Denver
— — a city exactly one mile up.
Not only on a wall.
“The mile-high city, laid out where Cherry Creek runs into the South Platte. The thirteenth step of the State Capitol sits at 5,280 feet, and the front range fills the western horizon on clear mornings. Union Station still sends trains under its 1914 arched roof. The light here is thinner than people expect, and it carries a long way.
Denver, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Denver sits on the High Plains at the eastern foot of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte River. The settlement was founded in November 1858 during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush and was named for James W. Denver, then governor of the Kansas Territory. Colorado entered the Union in 1876 and Denver became state capital five years later. The city's official elevation is 5,280 feet — exactly one mile — marked by a brass cap on the thirteenth step of the State Capitol.
At a mile up, the atmospheric pressure runs about 17 percent lower than at sea level, which is why baseballs travel further at Coors Field and visitors notice the climb up a single flight of stairs. The semi-arid climate yields long sunny stretches; the National Weather Service records around 245 sunny days a year, fewer than the often-cited 300 but enough to keep the light reliably clean. Winter brings dry Chinook winds off the Rockies that can lift afternoon temperatures by twenty degrees in an hour.
Union Station, opened in 1881 and rebuilt in its current Beaux-Arts form in 1914, was reopened in 2014 as the centrepiece of a transit-and-hotel district; the great hall still serves as a ticketing and waiting room. Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 24 kilometres west in Morrison, holds 9,525 seats inside two 300-foot sandstone monoliths and has run a concert series since 1941. The Denver Art Museum's Frederic C. Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2006, anchors the Golden Triangle civic district.