Oxford Hotel

The Oxford was the railroad hotel Denver built first — brewer Adolph Zang's 1891 palace a block from Union Station, Frank Edbrooke's red-brick fortress with its own power plant, steam heat, and one of the city's first elevators. It opened October 2, 1891, a year before Edbrooke's Brown Palace, and has never been anything but the Oxford — the city's oldest surviving hotel, expanded twice to keep up with the Union Station traffic it was built to catch.

The hauntings have names. Room 320 carries the story of Florence Montague — the legend says she found her husband with another woman in that room in 1898 and shot him and then herself; guests have reported the manifestations ever since, and the room is the hotel's notorious one. The Cruise Room downstairs — the Art Deco bar that opened the day Prohibition ended in 1933 — is said to keep its own resident, a man in period dress at the bar.

The Oxford survived LoDo's skid-row decades and came back as the anchor of its revival — Dana Crawford's 1983 restoration made it Denver's first boutique hotel and proved the neighborhood could be saved. The red sandstone castle by the station now presides over the district it outlasted — a Gilded Age hotel that never closed, never changed its name, and never quite emptied Room 320.

The Oxford Hotel is the archive's Room 320 file — Zang's 1891 railroad palace, Denver's oldest hotel, home to Florence Montague's murder-suicide ghost and the Cruise Room's period-dressed regular.