Home > Metrospective

Houses of the holy
By Nicole Queen
nqueen@mscd.edu

Photo by Kyle Bisio • kbisio1@mscd.edu A statue sits outside of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church, located at 1060 St. Francis Way.

Auraria’s cultural and social roots run deep.
Long before it was a sprawling commuter campus in the middle of downtown Denver, the Auraria neighborhood comprised separate communities and traditions.

Pioneer settlers founded the town of Auraria during the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s. The community, which took its name from the Latin word for “gold,” flourished, drew in many immigrant settlers, and adopted their cultures in the process.

The neighborhood was torn down in the 1970s to make way for the Auraria Campus. The construction of the new facility spared some of the community’s most important landmarks, including buildings such as the Emmanuel Gallery, St. Elizabeth’s Cathedral and St. Cajetan’s.

These are the physical traces, the tactile reminders in wood and stone of Auraria’s cultural, historical and spiritual roots.

Emmanuel Gallery
South of the Plaza Building, the Emmanuel Gallery’s antique exterior quietly beckons.

Denver’s longest-standing church is now an outlet for Auraria’s artistic community, allowing students, faculty and visiting artists to showcase their work.

According to its website, Auraria’s Episcopalian community first constructed the Romanesque-Gothic chapel in 1876. The chapel remained the center for worship and community gatherings until 1903, when it was bought by the growing Eastern European Jewish community and functioned as a synagogue. The building still bears the Hebrew letters and the Star of David of its Jewish congregation.

When the Auraria campus was constructed, the chapel was transformed into an art gallery shared by Metro, UCD and CCD.

“We do an average of 13 shows a year and the majority of the exhibitions are us supporting the three schools on campus,” curator Shannon Corrigan said.

Emmanuel Gallery serves a dual role as a haven to art students and as a local gem for architecture and history buffs. According to Corrigan, people from campus and the surrounding community alike visit the gallery simply because of their interest in the building.

“I’m very thankful for that,” Corrigan said. “Any way I can get someone in here to look at art is great.”

Corrigan touts the chapel’s unique qualities as a viewing gallery.

“Where you see art, it doesn’t necessarily break the show, but it can definitely make the show. The acoustics in here, the closeness that the small space (provides), the vast ceiling … I think that you have a calmness when you come in here, and an intimacy,” she said. “In a warehouse space, you’re not going to get that.”

St. Elizabeth’s
Mimicking the Victorian and Gothic architecture from the great European cathedrals, St. Elizabeth’s Church is one of the two active churches on campus.

According to its website, the church was founded in 1878 by German immigrants who built the structure from stone quarried in Colorado Springs. For years, St. Elizabeth’s served many of the Catholics in the Auraria community.

The May Bonfils Trust founded the church’s friary and opened its outside gardens in 1936. The gardens are decorated with a colonnade decorated with mosaics of New Testament scenes, as well as a shrine to St. Francis.

The church offers Roman rites at 9 a.m. and Byzantine rites at noon every Sunday. Bringing together two rites from the Catholic community is what brought one of the priests, Father Andreas Bonenberger, to the church last year. Bonenberger appreciates that “two worlds” – Western and Eastern Catholics – can worship under the same roof. According to Bonenberger, approximately 250 to 300 people regularly attend Mass on Sundays.

Photo by Jenn LeBlanc • jkerriga@mscd.edu St. Cajetan’s rises above the campus overlooking the common area, while UCD student Beth Burton sits in a shaded spot to write early Monday morning.

St. Elizabeth’s is also open Monday through Friday.

“The church is open to everyone,” Bonenberger said. “People come from downtown and we hope students will be interested. They are very welcome.”

Since its residence is a part of the Auraria Campus, those affiliated with the parish are anxious to open its doors to students.

“The problem was, up until now, in the evening there were no students here anymore. And that’s a very new situation now with the new (student) housing,” Andreas said. “So that’s why we are very interested this year to reactivate our outreach program, because before, the situation was that students would come here in the morning and then they left in the afternoon.”

Catholic or not, one can easily appreciate the beauty and history St. Elizabeth’s brings to the campus.

St. Cajetan’s
Its peach stuccoed Spanish colonial façade, stained-glass windows, massive entryway and unique architecture make St. Cajetan’s hard to miss. In the 1920s, Hispanics moved to the Auraria neighborhood in large numbers but found discrimination from other Catholic churches in the neighborhood, according to St. Cajetan’s website. Hispanic Catholics decided to build their own place of worship. The community’s women petitioned for their own church to practice Catholicism and to provide a haven for the Theatine Fathers, a religious order of southwestern America.

In 1922, the self-made millionaire John K. Mullen donated his old home at Auraria to the Hispanic community as a new place of worship. The building was named after St. Cajetan of Vicenza, an Italian saint who founded the Theatines in 1524 and was known for his virtuous practices of prayer and charity.

Eager for a bigger church, the parish borrowed money to build a new Spanish colonial church that seated 700.

St. Cajetan’s served as the social center for the Hispanic community. The St. Cajetan’s parish also opened a school, health clinic and credit union in Auraria.

In the 1970s, rumors of the demolition of Auraria to build a new university in its place spread quickly among residents of the Auraria neighborhood. Some vigorously protested the university, while others surrendered to the changing times.

Auraria Campus quickly replaced the school, credit union and health clinic. Preservationists and parishioners from the church worked hard to keep St. Cajetan’s standing.

St. Cajetan’s is now the largest meeting hall on campus and also houses theater productions and other campus events. The church also offers five services every Sunday. There is also a computer lab within the church and, strangely enough, a dinosaur tracks museum in the basement.

The church is the only remaining building from the pre-campus Hispanic neighborhood, and is still recognized and celebrated by Hispanics in the Denver community as a monument to Hispanic culture, religion and history.

Emmanuel Gallery
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturday- 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
For more information: http://www.emmanuelgallery.org/history.html

St. Cajetan’s
To schedule an event or find out about upcoming events at St. Cajetan’s, contact the Tivoli Student Union: 303-556-6330
St. Cajetan’s Sunday Mass schedule:
7:30 a.m., 9 a.m and noon in Spanish, 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. in English
Historical information at: http://www.archden.org/noel/07047.htm

St. Elizabeth’s
Mass Schedule:
Sundays Mass at 9 a.m.
Divine Liturgy 12 p.m.
Weekdays: Mass/Communion Service 12 p.m.
For more information: http://www.stelizofhungary.org/