Dana Crawford, a developer and preservationist who single-handedly did more than anyone to save Denver’s historic architecture, died Thursday night at age 93.
Long before retro was cool and historic preservation hip, Crawford fought the prevailing tide that favored destroying older brick buildings to make room for modern skyscrapers of glass and steel. While raising four boys and juggling a career, her earliest and signature save was Larimer Square, which in the mid-1960s was considered a scruffy row of rowdy bars best trimmed with a bulldozer.
It would be one of many restorations and redemptions she would tally up over the years.
“Dana Crawford was one of Denver’s most important visionaries. But she was a visionary who had more than a vision — she had the ability to implement her vision,” said former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, who worked with Crawford throughout his 12 years in office.
Her ability to see the value in buildings that others considered worth demolishing and her business savvy in finding economic uses for those buildings to ensure their long-term survival is what set her apart, he said.
“I learned a lot from her about building preservation and what makes for a great place that people want to come to. Her fingerprints are all over the city and we are better off for it,” said Walter Isenberg, CEO of Sage Hospitality and a close friend and business associate of Crawford’s.
She saw what could be achieved by maintaining beautiful architecture, long before others did, and in the process saved a legacy for the city, he said.
Her work with Larimer Square broadened into the concept of Lower Downtown or LoDo, helping the area avoid the wrecking balls that wiped out so many blocks further east. In a newer city that lacked many historic buildings to begin with, her passion and foresight came at a critical time, Webb said.
Across her career, Crawford redeveloped more than 800,000 square feet of historic properties in Denver, including the Oxford Hotel, Acme Lofts, Flour Mill Lofts, Edbrooke Lofts and Cooper Flats Condominiums, according to Historic Denver, a group she helped found.
“From saving Larimer Square to redeveloping Union Station, Dana shaped the Denver we know today,” Historic Denver said in a statement. “It’s no understatement to say that without Dana Crawford’s influence and drive to reimagine and reuse historic buildings, our city would be a very different place.”
Her persuasive charisma won others to the cause of historic preservation and the movement gained momentum to the point that it is now taken for granted that things could have been any different. Webb laments that those who have relocated to Denver over the years likely have no clue about the woman responsible for the good times they have enjoyed in Larimer Square and the wider LoDo area.
She left them a legacy, even if they don’t comprehend hers, he said.
As a member of the Union Station Alliance, Crawford helped guide the $54 million renovation of Denver Union Station, which reopened in 2014. The redesign included updates to the Great Hall, rebranded as Denver’s living room, and The Crawford Hotel, named in her honor.
Her renovation of the Pride of the Rockies Flour Mill, built in 1906, added residential momentum to the redevelopment of the Central Platte Valley, a former railyard where Elitch Gardens had landed in the mid-90s. The Webb administration had made the area a priority by establishing the South Platte River Commission to build parks and pathways in the area, but the area needed more than an amusement park.
Webb recalled that the Denver Fire Department refused to allow the converted Flour Mill Lofts to open because the traffic circle in front was too tight for the turning radius of a fire truck. Crawford called him up and said “Wellington, I don’t know, all they have to do is back the (expletive) truck up.”
Webb said he laughed because he knew she was right. He called the fire chief with her proposed solution and the building obtained its permit and opened.
“That was Dana from the standpoint of taking what some people viewed as problematic problems and coming up with very practical answers,” he said.
Not one to shuffle off into a quiet retirement, she shifted her focus later in life to Trinidad, where she helped restore the historic Toltec Hotel in 2006 and the Fox Theater in 2018, along with several other architecturally significant buildings in the city’s historic commercial district — El Corazon de Trinidad.
Crawford’s efforts extended beyond Colorado. She had a guiding hand in preserving neglected buildings, main streets and neighborhoods in more than 50 communities nationwide. Her work resulted in her receiving the Louise duPont Crownshield Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Born Dana Hudkins in Salina, Kan., Crawford graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in English Literature, not the most promising launching pad for a future urban developer.
Visits to her mother’s family in Ohio, however, had sparked an interest in old buildings and the history behind them. That passion only grew when she attended graduate school in Boston, a city with a rich tapestry of historic buildings and walkable neighborhoods, she said in an interview for the Rocky Mountain PBS documentary Colorado Experience.
After finishing school, she moved from Boston to Denver to be near friends and started working in public relations, eventually meeting geologist John Crawford, her future husband. The couple had four boys.
Denver, like many cities in the post-war period, struggled with what to do with its downtown, which had fallen out of favor as growth shifted to the faster-growing suburbs with their single-family homes and shopping malls. Voters agreed to create the Denver Urban Renewal Authority and tax themselves to tear down 30 blocks of existing buildings in the hopes that developers would fill the blank slates with modern structures.
While skyscrapers did rise up in many blocks, the city was also left with numerous empty spaces and sprawling parking lots, not to mention an irreversible loss of its built history. Crawford, opposed to what she considered short-sighted concepts of progress, scoured the city looking for areas that could be saved and serve as gathering places for multiple generations of Denverites.
As fate would have it, her car overheated and stranded her in the 1400 block of Larimer Street in the summer of 1964. Although full of dilapidated buildings and vagrants, Crawford realized she had found a place worth saving.
“I realized that everything that made the city started in the 1400 block, and it was slated to be removed,” she told Colorado Experience. “I distinctly remember thinking I talked about this a lot, now I have to do it.”
She would spend the next 22 years trying to stay ahead of DURA by quietly acquiring old buildings, restoring them, finding tenants and creating the retail and restaurant destination now known as Larimer Square. But it wasn’t easy. Bankers, not accustomed to backing a female developer, rejected her vision, forcing her to turn to her family and friends. City officials saw her as an opponent of modernization.
She would repeat the pattern when she acquired the historic Oxford Hotel, which had been operating as a flophouse, out of bankruptcy in 1986. Struggling to succeed as a hotelier, she partnered with Isenberg. The pair took the hotel into a second Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1989, which Crawford, ever the optimist, referred to as a Chapter 22, Isenberg said.
They created one of Denver’s premier boutique hotels, with its iconic Cruise Room, which draws younger patrons. That Oxford partnership would launch a decades-long collaboration and steer Sage Hospitality on a course of putting boutique hotels in historic buildings in cities nationwide.
Isenberg said Crawford was feted this July for her 93rd birthday and he arranged a meeting with actor Kevin Costner when he was staying at the Oxford Hotel. She was in good enough health to attend the New Year Eve’s celebration at Union Station. He visited with her one last time earlier this week before her passing.
“She is a great partner and a great friend and a friend of our family. I loved her,” Isenberg said.