U.S. Customhouse

About this property

The Federal Building and United States Custom House, Denver, Colorado is a historic courthouse and federal office building located at Denver, Colorado. It is a courthouse for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. The Federal Building and U.S. Custom House is part of a complex of four federal buildings located in close proximity to each other in downtown Denver, the others being the Byron G. Rogers Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, the Byron White U.S. Courthouse, and the Alfred A. Arraj U.S. Courthouse. The federal government acquired the site, which was previously home to the East Denver High School, in three parcels between 1928 and 1930 for just under $300,000. The building replaced Denver's overcrowded 1892 custom house, located at another location in the city. Designs for the original portion of the building, completed in 1931, came from the Office of the Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury, which at that time was led by James A. Wetmore. Both this building and the nearby Byron White U.S. Courthouse are clad in the same Colorado Yule marble used in the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C. Indiana limestone was originally planned for cladding the building, and would have been less expensive. However, members of Congress from Colorado successfully argued for use of local materials. The building was completed in May 1931 at a total cost of $1,260,000. A 1937 addition nearly doubled the size of the building. Denver architects Temple Hoyne Buell and G. Meredith Musick designed the addition. The cladding material was once again controversial. In this case, Colorado Yule marble was substituted for Georgia marble after local officials successfully argued that the materials of the original building and addition should match, and that the revenue from the marble purchase should benefit Colorado. Though it housed various federal agencies, the building's primary occupant was the U.S. Customs Service. Its revenues averaged $500,000 per year, and eventually climbed to $1,400,000 in 1957. In need of more space, the Customs Service moved to the former Stapleton Airport in 1957. The major building tenant is now the bankruptcy court. The building has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 1979. During the 1960s and 1970s, protesters often used the U.S. Courthouse plaza across the street. In 1975, a bomb exploded in a first floor men's room of the building, but there was no significant structural damage. A group calling themselves the Continental Revolutionary Army took credit for the bombing.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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