In 2012, after more than two decades living abroad, I returned to the U.S. – specifically to Denver, Colorado – where I help direct coverage of the United States as a Reuters national affairs editor.
My husband was born and raised in the “Mile High City,” as Denver (which is perched 5,280 feet above sea level) is known, so I consider myself native-adjacent. I’m a city girl who enjoys the urban pleasures of my high-desert adopted hometown, and who bristles at visitors who see it as a place to pass through on the way to ski or hike in the Rocky Mountains.
Here’s my take on how to see the city, the local way:
Getting around: Public transit is one of those urban pleasures. I was bemused by a Denver Post headline last year proposing that it might be rude to ask visitors to take the Regional Transportation District’s A Line train into town from the airport 20 miles (32 km) east. What’s the downside to zipping past the highway traffic and having the opportunity to take in the distant mountain views as you cross the plains?
The A train will bring you to Denver’s Union Station, a grand granite Italian Romanesque structure completed in 1881 when the city was only 12 years old and the state was five. The station underwent an ambitious redevelopment a decade ago that has made it the transit and hospitality hub of the Lower Downtown neighborhood, known as LoDo.
The David Adjaye-designed Museum of Contemporary Art Denver near Union Station has a rooftop garden that my friend, landscape architect Karla Dakin, planted with mountain flora. It has views of LoDo’s Victorian warehouses and sleek 21st-century high-rises.
All that jazz: Among my favorite Denver performance spaces is Dazzle, a jazz club located at LoDo’s southwestern edge in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Dazzle’s intimate space is brightened with murals honoring some of Denver’s finest musicians, including the late Ron Miles, a composer, cornet player and bandleader. The murals also depict Charles Burrell, jazz and classical bassist, who in 1949 became the first African American to sign a full-time contract with a major American symphony when he joined what is now the Colorado Symphony – which has its concert hall in the municipal arts complex where Dazzle is located. You may spot Burrell, who turned 104 in October, in the audience at Dazzle, which was included in DownBeat’s 2025 Jazz Venue Guide to awesome listening rooms.
Indigenous history: You can walk to Dazzle from Union Station, or you can take a free shuttle bus that runs along the otherwise pedestrian-only 16th Street Mall, a mile-long promenade designed by I.M. Pei.
The mall ends at the edge of Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood, home to the Denver Art Museum. The museum has an impressive collection of work by contemporary Indigenous artists such as Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale last year. Kent Monkman’s “The Scream,” a monumental realist painting depicting the trauma of the residential school system, is worth a visit to Denver in itself.
The confluence of South Platte River and Cherry Creek, now called Confluence Park, is where members of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute and other communities gathered long before flecks of gold spotted in the waters brought people from all over the world rushing to what would become Denver. In the 1950s the U.S. government began a campaign to push Native Americans to leave reservations and settle in cities. Denver, near the reservations of the southwest and the plains, became a multiethnic Indigenous hub.
Cowboys – and cowgirls, too: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in business services, trade, education, hospitality and the mining industry drive the Denver area’s economy. But the city looks back fondly on its cowtown roots. Each new year in Denver kicks off with cowboys and cowgirls driving dozens of longhorn cattle from Union Station through downtown to launch the annual National Western Stock Show, which is a little like a state fair, but, well, national. With rodeos.
The National Western Complex in the north Denver neighborhood of Globeville is busiest during the two-week stock show in early January. Year-round, the complex is the home of a Colorado State University Denver campus known as Spur, where visitors can watch dog and cat surgeries and see the equestrian therapy center.
Where to eat: Denverites are celebrating the Welton Street Café’s reopening in the near-downtown Five Points neighborhood. This family-owned restaurant serving soul and Caribbean food is a gathering place for locals that first opened in Denver in the 1980s. It closed in 2022 post-pandemic, but recently reopened at a new site.
Most of Colorado was part of Mexico until 1848. I grew up in southern California and thought I knew Mexican food, but I was introduced to some specialties in Denver I hadn’t seen on many California menus. My favorite is pozole, a warming stew of hominy and pork or chicken. My favorite spot for pozole is La Morena in the suburb of Aurora, just east of Denver.
Aurora is also the place to go for a range of ethnic restaurants, among them Dân Dã, a Vietnamese place run by the second generation of a Denver restaurant family, and Tofu Story, a Korean restaurant whose only other outpost is in Queens, New York.
Colfax Avenue, an east-west thoroughfare connecting Denver and Aurora, is dotted with Ethiopian restaurants — Ethiopians fleeing war in East Africa have been settling in Colorado since the 1970s. I find it hard to pick a favorite among so many. I enjoy, as I tear off pieces of injera to scoop up fragrant lentil stew, looking out the window to people watch on Colfax.
I have worked and lived in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Sitting in a restaurant on the avenue affectionately known as the Fax, which is part of the transcontinental US-40 highway that runs from Atlantic City to San Francisco, makes me feel Denver is the center of the world.
DATA POINTS
Price of an ice cream cone: $4.95 at Sweet Sweetz Ice Cream & Desserts. For $5.71, get that scoop on a tender-crusted square of peach cobbler at this family-run, neighborhoody shop.
Price of a cup of coffee: $2.25 for 12 ounces at Prodigy, a nonprofit cafe that offers training and jobs to young people, near the 40th Ave. & Colorado A Line station.
Higher education: Auraria Campus, with about 38,000 students near downtown Denver, is a location shared by the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado Denver.
Great place to see a sunset: Cranmer Park, in Denver’s Hilltop neighborhood, with the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop.
New business coming to town: The National Women’s Soccer League has announced that Denver will be its 16th team, set to start competing in the 2026 season. (Donna Bryson/Reuters)
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