The man who designed the Denver Masonic Temple was a Mason himself. Frank E. Edbrooke — the architect who gave Denver the Brown Palace Hotel, the Oxford Hotel, and more than seventy buildings that shaped the city's character — drew the plans for 1614 Welton Street as a member of the fraternity he was building for. When the Masons of Colorado decided in the late 1880s that their order deserved a temple commensurate with their standing in one of the West's fastest-growing cities, they hired the best architect in Denver. He happened to be one of their own.
The Architect
Edbrooke arrived in Denver in 1879 to supervise construction of the Tabor Block at 16th and Larimer Streets — a commission arranged through his brother Willoughby, who had designed the building. He liked what he found. Denver in 1879 was a city with ambitions that outran its skyline, and a capable architect with a serious practice could build both at once. Edbrooke stayed.
Within a decade, F.E. Edbrooke & Company was the largest architectural firm in Colorado. He was a founding member of the Colorado chapter of the American Institute of Architects, a Civil War veteran who had ridden with the 12th Illinois Cavalry, and a man who wrote in his 1919 autobiography that his guiding principle had always been "truth and honesty in all things." He designed hotels and churches, schools and banks, civic buildings and private residences. His most celebrated work, the Brown Palace Hotel, completed in 1892, remains one of the finest buildings in the American West. He designed his own mausoleum at Fairmount Cemetery, where he is buried.
He was also a Mason. When the Grand Lodge of Colorado broke ground for its new temple, Edbrooke was the natural choice — and a motivated one.
The Building
The cornerstone was laid by the Grand Lodge of Colorado in April 1889. The stone Edbrooke chose was red-orange Manitou sandstone, quarried from Colorado's own mountains, with a base of Pikes Peak granite. The result was a five-story Richardsonian Romanesque landmark: corner towers connected by a central arcade, and a Welton Street entry through a 15-foot-wide elaborately carved arch with engaged columns. It did not ask to be noticed. It was simply impossible to ignore.
On St. John's Day — June 24, 1890 — approximately a thousand Masons from lodges and bodies across Colorado abandoned their meeting at City Hall and paraded to the completed temple on Welton Street. The first formal lodge meeting was held there on June 30, 1890. The building would serve as the center of Colorado Masonic life for generations.
The National Register of Historic Places recognized the temple in November 1977 — one of the few surviving examples in downtown Denver of rockfaced Manitou sandstone construction, and a monument to what the Craft built when Denver was still becoming itself.
The Fire
On the evening of Saturday, March 3, 1984, the first alarm came in at 7:02 p.m. By 8:30, a four-alarm fire was consuming the building's interior. More than a hundred Denver firefighters responded; 20 pieces of equipment were deployed. At one point the fire threatened to jump to the adjacent Kittredge Building. Firefighters held it back by training their hoses on the Kittredge's walls. The temple the Masons had built — known around Denver as "The Old Lady on Welton Street" — was gutted. The interior was destroyed. When the fire was out, only the stone exterior walls remained.
The fire was arson. Walter Garcia, owner of Jerry Breen Florists, a ground-floor tenant, was later charged with and convicted of first-degree arson. The fire had been set with gasoline in the rear of his shop. He received a 16-year sentence.
The lodges that called the temple home had to find other quarters while the damage was assessed and plans were made. What came next was a decision that said something about the men who had to make it.
The Restoration
The architects commissioned for the 1985 restoration — C.W. Fentress and Associates — faced a practical problem: the fire had badly damaged the stone on the building's lower floors. The material would have to be replaced. Rather than accept a substitute or approximate the original, they went back to the source. New stone was quarried from the same Manitou sandstone formation Edbrooke had used in 1889, then shaped to match what he had specified. A steel frame was erected inside the surviving exterior walls, reinforcing them from within. The building that stood when the work was finished looked, on the outside, as it had always looked — because the people responsible for it insisted that it should.
The lodges returned. The temple has continued operating ever since.
Why This Building Matters
Centennial Lodge No. 84 meets in a building that has now stood for well over a century, survived a fire that gutted it to the walls, and been restored by a community that cared enough to use the original stone. It was designed by a Mason who understood what he was building. It was opened with a parade of a thousand brothers on the feast day of St. John. When it burned, no one walked away from it.
A lodge room carries the weight of every meeting that has been held in it. This one has been accumulating that weight since 1890. The men of Centennial Lodge No. 84 do not often pause to consider this on a Thursday evening. But the room considers it for them.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
History Colorado, Masonic Temple Building listing — historycolorado.org
Denver Lodge No. 5 A.F. & A.M., Lodge History — denver5.org/history
SAH Archipedia, Masonic Temple, Denver — sah-archipedia.org
Colorado Encyclopedia, Frank E. Edbrooke — coloradoencyclopedia.org
Denver Consistory Building Endowment Fund, Politics and the Denver Economy — denverconsistorybuildingendowmentfund.org
Westerns Network, Masonic Temple Fire — westerns.net/masonic-temple-fire
Denver Public Library Special Collections, Masonic Temple Building — history.denverlibrary.org