Three colleges share one campus - and lend Denver its downtown festival ground. The Auraria Campus, spread across 150 acres at the southwest edge of downtown, serves the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and CU Denver, and doubles as one of the city's busiest outdoor event venues: the Tivoli Quad at 1000 Larimer Street, the lawn beside the landmark Tivoli Student Union brewery building, hosts festival-scale concerts, food-and-wine festivals and community events.....

Denver's big room opened with Celine Dion and has barely gone dark since. Ball Arena at 1000 Chopper Circle - the Pepsi Center until 2020 - opened on 1 October 1999 with a sold-out Dion concert dedicated to the Columbine community, the finish line of a 180-million-dollar, privately funded build by HOK Sport in the Central Platte Valley beside Speer Boulevard and I-25. The five-level, 675,000-square-foot arena is home to three franchises - the NBA's Denver Nuggets, NHL's Colorado Avalanche and N.....

Denver hid a 5,000-seat theatre inside its convention center. The Bellco Theatre at 700 14th Street occupies the street level of the Colorado Convention Center, opened with the building's 2004 expansion and since named by Pollstar among the top 200 theatre venues worldwide - a fixed-seat house whose 5,005 capacity makes it the city's largest true theatre, purpose-built for concerts, comedy, general sessions, lectures and family spectaculars with acoustics engineered for amplified performance. F.....

Denver's first purpose-built movie house became its favourite small stage. The Bluebird Theater at 3317 East Colfax Avenue opened on 11 September 1915 as the Thompson Theater, designed by Harry W. J. Edbrooke for grocer-druggist John Thompson as the city's first theater built specifically for motion pictures - a Renaissance Revival neighbourhood house with a terraced floor, a balcony and an ornate proscenium of dancing cherubs. Pharmacist Harry Huffman bought it in 1921 and gave it the Bluebird .....

A cornerstone of Denver's East Colfax Avenue, the Bluebird Theater is a historic venue that has reinvented itself many times since first opening in 1913. Built as an early cinema and later operating under various guises, the building was lovingly restored in the 1990s and reborn as one of the city's most beloved small music venues, retaining its vintage marquee and intimate character while becoming a fixture of the local live scene. The room is prized for its intimacy and atmosphere. With a cap.....

America's first symphony hall in the round put every seat within 85 feet of the orchestra. Boettcher Concert Hall opened in 1978 as the home of the Denver Symphony Orchestra - today's Colorado Symphony - and the first major American concert room to wrap the audience entirely around the stage, a design by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates with acoustician Christopher Jaffe that placed 80 percent of its seats within 65 feet of the platform. Named for Colorado philanthropist Claude Boettcher and an.....

The Harlem of the West still has a working stage, and it has been booked solid since 2003. Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom at 2637 Welton Street occupies the old Casino Cabaret in Denver's Five Points neighbourhood, a room whose history reaches back to the mid-1920s and whose golden age paralleled the Cotton Club: through the 1930s, 40s and 50s, when segregation made Five Points the thriving heart of Denver's African American community, the Casino was a West Coast jazz epicentre where Duke Ellin.....

The second stage at Cervantes' is a headline room in its own right. Cervantes' Other Side at 2637 Welton Street is the companion hall to Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver's Five Points neighbourhood, the two rooms sharing the historic Casino Cabaret building whose jazz-age stage hosted Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman in the decades when Welton Street was the Harlem of the West, and later James Brown, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Ike and Tina Turner as the Casino's legend grew.....

A mainstay of Denver's nightlife, Club Vinyl is a multi-level nightclub on Broadway near the city's Golden Triangle and Capitol Hill districts. Housed in a converted historic mansion, the club spreads across several floors and a rooftop, offering a sprawling, maze-like layout of dance floors, bars and lounges that has made it one of the largest and most popular dance-music destinations in the city. The venue is built around electronic dance music, with a powerful sound system and lighting rig a.....

Roseanne Barr walked down these basement stairs an unknown Denver housewife and came back up a comedian. Comedy Works Downtown at 1226 15th Street operates where it began in September 1981, in the basement of the Granite Building just off the corner of 15th and Larimer in Larimer Square, Denver's oldest block. Founders George McKelvey - the godfather of Denver comedy - Doug Olson and Edd Nichols renamed their Comedy Shoppe when they moved it into the space, creating the first Denver nightclub de.....