Home > Metrospective

Magical history tour
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Photo by Jason Small • jsmall04@mscd.edu After dining on calimari and shrimp appetizers at The Cruise Room, the tour enters the Hotel Monaco.

Metro professor Kevin Rucker sported a devilish grin as he casually revealed the seedy side of the Mile High City’s history.

“This tour features con men, desperados, movers, shakers and everything in between,” he boasted at the beginning of his historical walking tour.

The description was more than accurate. During the three-hour stroll around downtown, Rucker illuminated some of the city’s most colorful and controversial personalities. The ghosts of William Larimer, William Byers, Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, Barney Ford and others found renewed vigor in Rucker’s careful and detailed oral biographies.

Donning a bowler hat and a Victorian necktie, he seemed to be a living envoy from the city’s past as he led a group around the city on Aug. 19. For every block, he had a story; for every antique edifice, an accompanying tale that lent life and substance.

Rucker was not the only one who relished in the tawdry tales. His unbridled enthusiasm for history was contagious. As he spoke to a rapt audience of more than 20, they crowded around the speaker, intent on the facts, stories and personalities he uncovered.

Photo by Jason Small • jsmall04@mscd.edu Union Station’s basement has been repainted, but a high water mark from a 1933 flood that killed six workers remains on a support beam.

The part-time Metro history professor leads a weekly walking historical tour of the city and attracts a diverse crowd. On this tour, college students and senior citizens alike followed the rambling history professor as he snaked through downtown.

Although his tours began almost ten years ago as a way to give his students tactile context for his courses, demand for his unique brand of education has blossomed. He has opened his tours to history enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds.

Rucker leads his groups through the historical cradle of the city, from Larimer Square to the Platte River, and highlights the exploits of some of the city’s most famous and infamous denizens.

“Denver was a den of wickedness in the West during the 1900s,” he asserted without hesitation. “Between 18th and 23rd [streets, there were] over 11,000 prostitutes and 17 opium dens.”

LoDo’s sleek, urban atmosphere was sullied as Rucker revived the neighborhood’s less palatable, but infinitely more interesting, past.

Rucker aired the dirty laundry of many of Denver’s founding fathers, from William Larimer, a “no-good claim jumper,” to Robert Speer, a corrupt city leader with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

Rucker led his crowds past the haunts of Jefferson “Soapy” Smith along Larimer Street. Smith, a con man’s con man, moved to Denver in 1879 and developed his own personal brand of underhanded robberies. From crooked card games to bogus diamond sales, Smith established a criminal empire in the Centennial state. He earned his moniker from a sleight-of-hand scam he created involving bars of soap and hundred-dollar bills. Wrapping bills around select bars, Smith encouraged crowds to participate in the makeshift lottery; a lucky participant could easily end up with the hundred-dollar soap for a negligible price. Smith’s ruse was in his sleeve; he pocketed the bill before he offered the bars to the crowd – winning was impossible.

Photo by Jason Small • jsmall04@mscd.edu El Chapultepec is a Denver after-hours jazz spot that’s hosted such figures as former president Bill Clinton.

Rucker’s anecdotes were not all seedy. Denver’s wild and often lawless backdrop served as a haven for Barney Ford, the namesake of a building at 1514 Blake Street. Ford, an escaped slave, arrived in Colorado in 1860 and eventually carved his own societal niche in the city as a hotel tycoon. Ford was an early activist for African-American rights; he was the first African American to serve on a Colorado grand jury and established Denver’s first black adult education classes.

Rucker offers his followers a respite from the hiking and from the stream of facts. The tour makes stops in art galleries and restaurants along the way. Still, even these settings pulse with their own colorful pasts.

The Cruise Room cocktail lounge is an art deco watering hole tucked away in the grandiose Oxford Hotel on 17th Street. It’s an appropriate setting for a history tour: The crimson lighting scheme, long bar and stylized paneled artwork on the walls transports patrons to another time. Ghosts of prohibition-era bootleggers seemed to lurk in the bar’s corners as the crowd rested their feet and feasted on the free appetizers.

The tour covers the best and worst of Denver’s past, and Rucker revives the city’s phantoms with his enthusiasm and knowledge. He revels in the seemingly impossible extremes of his stories; for him, the past is more exciting than any story fiction can offer.

Rucker often punctuated his more unbelievable tales with a simple refrain: “You can’t make up stuff this good.”