This week the Denver City Council unanimously approved a small alley house on Tennyson Street in Northwest Denver as a Denver individual landmark. Historic Berkeley Regis, the neighborhood's nonprofit historic preservation group, worked with owner daphne salone in an effort to recognize the significance of the dwelling. The 1909 Currie/Dryer Cottage is associated with the early residential and commercial development of Tennyson Street and the surrounding Berkeley neighborhood following the local arrival of streetcars in 1888 and the area’s 1902 annexation to Denver. The dwelling represents the alley house architectural type, generally defined in the Berkeley neighborhood as unpretentious, small, frame, one-story dwellings standing behind or adjacent to the owner’s larger house and set farther back from the street. The houses typically had a gabled roof and a rectangular plan.
The cottage provided a home for the Curries, the original owners, while they erected the larger brick bungalow closer to the public street. They then rented out the cottage, whose tenants included immigrants, small families, skilled and unskilled laborers, widows, and older people. The building now constitutes a rare resource type. Alley houses were once numerous in the Berkeley neighborhood, but only 16 percent of those present in 1930 are still standing in the eighteen blocks surrounding the Tennyson Street dwelling. The Tennyson Street corridor experienced massive change and loss of historic residential fabric since 2000. Westword covered the designation effort in three articles in 2023-24:
https://www.westword.com/news/denver-holdout-house-now-protected-as-historic-landmark-22761887
The cottage provided a home for the Curries, the original owners, while they erected the larger brick bungalow closer to the public street. They then rented out the cottage, whose tenants included immigrants, small families, skilled and unskilled laborers, widows, and older people. The building now constitutes a rare resource type. Alley houses were once numerous in the Berkeley neighborhood, but only 16 percent of those present in 1930 are still standing in the eighteen blocks surrounding the Tennyson Street dwelling. The Tennyson Street corridor experienced massive change and loss of historic residential fabric since 2000. Westword covered the designation effort in three articles in 2023-24:
https://www.westword.com/news/denver-holdout-house-now-protected-as-historic-landmark-22761887
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