Denver Apartment Reviews

Read Denver apartment reviews. Renters share their first hand experiences from living in apartments you want to know about. These apartment reviews help you choose wisely before you rent.

Denver Information

Before the great Colorado gold rush, the Rocky Mountains offered little to attract settlers, except "hairy bank notes," the beaver pelts prized by fur trappers, traders and fashionably hatted gentlemen in Eastern America and Europe. The gold rush changed that, as the rudely dispossessed Cheyenne and Arapaho soon discovered.

The Mile High City?s aggressive leadership, spearheaded by William N. Byers, founding editor of the Rocky Mountain News, and Territorial Governor John Evans, insisted that the Indians must go. After dispossessing the natives, Denverites built a network of railroads that made their town the banking, minting, supply and processing center not only for Colorado, but for neighboring states. Between 1870 when the first railroads arrived and 1890, Denver grew from 4,759 to 106,713. In a single generation, it became the second most populous city in the West, second only to San Francisco.

Although founded as the main supply town for Rocky Mountain mining camps, Denver also emerged as a hub for high plains agriculture. Denver?s breweries, bakeries, meat packing and other food-processing plants made it the regional agricultural center, as well as a manufacturing hub for farm and ranch equipment, barbed wire, windmills, seed, feed and harnesses.

The depression of 1893 and repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act abruptly ended Denver?s first boom. Civic leaders began promoting economic diversity?growing wheat and sugar beets, manufacturing, tourism and service industries. The Denver Livestock Exchange and National Western Stock Show confirmed the city?s role as the "cow town" of the Rockies. Denver began growing again after 1900, but at a slower rate. Stockyards, brickyards, canneries, flour mills, leather and rubber goods nourished the city. Of many Denver-area breweries, only Coors has survived, becoming the nation?s third largest sudsmaker.

Regional or national headquarters of many oil and gas firms in the Mile High City fueled much of Denver?s post-World War II growth and an eruption of 40- and 50-story high-rise buildings downtown, during the 1970s. Denver?s economic base has come to include skiing and tourism, electronics, computers, aviation and the nation?s largest telecommunications center. As the regional center of a vast mountain and plain hinterland, Denver boasts more federal employees than any city besides Washington, D. C. Since the 1940s, the large federal center, augmented by state and local government jobs, has somewhat stabilized the city?s boom-and-bust cycle.