Roadside Attraction: Cruise Room at Denver's Oxford Hotel

"No one goes there nowadays…it's too crowded."

                                                 ------------Yogi Berra

Mr. Berra, of Yankee Hall of Fame fame, was talking about a restaurant in NYC when uttered that famous line decades ago, but he might've said the same thing about the Cruise Room in Denver's Oxford Hotel today…

After a baseball game at nearby Coors Field on a mid-September Friday night,  you  could barely navigate from one end of the windowless,  noisy,  glowing room to the other.  Was it always this busy?  Not officially, anyway…

The solid and somewhat stolid Oxford, completed to a design by Denver architect  Frank Edbrooke in 1891, always had a bar.  During Prohibition, which began in 1920, there was no bar listed among the Oxford's features, but there was a secret speakeasy located where the Cruise Room is now (remember that lack of windows?) and it was accessed by secret panels and a subterranean tunnel. One can't be sure what the building inspectors would've said about the fire exit situation with those secret panels, but the business thrived.  One day after Prohibition ended, on December 6, 1933, the Cruise Room opened, complete with visible entry and exit doors, and an Art Deco interior design inspired by a bar on the Queen Mary and designed by architect Charles Jaka.  The long, narrow room has a plan shape allegedly inspired by a wine bottle…

Full-height bas-reliefs by Alley Hensen depict toasts of many nations; the last image below commemorates China with a stylized dragon.  A German-themed panel was taken down during World War II because one of the characters looked too much like Hitler.  This panel was replaced with one commemorating Ireland.  

Rose-tinted overhead lights illuminate walls restored to their original peach color in 2012, and reflect a rosy tint in the polished glass and metal surfaces.

During the major restoration of the hotel initiated by Dana Crawford and Charles Calloway  during the early 1980s (a project on which I worked with Denver architect Mark Hoskin), there was never any doubt that the Cruise Room should be retained in its 1933 form, in preference to the earlier speakeasy, which might have been more consistent with the stylistic themes of the hotel in which it is housed. In some cases, after all, authenticity is more desirable than mere historical consistency*…If you visit the Cruise Room on a weekend, you may not be able to maintain a quiet conversation over the background din, but you'll have plenty of visual detail to ponder while you enjoy your drink.  As Yogi Berra noted, sometimes you can observe a lot just by looking…

*Footnote:  For more reflections upon the question of authenticity versus originality, you may want to see "Authenticity vs. Originality: A Tale of Four (or Five) Bugattis" from June 11, 2017.

Photo credits:

Top:  the author

2nd:  wikimedia

3rd:  jetsetter.com

remainder:  the author