LoDo Reverie

I remember lower downtown before it was LoDo, dressed in red brick and laced together by crumbling viaducts that rose up between building faces to leave the sidewalks in looming shadow. Back then (and then wasn’t really so long ago — perhaps twenty years past), those now teeming streets were pure skid row but for a few bars and warehouses, some working and others boarded up, and pretty much anyone who lived down there was a pioneer…or homeless. At the time, photographer Kim Allen was lugging his 35mm camera through the mean streets, shooting pictures in places no one else thought to go: in railroad yards and abandoned buildings, under viaducts and on the Central Platte Valley flats. As Allen writes on his website, “It was the developers, hobos, pigeons and me.”

A selection of those photos, Chronicles of Lower Downtown 1983-1991, are currently on display at RedShift Framing and Gallery, 2266 Broadway.

“I never thought in my lifetime that I’d ever see that area grow like it has,” Allen says of present-day LoDo. Though he misses the freedom he had to work amid the old squalor, he doesn’t mind change and is glad some of the old character of the area has been retained through renovation. “That’s what a city’s all about,” he notes.

Chronicles continues through June 15; for information, call 303-293-2991. For more about Allen, go to www.denverphotoarchives.com.

May 22-June 15, 2009