Denver’s Smugness of ‘70s Gone : Sagging Economy Brings Mile-High City to New Low

The history of the West--built on a gambler’s dream--is a dangerous thing, stalking those who too easily forget lessons of the past. Now it has another victim. Another boom’s gone bust, another Golden Age has slipped quietly away from a city that thought the good times had become part of its eternal heritage.

Denver has changed.

Out here where the prairies meet the mountains, the smugness of the 1970s is gone. No one talks of having it made any more. Today, Colorado’s “Rocky Mountain High” is an anthem to be sung under polluted skies, a lament to another decade when the Queen City of the Plains rode the crest of an energy bonanza and optimism was as bountiful as the life style was appealing.

To be sure, Denver is still a pleasing and pleasant place. It has 300 days of sunshine a year, no slums, a first-place National Football League team--around which many people say the “culture” of Denver revolves--and a backdrop of snow-capped mountains as stunning as any urban panorama on earth. But, as Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm likes to say, the city has moved from the cow chip to the computer chip in 20 years’ time, and partly as a result Denver now resembles Los Angeles more than it does the cowboy capital it once was. Defrocked of its mystique, it stands today not as a beacon of the future but as a symbol of the economic hurt in the eight Rocky Mountain states.

Last year, Colorado--which attracted up to 90,000 new residents annually in the ‘70s--had a net population loss for the first time in 25 years. In September its unemployment rate, burdened by 3,000 jobless Frontier workers when the hometown airline folded, crept above the national average for the first time in 16 years. The office vacancy rate in downtown Denver--nearly 30%--is the highest in the nation, and the city’s peak carbon monoxide pollution levels are the most severe of any U.S. city, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

From the 37th floor of the Anaconda Tower, where the Petroleum Club reflects a tone of monied understatement befitting “Dynasty’s” Blake Carrington, the sweeping view of Denver and the 17th Street canyon of skyscrapers below are reminiscent of the cities that sprang up overnight around the Persian Gulf. Denver seems to have just been dropped here out of the clouds, unexpectedly and for no reason. And a few miles out, locked in by flat, treeless suburbs, it simply ends.

Club Membership Plummets

The Petroleum Club moved into two floors of the tower in 1978, when Denver was booming and 1,200 energy companies were based here. It paid $3 million, cash, for renovations. Since then the number of oil rigs operating in the Rocky Mountain states has dropped from 600 to about 100, Exxon pulled out of its mammoth oil-shale project on the Western Slope of the Rockies, and in a glassed-in case outside the club’s dining room are the plaques of 17 companies with names such as Circle T Drilling, Husky and Toltek. None of them still exists. This year the club has lost a quarter of its 1,600 members and has launched a campaign to attract new members, cutting its dues by half.

“You know, I used to walk to work and you’d come down 17th Street a few years ago and see 17 or 18 construction booms,” said Ed Hutchinson, a retired public relations executive. “It was an exciting, exhilarating time. You had the feeling things were really happening. It’s not that way anymore, and now I find myself wondering if things will ever boom again.”

In the West, as Denver knows so well, they often do.

Denver--named for a now-forgotten Kansas governor--was founded in 1858 by Gen. William Larimer, who staked out the settlement by crossing four cottonwood sticks on an empty expanse where the Santa Fe and the New Mexico roads met on the routes to Ft. Laramie and Ft. Bridger. This, he wrote, “is the center of all the great leading thoroughfares and is bound to be a great city.” In 1860, the federal census taker counted 4,749 Denverites; a decade later there were only 10 more.

Ultimate Gamblers

But the men who followed Larimer west were, as Denver historian Thomas J. Noel observes, the ultimate gamblers, men who would give up their homes and farms in the East and Midwest in pursuit of sudden wealth in an untamed territory. Many made fortunes in gold and silver, and what Mark Twain called the get-rich-quick disease struck so many victims that, in the 1880s, Gov. John L. Routt walked out of the state Capitol one day and went to mine in Leadville, where in short order he became fabulously wealthy.

In 1893, the government ended its silver subsidies and the boom went bust. The silver barons were wiped out. Denver lost half its banks, architects and realtors in a flash and the number of annual building permits issued dropped from 2,338 to 124 in 1894. Residential lots that had sold for $1,500 were auctioned off for 20 cents on the dollar to pay back taxes, and half the mines in the state closed, throwing 45,000 people out of work--a devastating number in a state with only 500,000 residents.

Although Denver slipped into a period of stagnation, the city had emerged as the transportation, commercial and banking hub of the Rocky Mountain states and territories--Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Denver still fulfills that role and today few cities exert as much influence over their region as it does. It is, for instance, all but impossible to fly from Casper, Wyo., to Billings, Mont., without transiting through Denver.

“The remarkable thing about Denver is its ineffable closedness,” John Gunther wrote in 1947. “When it moves, or opens up, it is like a Chippendale molting its veneer. This is not to say that Denver is reactionary. No, because reaction suggests motion, whereas Denver is immobile. . . . Denver is Olympian, impassive and inert. It is probably the most self-sufficient, isolated, self-contained and complacent city in the world.”

Denver awoke with a start in the 1960s. The mile-high city, whose air a writer had once remarked was so pure “you can live without much lungs,” was a magnet for the migrating World War II baby-boom generation, and with interest rates low, construction soared.

Stapleton International was to become the world’s sixth-busiest airport. Eventually, 125 federal agencies, the largest concentration outside Washington, would locate here, bringing along a recession-proof payroll that now numbers 31,300. The high-tech industry moved in en masse. Then, with the oil crisis, came the energy exploration companies that would transform Denver into Houston West. Three major hotels went up, doubling the number of first-class rooms to 4,000.

Things were going so well that, in a 1972 referendum, Coloradans rejected the position of many businessmen and voted by a 3-2 margin to prohibit state spending on the 1976 Olympics, in effect sending the Winter Games elsewhere. The vote helped sweep into state office a new group of fervent environmentalists whose policies were often perceived to be anti-business.

At the forefront was a 37-year-old Democrat, Richard D. Lamm, who would serve three terms in the gold-domed Capitol. Now stepping down--his successor as governor is a development-oriented Democrat, Roy Romer--Lamm has won the grudging respect of even the business community by continuing to speak his mind regardless of political implications.

“Sure, I’d still vote against the Olympics,” said Lamm, who has accepted a six-month fellowship to teach and write at Dartmouth College. “We needed to develop a high-tech state, not sponsor a 10-day blitz that would have cost us $7 million just to build the bobsled run. I never advocated no growth. I was for planned growth. But back then, any talk of planned growth was interpreted as no growth.

‘We Were Booming’

“This state made politicians look good in the ‘70s. I didn’t even have to take many economic-development trips. We were booming. The problem was how to manage the boom. But the whole history of the West is one of boom and bust, and you ignore that history at your own peril.”

Lamm, who ironically presided over the most explosive growth in the state’s history, was hamstrung during his three terms by a Republican-controlled Legislature. He cautioned against over-investment, against overextending the state’s resources, especially its water, and on the failure to develop a land-use plan. In the late 1970s, he warned the 3 million Coloradans that what goes up must come down so often that he picked up the moniker “Governor Gloom.”

And then agricultural prices did drop, the energy crisis eased, exploration was drastically reduced, construction slumped, singles-only complexes that had mushroomed in the suburbs began converting to retirement centers, and the hotel occupancy rate fell below 50%.

The economic downturn has jarred the civic insecurity of the 1.6 million people in metropolitan Denver. The city has always wanted to be recognized by the Eastern Establishment as a major commercial power yet, although the Broncos have sold out 127 consecutive football games and the waiting list for season tickets numbers 17,000, there’s a feeling here that Denver never quite made it into the big leagues. Why, even the minor-league baseball Zephyrs are a farm team of, for heaven’s sake, the Milwaukee Brewers.

“If you look at hard times other cities have gone through, we’re really not that hard up, but Denver had it so easy for so long that the present situation is really causing excessive pessimism,” said Morgan Smith, who heads the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.

“The mood is much gloomier than evidence warrants. People around the country are saying that Denver has thrown in the sponge. Psychologically, I think, we’re really hurting ourselves with our pessimism.”

Just as Denverites were heading to work the other morning, the bells in Holy Ghost Church began to toll and “God Bless America” swept over the downtown area. The refrain was a reminder that by the standards of 1893 and 1929, this state that sits atop the nation with an average elevation of 6,800 feet is in far better shape than the doomsayers like to admit.

‘We’re Still Growing’

“The changes in the mood and the perceptions and the attitudes are more dramatic than the economic statistics,” said William Kendall of the Center for Business and Economic Forecasting. “A lot of business people I encounter think the economy is in the tank. I tell them that’s not true. Our economy is diversified and we’re still growing, though slowly; it’s just that our growth isn’t as great as it was. But I don’t think we’re seeing anything like a depression.”

Among the benefits of the boom is a severance tax on energy companies that has been placed in a state trust fund to help communities cope with the impact of sudden growth. The tax (producing $50 million in 1982 and a projected $25 million this year) has laid the foundation of an infrastructure ranging from fire stations to waste systems in dozens of small towns. In Pueblo, McDonnell Douglas is constructing a plant to build Delta rockets and Sperry Rand has started producing computers for Navy planes.

Denver officials are preparing to break ground on a $110-million convention center and final plans are being drawn up for a new $3-billion international airport, 10 miles from Stapleton. The Winter Park Ski Resort, owned by the city and county of Denver, opened Nov. 12 with $9 million invested in new trails and lifts, and state officials are estimating that 1.5 million skiers will visit Colorado this season. And the venerable, 94-year-old Brown Palace Hotel has completed a $4-million “uplift” and launched a campaign to promote both itself and Denver.

As any gambler knows, good fortune is a fickle partner. High stakes equal high risks. And although Colorado’s “Rocky Mountain High” may have been grounded, the Queen City remains the only royalty on the Plains.

Times researcher Dallas Jamison contributed to this article.