One of Denver’s oldest buildings turns 150 and most people walk right past it

Before there was a state of Colorado, there was the Emmanuel.

Built in 1876 — the same year Colorado became the 38th state — the Emmanuel Art Gallery is Denver’s oldest standing religious structure, a tiny Gothic Revival chapel made of stone with 12-by-18-inch wall buttresses, pointed arched windows and a footprint of just 24 by 66 feet. It has been an Episcopalian chapel, a synagogue, an artist’s studio and, since 1973, a working art gallery. It sits on the Auraria Campus in the middle of downtown, surrounded by modern academic buildings, and the vast majority of people who walk past it every day have absolutely no idea what it is or how long it’s been there.

This week, CU Denver is fixing that. The university opened “Come Together: 150 Years of the Emmanuel,” a new exhibition celebrating the building’s sesquicentennial with work from local and national artists. The show marks a century and a half of continuous use on the same patch of ground — a patch that was, before Bishop John F. Spaulding bought the land in 1874, the site of an even older religious structure: a nondenominational Sunday school built by Col. Lewis N. Tappan in 1859, back when Denver was still a mining camp with ambitions.

The building’s middle chapter is arguably its strangest. From 1903 to 1958, the chapel served as the Shearith Israel Synagogue. When enough of its congregants moved to other neighborhoods, the building was sold to artist Wolfgang Pogzeba, who used it as his personal studio for 15 years, swapping the original wooden doors for bronze ones but otherwise leaving the structure intact. In 1969, it became the first building listed as a historic site by Denver’s Landmark Preservation Commission and was added to the National Register of Historic Places the same year.

Today, the Emmanuel shows the work of students from Auraria’s three institutions alongside curated exhibitions featuring professional artists of national and international stature. It has won a Denver Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Culture. It is free to visit, open during campus hours, and — if the past 150 years are any indication — it will still be there long after the rest of us have moved on.

“Come Together: 150 Years of the Emmanuel” is on view at the Emmanuel Art Gallery, 1205 10th Street on the Auraria Campus. More information at emmanuelgallery.org.