It’s funny how this historic research works sometimes . . .
As a real estate agent who specializes in selling historic properties, a significant part of my work is to dig into historic research, indexing, documenting, processing, and sharing much of what I learn along the way. It makes it so that I have a supreme knowledge of the product I am selling, and it also helps me to connect the dots about the history of the mid-century and modern homes and neighborhoods in Denver, and builds my credibility as a knowledge resource to the community.
While much of this research is planned - a large portion is not . . . rather, it is information that I discover on the periphery of what I am really looking for that turns out to be significant, and this is one of those examples!
While looking into a home that I showed to a client in Denver’s Athmar Park neighborhood, I decided that I wanted to look into its history, because architecturally, the home I showed, and those around it, have an uncanny resemblance to homes designed by architect Norton Polivnick in both Westminster’s Sunset Lanes, and nearby Harvey Park. In trying to figure out who might have developed these homes, I pulled the old Master Property Record cards for the block from the Denver Public Library’s Digital Collection, and as I was looking carefully at them, I realized that I knew one of the names on the cards . . . prominent Denver architect Charles Gordon Lee.
On closer inspection (and using a couple of other methods to double-confirm what I was seeing), I realized that the home next door to the one I had shown had been originally owned by Lee! I was able to piece together that he and his wife owned the home from when it was built in 1952 until 1961, at which time they moved to Windermere Street in Littleton.
Charles Gordon Lee was a notable architect for his body of work in Colorado (including the last project of his career, the Rocky Mountain National Park headquarters and visitor center at Beaver Meadows, (for which he was not the design architect, but was the local representative for Taliesin Associated Architects on the project) before his untimely death at the age of 48 in 1966), both independently, and while working for another notable Denver architect, G. Meredith Musick, but also because he was trained by Frank Lloyd Wright.
And . . . I know, real estate agents are notorious for saying that exact line about the architect of whatever the mid-century modern home they are trying to sell, whether or not they actually know it to be true, or if they even know the name of the architect . . . FLW sells homes, I guess. But in this case, it really is true! Lee was trained at Taliesin East and Taliesin West, and while at Taliesin West, he studied directly under the man himself.
While we might expect a student of Wright to be living in a masterpiece, the fact of the matter is, this was early in Lee’s career - architecture, regardless of your talent and experience, is a tough business, and it’s not surprising to see a great architect living in such a modest home at the start. But there may also be more to the story . . . more on that after I can get access to Charles Gordon Lee’s archives when the Central Denver Public Library re-opens in November. Stay tuned!