“This is our town,” Julie Davis declared to hundreds of revelers on the 30th floor of a vacant downtown Denver office building.
Most nights, the streets around the high-rise at 633 17th St. have been empty, save for a murder of crows painting the concrete with guano.
But on the last Friday in February, around 500 fashionable guests – artists, musicians, curators, city officials and more – walked like misfits through the empty corporate lobby, and took the ear-popping elevator ride to the 30th floor.
Two stories of gutted office space had been converted into a series of galleries dimly lit with colored lights. Solitary guests stood at windows, staring into adjacent office towers with floor after floor of illuminated emptiness.
They spent the evening gazing at geometric paintings that seemed to change as the colored lights shifted. Projections slowly unfolded on large screens in rooms that once rattled with keyboards.
And in one corner of the desiccated cubicle farm, Davis led her musical quartet, Bluebook, in a joyful set as the crowd danced into the night.
For weeks, Davis and her partner, Joseph Pope III, had been preparing this unlikely downtown arts venue — a half-century-old office tower that, like so many, was emptied out by the pandemic.
The building’s owner, developer Asher Luzzatto, lent the space to the couple. His charge: create something sublime in an underused space.
