Brown Palace Hotel

Henry C. Brown, who homesteaded Capitol Hill, asked Frank Edbrooke to design this $2 million palace. Edbrooke envisioned the three-sided, nine-story hotel with a skylighted atrium seventy-five years before John Portman made the Hyatt Hotel atrium a familiar form. To this day, no architect has handled so well the awkward triangular sites created by the meshing of Denver's original mining camp grid with the compass-oriented grids of later additions. By using three grand curves at the corners, Edbrooke wrapped the site effortlessly with red sandstone walls above a Pikes Peak granite base course. The steel and iron frame, clad in terracotta and concrete as well as stone, made this one of America's first fireproof structures, according to a May 21, 1892, cover story in Scientific American.

For the exterior, Edbrooke drew inspiration from H. H. Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store and Louis Sullivan's Chicago Auditorium. As in these Chicago landmarks, repetition of arcaded window patterns, multiple cornices, and banding add horizontal emphasis to what was Denver's tallest building. The Brown Palace has expansive ogee entry arches in implied three-story towers and giant arches rising from the fourth through the seventh floors. Stone creatures once swarmed over the exterior, but nearly all were removed after pieces began bombarding the sidewalk. Even the grand stone cornice, inscribed “The H. C. Brown Hotel,” has been pared off the Broadway facade, leaving the hotel without a definitive main entrance. Twenty-six medallions of native Colorado animals by James Whitehouse survive on the top-floor fenestration arcade, and the now-closed Broadway entry arch retains some stone trim, including a bas-relief bust of Brown.

The interior still has its opulent 1890s spaciousness and many antique furnishings. From the overstuffed couches in the lobby, rubberneckers can admire the pastel shades of the skylight and the caramel and cream swirls flowing through 12,000 square feet of onyx paneling from Mexico. The best-preserved chamber, the Onyx Room, has a ceiling mural of cherubs hovering in a heavenly blue sky. In the Tremont Place entrance lobby, two later murals by Allen True contrast the stagecoach and airplane ages. The Ship Tavern, a 1935 celebration of the repeal of Prohibition, was designed by Alan B. Fisher, the son of architect William E. Fisher. The tavern is an inland seaport featuring a fortune in nautical artifacts, ranging from a crow's nest wrapped around the room's central beam to a collection of ships in bottles.

During the 1930s the hotel's high-ceilinged ninth-floor ballroom was converted to two floors of luxury residence suites in Art Deco style. Each hotel room initially had its own fireplace, but the flues and chimneys have been converted to air conditioning ducts, and the 10-foot-high lobby fireplace is now an alcove housing a boutique. The hotel offers free tours, which include a peek into President Dwight Eisenhower's former suite, with its knotty pine paneled walls and lime green tiled bathroom.