8 AUGUST 1-7, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | which says it’s “working on it,” according to the Arcas. Crawford & Company did not respond to requests for comment from Westword. “I’m not sure I believe they’re even telling us the truth at this point,” says Jefferson Arca. “We’re just at a loss,” Selene adds. “It’s hard for us to keep our amiable nature with them at this point. We’re tiny. Twenty thousand dollars might not be much to them, but it’s big for us.” The D&F Clocktower is no stranger to hard times. Despite its legendary status — which was an almost im- mediate thing, perhaps even before its construction 113 years ago — the building and its inhabitants have seen their share of challenges. Still, it remains what it was built to be: an inspirational spectacle, a brick-and- mortar symbol of the city it graces. The structure began life as the Daniels & Fisher Tower, part of what billed itself as “Denver’s oldest de- partment store.” According to historian and author Mark A. Barnhouse, who wrote Dan- iels and Fisher: Denver’s Best Place to Shop, “The legacy of the Tower is inextricably linked to that of the department store. You can’t talk about one without diving into the story of the other.” The store was founded in 1864, a dozen years before Colorado became a state, by a Kansas merchant named William Bradley Daniels. Hearing how Denver was grow- ing, he sent his brother-in-law west with a wagonload of goods, and they opened a shop at the corner of Blake Street and 15th (then known simply as “F Street”). The store did well, and in 1872, Daniels brought in partner William Garrett Fisher, whose three-story neoclassical Revival-style mansion still graces the corner of 16th Av- enue and Logan Street. By 1875, the venture now known as Daniels & Fisher had built a two-story store at the corner of 16th and Lawrence streets. It soon grew, expanding down Lawrence and adding two fl oors, then another. Daniels died in 1890; Fisher passed in 1897. It was left to Daniels’s son, William Cooke Daniels, to usher the department store out of the Silver Crash of 1893 and into the 1900s. Sort of. “William Cooke Daniels wasn’t someone who really wanted to run a store,” Barnhouse says. At the time, he was a journalist, working at one of the many New York dailies duking it out in that city. “But he’d inherited one, so he hired a friend he’d met in New York, Charles McAllister Wilcox, to run the store.” While Daniels played dilettante, moving to France for a while, Wilcox ran the show. “The store wanted to expand again,” says Barnhouse, “but they were hemmed in. They couldn’t keep moving down Lawrence, because there were some buildings there already — one a hotel — that didn’t want to sell out. Instead, D&F decided to bridge the existing alley and expand up to Arapahoe — and that new structure included the tower.” Construction began in 1910, and the proj- ect was fi nished in time for the 1911 holiday shopping season. The inspiration for the D&F Tower itself dates back to 1902 and the collapse of the Campanile di San Marco, the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. That tower’s foundations were estimated to have been laid in the tenth century, and although they’d been improved and reconstructed several times over the centuries that followed, the unstable marsh on which they were built could not support them. Despite some lo- cal opposition, Italy decided to rebuild the landmark, and that project captured global attention. “A lot of architects around the world began building replica towers based on the Campanile,” Barnhouse says. “The Metropolitan Life Tower in New York City. A Seattle, Washington, train depot. A city hall in Melbourne, Australia. It was defi nitely part of the zeitgeist.” And ultimately, Daniels wanted his store to be a landmark. “After all,” Barnhouse notes, “Daniels was competing by this point with a lot of other stores along 16th Street. The Denver Dry Goods, Joslin’s, smaller stores like A.T. Lewis and Sons. Plus, Daniels was kind of a snob about architecture. He didn’t like the idea of red brick, for example. We love our red brick buildings now, espe- cially down in LoDo, but Daniels felt that red brick made buildings look like warehouses. I’m sure it didn’t help that his competitors were all in buildings utilizing red brick, too. So he had his architect, Frederick Sterner, use the lighter blond brick in his design, and ended up refacing the existing structure in that same brick to tie it all together.” When it was fi nished, the D&F Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River — some said west of Manhattan — at 393 feet and 21 stories, with an enormous bell that chimed on the half-hour and clock faces on all four sides of its apex that employed the same mechanics as London’s Big Ben. It fi t right in with Mayor Robert Speer’s “City Beautiful” movement, itself inspired by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, introducing neoclas- sical design and architecture into working metropolitan areas. “It was really Denver standing up and saying, hey, we’re a big city now,” says Barnhouse. “The Tower was a private response to what Speer was doing in the public realm.” The Tower became one of the must- see sights for travelers, who’d climb to the observation deck near the top to scope out the city, then stop at the curio shop on the twentieth fl oor. “When you see a postcard or any sort of souvenir merchandise from the D&F Tower, you can bet that it was originally purchased from that curio shop,” Barnhill says. “I can’t imagine anyplace else in the city selling them.” Other parts of the structure served differ- ent functions through the years. There was an employee cafeteria, along with the requisite offi ces. There were lounges — one for men, one for women — as well as a space devoted to the schooling of the store’s youngest em- ployees: cash boys and cash girls, who’d run payments between the sales fl oor and the cen- tral cash offi ce, where change would be made, then return the remainder to the customer. The Tower even had a short-lived role in politics, which ended shortly after it opened. In 1912, the Denver Republican (a house organ of the GOP) worked out of offi ces directly across the street, essentially where Skyline Park is today. On election night, the news- paper arranged a tower lighting code, which Denver residents could follow to learn early voting results. In a world that would still have to wait a decade or more for the advent of radio, it was the closest thing to mass media that the city could muster. Wilcox, who’d inherited the store from Daniels after his passing, sold it in 1929, only a short time before the stock market crash. Despite briefl y entertaining an offer from a growing national chain that had made a practice of buying up regional stores like Daniels & Fisher, Wilcox wanted to keep the business in local hands. The store survived the Depression rela- tively well, as it had always offered everything from bargain-basement items to exclusive departments. But the area around the fabled tower started going downhill, and the store responded in the mid-1930s by building a parking garage — Denver’s fi rst — with an en- trance on the Arapahoe side. Its valet parking allowed patrons to arrive and walk right in the doors without worry- Tick Tock continued from page 7 continued on page 10 Mark Barnhouse wrote the book on the D&F Tower. The D&F Clocktower is a landmark in downtown Denver. THE HISTORY PRESS/JEREMY PATLEN EVAN SEMÓN
