Auraria

Why Auraria doesn’t have a listings page

Auraria is Denver’s oldest neighborhood. It was founded in 1858 by miners working the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, named after a gold-mining town in Georgia, and grew into a real mixed-use community of mills, breweries, warehouses and working-class housing. The population shifted over the decades from Central and Eastern European immigrants to a predominantly Hispanic community by the 1920s, with St. Cajetan’s Catholic Church, built in 1926, serving as its cultural and spiritual center.

A devastating flood in 1965 gave the city an opening to pursue urban renewal, and despite organized resistance led by Father Pete Garcia through the Auraria Residents’ Organization, a 1969 bond election passed at 52 percent and authorized clearing the neighborhood for educational use. Residents were relocated by 1972, and the Auraria Higher Education Center opened in 1976.

Today Auraria is not a residential neighborhood. It’s a shared campus for the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver, with no homes for sale and no reason for a listings page here. The campus does preserve real pieces of the original neighborhood, including the Tivoli Brewery (now a student center), several historic churches, and the thirteen restored Victorian homes of Ninth Street Historic Park. Golda Meir’s former Denver residence was even relocated onto campus as a small museum.

If you’re interested in what Auraria used to be, the closest residential neighborhoods today are Lincoln Park and the Golden Triangle, both a short walk east.