DENVER – Brick-by-brick, workers are dismantling an old building near the expanding National Western Complex in Denver so it can be rebuilt 40 feet away.
The move is to make room for the widening of Brighton Boulevard and the redevelopment of the National Western Center.
“It will basically stay in the same location, just 40 feet back,” said Mark Rodman, History Colorado’s deputy state historic preservation officer. “The expense of moving that as a whole building was just beyond something that we were able to do. That’s how we came up with the alternative to deconstruct and to reconstruct.”
The commercial building at 4701 Brighton Blvd. was built in 1906 and played an important role in the development of North Denver’s Elyria Neighborhood.
“Originally, it served as a drug store and grocery store until about 1940,” Rodman said. “The second floor served as a place for people to get together. It was a place where they had celebrations – whether it was weddings or meetings for their fraternal groups. People feel like it was part of their history.”
Architectural features of the building were stored and documented before workers began to dismantle the building.
“We first did a laser scan of the entire building with millions of points of data to be able to reconstruct it in the future,” said Gretchen Hollrah, executive director of the mayor’s office of the National Western Center. “It allows us to create with 100 percent accuracy a scalable version of the building in the future.”
Hollrah said the project is the result of feedback from the neighborhood and a desire to make the National Western Center a welcoming place for the community.
“It will be a gateway for this neighborhood back into our historic campus,” Hollrah said.
The city will meet with neighborhood leaders to decide what will go into the building once it is reconstructed.
“We want it to be a really active and community-focused use,” Hollrah said.
Rodman said this method of dismantling and rebuilding a historic structure in Denver is used very rarely, though he did point out it was also used for the Ghost Building on the southwest corner of 18th and Stout.
