Audio By Carbonatix
Lower downtown has changed a lot over the past three decades — and photographer Kim Allen, a Denver native, has been there to document it all. He was shooting photographs of Denver’s decrepit viaducts and gritty warehouses before the area was nicknamed LoDo, before it became an official historic district in 1988, before Coors Field opened in 1995 — and certainly long before this summer’s reveal of the Union Station renovation. So Denver Retrospective 1985-1995: Photographs by Kim Allen, which opens today at the Von Tornow Gallery, is not just a retrospective of Allen’s work, but a retrospective of the neighborhood itself, in the days before development changed the face of LoDo.
“It was kind of a small town,” he remembers. “There was this hip little bohemian grouping of artists. It was a cool place. I miss it.”
But you can see it in this stunning collection of forty photographs, all of them of Denver, most of them of LoDo. Allen was there to capture the start of the Wynkoop Brewing Company (his photo of the founders, including John Hickenlooper, has become an iconic image), the postal trucks outside the old Terminal Annex, the original Terminal Bar that got its name from both the post office and the then-far-from-chic train station. And even as Allen misses some of the people and places we’ve lost, he says, “I’m very proud of a lot of the hard work. People have made it a great city.”
Celebrate that city at the show, which runs through September 27 at the gallery, 1255 Delaware Street; an opening reception will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on Friday, September 12. For more information, go to vontornowgallery.com.
Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Sept. 9. Continues through Sept. 27, 2014
