Overview:
Denver historian Phil Goodstein discusses neighborhood history, cemetery stories and why walking tours reveal the city better than maps.
Few people know Denver’s neighborhoods as intimately as Phil Goodstein. A longtime local historian, author and walking tour guide, Goodstein has spent decades documenting the city’s past block by block, often focusing on the overlooked corners and odd details that history books ignore. His work has explored everything from Capitol Hill’s fading Victorian mansions to the hidden stories buried in cemeteries scattered across the metro area.
His interest in Denver’s neighborhoods began after years spent getting his master’s degree, followed by a doctorate from CU in modern European history. When he emerged, he discovered a city that had changed dramatically since his childhood as a Park Hill resident and East High School graduate. Looking for a way to reorient himself, he began researching the geography and evolution of Denver’s communities, which resulted in more than 20 books about the Mile High City, lectures and a popular series of walking tours.
In this week’s 5 Questions, Goodstein reflects on the neighborhoods he finds most fascinating, why cemeteries can reveal as much about a community as its living residents and what he’s learned from the people who join his tours. He also shares his thoughts on how gentrification and modern development are reshaping Denver and why seeing the city on foot remains the best way to understand it.
How did you first get interested in chronicling the history of Denver neighborhoods?
I was isolated from the world while in graduate school from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. When I got out, I had to discover Denver anew, a town quite different from where I had grown up. To gain an orientation, as a historian, I started looking at the different parts of the community. In the process, I developed publishing links about the neighborhoods and the city’s past. Capitol Hill is far and away my favorite neighborhood. North Denver is a close second.
What are some surprising things about Denver neighborhoods and its gentrification?
Survivors of yesterday often are more interesting than well-maintained, museum-like landmarks. It says a lot, for example, that there are simple frame houses at 12th Avenue and Logan Street and 17th Avenue and Washington Street that date from when Capitol Hill was an elite neighborhood. At times, ugly buildings also tell a tale: what were the values of a community that eagerly embraced them?
Sometimes, those on tours express puzzlement as to why I have chosen an area. They are surprised, for example, by the vintage Victorian manors in Montclair. Before virtually all of the old shacks near the Cherry Creek Shopping Center vanished, they were amazed at the area’s evolution from poverty. Participants also are hypnotized by some of the early-20th-century splendor of older parts of Capitol Hill.
What is it about cemeteries that particularly interest you and what are some moving things you’ve seen in a local cemetery?
Cemeteries are as much for the living as the dead. They express community sentiments and memories. Often they are art museums in their own right. Sometimes known as the “cities of the dead,” they have their own neighborhoods, while the stories of the dead are equal to those of the living.
In a way, cemeteries can be quite dull with standard religious clichés as epitaphs. In other places, people observe about the deceased that “when she was young, she couldn’t afford steak; when she was old, she didn’t have teeth.” In another case, somebody who was far more a skeptic than a believer observed that “Life is a mirage. Vainly we seek solace in sheer hallucination.” The other side of his monument asks, “Oh death, who can fathom thee or thy purpose beyond the grave?”
What are a few stories you can tell about what you learned from those who attended your tours?
I have learned a lot about Globeville, especially its hangouts, from people on my tours. Likewise, those coming on tours of Old South Gaylord Street have amazing memories of what the road was like in the years after World War II.
Questions are actually relatively rare on walking tours. I greatly like it when people who have grown up in areas come along, sharing their memories, which often far surpass my research on the sections.
Why is it important to share the history and culture of our neighborhoods?
Independent tour guides are necessary. City planners spew out amazing fantasies and misinformation about the city. Lazy journalists echo them. Tours offer a first-hand view, complete with a discussion of the people and the evolution of places. Significantly, rarely do journalists or planners come on the tours.
City planners and journalists do not know the geography of the city. The area by North High School, near the intersection of Federal and Speer boulevards, is the heart of North Denver. The ignorant call “North Denver” the section northeast of downtown. This is old East Denver. The section directly to the northeast of Union Station is to the East’ city planners and real estate interests call it “North.”
