1/17/2024 0 Comments Faux patina paint jobMany visitors were also decked out in white clothing, from large hats on society ladies to white-collared sailor shirts on their well-behaved children. The park quickly earned the nickname “White City” for the 100,000 white lights that twinkled off the white buildings 10,000 of them were on the Tower of Jewels (the Denver Republican called it “a pillar of fire at night”), and the rest encircled structures and rides or illuminated pathways. From there they encountered such wondrous amenities as the Casino, which offered fine dining and shows the El Patio Ballroom, with 15,000 square feet of floor space, making it a ballroom dancer’s dream a Music Plaza with a bandstand a photo studio a skating rink a funhouse a swimming beach complete with diving towers and a boathouse and the Natatorium, a 50-by-125-foot indoor swimming pool. The tram let them off at the entrance to the 150-foot-high Tower of Jewels, where they descended a grand staircase flanked by regal lion statues. An estimated 50,000 people attended opening-day festivities, many of them arriving by the Denver Tramway. Although Zang envisioned the land surrounding the park becoming an upscale housing development, that idea never took hold. Lakeside was truly a company town, and the majority of its 44 initial residents either worked at the amusement park or played a role in its future. He and brewer Adolph Zang decided to create Lakeside Amusement Park at the edge of Lake Sylvan, at West 46th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard, to lift Denver from its dirty, bar-brawling roots into a dream city that Speer envisioned as “Paris on the Platte.”ĭenver Public Library As part of Zang’s master plan, and to avoid Denver’s blue laws prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sundays, the home of the future amusement park was incorporated as the town of Lakeside in 1907, which would allow the brewer-owned facility to serve liquor daily once it opened. Robert Speer, who was elected mayor of Denver in 1904, was certainly inspired by the Exposition when he made the City Beautiful movement a major push. “Nearly everyone involved in the Exposition, from planners to visitors, viewed the Great White City of the Exposition as heavenly, clean, orderly and safe - essentially, everything American cities were supposed to be striving to become,” Forsyth concludes. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who’d created New York City’s Central Park, designed the surrounding grounds to add botanical beauty to the overall scheme. The Exposition showcased such “mechanical wonders” as the Ferris wheel, as well as classically styled buildings by architect Daniel Burnham grouped around a central lagoon that “proved that architecture could bring order out of chaos,” Forsyth notes. “The ideas of both the City Beautiful and the amusement park owed their existence to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, which an estimated 27 million people from around the world visited between May 1 and October 30, 1893,” David Forsyth writes in his 2016 book, Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park…From the White City Beautiful to a Century of Fun. Today 400 remain, including Lakeside, the last private amusement park in metropolitan Denver. But the concept of an amusement park really took off a few years later, with nearly 5,000 amusement parks developed between 18 across the country. Mary and John Elitch took outdoor recreation to the next level when they opened Elitch Gardens, complete with a zoo, gardens and a theater, on West 38th Avenue and Tennyson Street in 1890. Denver Public Library Parks were popular in early Denver, with residents often picnicking at cemeteries, in gardens and at early attractions along the South Platte River.
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