At 375 feet tall, the Daniels and Fisher Tower was a perfect match for William Cooke Daniels’s ego—and Denver’s ambition. At the time of its completion in 1910, it was the third-highest building in the nation, topped only by two Manhattan skyscrapers. Its design borrowed from Venice’s famous Campanile di San Marco, while the sixteen-foot-high clock—alleged to be the largest in the world—used the same mechanism that powered London’s Big Ben. The symbolism could not be missed: Denver, the tower declared, is ready to rise into the ranks of the world’s great cities.

Nothing less than that would satisfy Daniels, whose five-story department store stood adjacent to the tower. He conceived of the structure as a way to raise his business’s (and his city’s) national profile. Standing hundreds of feet above the surrounding rooftops, the tower was visible from all over Denver. Visitors came from across the country, often shopping the Daniels store before riding up to the tower’s observation deck. From that perch, they could see 200 miles in every direction and gaze at the Rocky Mountains from a sensational new perspective. A few floors below, people of business and high society enjoyed a similar view from the gourmet dining room. The building even had an appropriately scaled doorman: seven-foot, five-inch-tall Carl Sandell.

The Daniels and Fisher department store was razed during an urban renewal project in the 1970s. The tower nearly met the same fate, but the public outcry led Denver officials to reconsider. Renovated in the late 1970s, it reopened in 1981 as an office building and tourist attraction. As an early example of successful historic preservation, the tower did what it has always done best:
It expanded the view and broadened the horizon, helping people see the vast potential for saving Colorado’s historic landmarks.