When the University of Denver's basketball teams outgrew the atmosphere of their 7,000-seat arena, they moved into the smaller gym next door - on purpose. Hamilton Gymnasium, inside the Ritchie Center for Sports and Wellness at 2240 East Buchtel Boulevard on the DU campus, is the roughly 2,000-seat home of Pioneers volleyball and both basketball programs, prized precisely for the noise a compact room generates. The gym is part of the Ritchie Center, the gold-spired athletics cathedral completed.....

Vampire Weekend played here to 50 people, and the club printed its worst one-star Yelp review on a T-shirt. The Hi-Dive, at 7 South Broadway in Denver's Baker neighbourhood, is the city's definitive independent rock dive: a 260-capacity musician-owned club that has anchored the South Broadway strip since November 2003. The little blue building had music in it long before the name: as Seven South it hosted Mazzy Star, Neutral Milk Hotel and 311 through the 1990s, then spent two years as Deadhead.....

When 3 Kings Tavern died in the first pandemic summer, two owners of the Oriental Theater signed a lease within weeks - Denver's South Broadway strip was not going to lose the room. HQ, at 60 South Broadway in the Baker neighbourhood, opened in August 2020 in the former 3 Kings space and has since stacked up Westword Best of Denver awards, from Best New Club to Best Metal Venue. The inheritance mattered: 3 Kings Tavern spent 14 years as a pillar of Denver rock, and Scott Happel and Peter Ore - .....

Fifty free concerts a year is the rent: the city provided the park land, a national foundation seeded the build, and the deal is that most of the summer costs nothing. Levitt Pavilion Denver, at 1380 West Florida Avenue in Ruby Hill Park, opened in July 2017 as one of the Levitt Foundation's permanent outdoor venues - and now runs one of the biggest free concert series in the American West. The model is national but the execution is Denver's: the Mortimer and Mimi Levitt Foundation partners wit.....

The arena opened one month before the Pepsi Center - and its hockey program has out-championed every NHL team in the same city. Magness Arena, the centerpiece of the University of Denver's Ritchie Center at 2240 Buchtel Boulevard, opened on 15 September 1999 and is home ice for one of college hockey's dynasties. The building replaced a rink with history: the old University of Denver Arena - razed in 1997 - had carried the program's early national titles, and the 84-million-dollar, 440,000-squar.....

The renovation tore the theatre down to the ground and rebuilt it - and still kept every seat within thirteen rows of the stage. The Marvin and Judi Wolf Theatre, inside the Helen G. Bonfils Theatre Complex at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts on Speer Boulevard, is the flagship thrust stage of the largest non-profit theatre organization in the American West. The house opened with the complex: the Bonfils - called a triumph of architecture by the New York Times - launched the Denver Cen.....

A bank wanted to knock it down for a parking lot - the neighbourhood formed the Friends of the Mayan and won. The Mayan Theatre, at 110 Broadway on Denver's South Broadway strip, opened on 20 November 1930 and survives as one of only three theatres in the United States still standing in the Art Deco Mayan Revival style. The architecture is the attraction: Denver architect Montana Fallis dressed the house in pre-Columbian fantasy - jaguars, masks, polychrome terra cotta flora and a monumental "c.....

The air conditioning is buried underground and fed through hundreds of floor vents so slowly it makes no sound - acoustics obsessive enough that the Rocky Mountain News credited the hall with a quality virtually unknown in Denver: intimacy. The June Swaner Gates Concert Hall anchors the Robert and Judi Newman Center for the Performing Arts at 2344 East Iliff Avenue, on the University of Denver campus. The opening was an event: the 70-million-dollar Newman Center debuted on 18 April 2003 with a .....

When it opened it was the only stadium in America built solely for lacrosse. Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium, on the University of Denver campus beside the Ritchie Center, was formally dedicated on 30 April 2005 with an overtime win over Air Force - and the program it houses went on to win a national championship a decade later. The name honours a believer: Peter Barton, founding president of Liberty Media and an adjunct professor at DU's business school, coached his children in lacrosse and shar.....

Nathaniel Rateliff liked the bar enough to buy it. The Skylark Lounge at 140 South Broadway in Denver's Baker neighbourhood traces to 1943, when it opened a block north at 58 South Broadway as a wartime workers' bar named for a Hoagy Carmichael song - and it has anchored South Broadway's drinking life across eight decades since. Scott Heron bought the failing dive for about 82,000 dollars in 1998, secured its first cabaret licence, and remade it as an Americana, honky-tonk and rockabilly joint .....