A couple of months ago I took short trips to Phoenix and Denver for a change of scenery, to indulge in culture, and to see the rebranding of Sheraton hotels.  Denver is a surprisingly interesting city, and we stayed in the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, which is very well located near the main street of Denver, 16^th Street, with its free streetcar, and near the Capitol with its famous “mile-high” status.  Denver was founded as part of the gold rush, the one that occurred at the base of the Rocky Mountains.  Historian Tom Noel has said, “Denver is such an unlikely place for a city to be. It began as a little town in the middle of nowhere, with no obvious reason to be there.”  And yet it grew and thrived, building a rail connector to the Transcontinental Railroad, from Denver to Cheyenne, when that passed them by.

Today Denver is a bustling city by day, and pretty quiet by night, though one evening we passed a long row of people lined up for a concert on our way to a steak house that was packed to the gills. That steakhouse was the Guard and Grace, and the food was generous and superb.  The dishes had that extra touch that makes a meal memorable, such as the asparagus topped with crabmeat—scrumptious.

Downtown Denver is relatively compact, and you can cover a lot in a walking tour, which I took from the steps of the Capitol one morning at 10 a.m. Through Denver Walking Tours, we had an excellent guide; a graduate student who gave just the right amount of information as we walked around.  She introduced us to the Capitol, the State Legislature, the Denver Art Museum, the US Mint—who knew there was a mint in Denver—and we made it all the way to Union Station, which has become an eatery hub.

As an art person, I found the name-brand architecture in Denver quite fascinating.  In the 1960s, I. M. Pei designed a downtown complex, which unfortunately was mostly torn down.  With the exception of the Sheraton Tower, across the street from my half of the hotel, with its quite interesting façade of grids—varied just enough to relieve monotony and create interest. Also, in the 1980s, Pei and the landscape architect company of Hanna/Olin designed the 16^th Street Mall corridor, and you can still see the repeat diamond pattern in the pavement, referring either to a Navajo rug or a diamondback rattlesnake.  The Regional Transportation District says it spends over a million dollars a year to clean and maintain those pavers along 1.2 mile path.

Not far away is the Denver Art Museum, the only building designed by Gio Ponti in the US.  Recently, it completed a major renovation, including a rehanging of the collection. I’ve always thought the building rather a fortress, but this time I appreciated how the narrow windows help protect the art, as well as afford wonderful views onto the surrounding landscape. The art is well divided on the seven levels, and I was impressed with the retelling of Latin American Art/Art of the Ancient Americans on Level 4 and Indigenous Arts of North America on Level 3. There was also an excellent temporary exhibition for those who love painting, “Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France” (through March 13, 2022). Yes, our well-known American-abroad artists, such as James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, are here, but the exhibition also provides some needed focus on the American women who were part of that moment—not only Mary Cassatt, but Elizabeth Nourse and Cecilia Beaux.

The Sheraton is having a little facelift. The revamp of the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown hotel feels very on target, dovetailing with the way we work now, on the run and in borrowed spaces. The expansive lobby is also the coffee shop (called &More) and workstation for people catching up on their laptops or having meetings  I saw several meetings when I passed through—sometimes at an elevated table, sometimes in a cluster of armchairs. Then at the end of the day people were gathered for drinks and watching sports on a large monitor. Though not as spacious, the lobby of the Denver Sheraton has also been similarly updated.