is Berman’s account of his wife’s return to the Gambian village where she had worked as a Peace Corps volunteer — and where she had been given the name Sutay. As she walked into the compound, villagers cried out, “Sutay, Sutay!” and mobbed her. Eventually the couple visited a refuge of docile crocodiles, touching their backs in a kind of fertility ceremony for the life ahead back home in Boulder.