The $54,133 Question
Red Rocks: Where the Stones Remember
PART 1: Rocks, Rails, Ruin & the Titans of Red Rocks
Red Rocks has been bought, sold, developed, renamed and reinvented for more than a century. Its history is usually told as a fairly simple progression: John Brisben Walker developed the Garden of the Titans, the City and County of Denver acquired the property, and, with federal assistance through the WPA and CCC, Denver eventually built the Red Rocks Amphitheatre we know today.
There is just one problem with that story.
Where is the deed?
The commonly repeated story says that the City and County of Denver purchased Red Rocks from John Brisben Walker for $54,133.
I have spent years looking for the transaction.
I have examined the Jefferson County property records and assembled a file of deeds tracing Walker’s properties. I have searched Denver’s records as well. I have also examined records from John Ross v. The City and County of Denver, litigation involving property later associated with Red Rocks.
Yet I have not found a deed showing John Brisben Walker selling Red Rocks Park to the City and County of Denver for $54,133.
That doesn’t prove what happened.
It presents a question.
If Denver bought Red Rocks from Walker for $54,133, where is the record of the sale?
And there is another complication.
The property history intersects with John Ross and the Bear Creek Development Corporation, whose role in the story largely disappears from the familiar history of Red Rocks. The surviving litigation and property records deserve to be examined alongside the story that has been repeated for generations.
So rather than beginning with a conclusion, let’s begin with the paperwork.
Who owned Red Rocks?
Who sold it?
Who took it?
And what exactly did $54,133 buy?
Continued in Part 2 — The Missing Years…
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