Colorado's State Capitol

I didn't have any expectations of Colorado's State Capitol building.

I could see that it was fairly accessible in the city street pattern, compared to Minnesota's Capitol, which is cut off by freeways and blocks and blocks of empty formal green space, and that its building design is similar to Minnesota's (and the U.S. Capitol), with a center dome (though the one in Colorado is covered in gold leaf, in reference to the Gold Rush):

As I approached the elevated level of the building, I saw what I at first thought was a marble block with plaques on the side:

After a few seconds, I realized it was instead a painted box and that there was an empty pedestal peeking out of the top. Clearly, a statue had been removed from in front of the building. The sides of the box had illustrations of columbines and big-horn sheep on two sides each, with the words "Colorado for All." Hmm. 

I looked it up online later and discovered that a bronze statue of a Civil War soldier was pulled down in the summer of 2020 by protesters. Civil War soldiers of the First Colorado Cavalry, including their Colonel John Chivington, carried out the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, in which at least 150 Cheyenne and Arapahoe people died (women, children, and old men). 

The old statue is now in the History Colorado museum (I assume with appropriate signage). Its former site in front of the Capitol will soon hold a new statue, created by a sculptor who is a Sand Creek descendant, of an Indigenous woman, kneeling, holding an empty cradle board.

Once inside the building, I could see its similarity to Minnesota's Capitol, but on something like a one-third smaller scale. The lower level cafeteria has a small honor-system food service area, rather than a full food line, for instance, and it would be hard for crowds of people to fill the rotunda area, the way they do in Minnesota.

The building was built in the 1890s, and opened in 1894. The dome was added in 1908. It looks beautiful from the inside:

The interior stone is dominated by Colorado Rose Onyx, which is a rare rose marble. So rare, in fact, that the builders used all of the known amount in creating the Capitol:

On the walls of the rotunda room, there is a set of murals, painted from 1934–1940 by Alan Tipper True. He had previously painted four murals for the Wyoming capitol and 16 for Missouri's. So I guess they aren't the usual WPA starving-artist murals, as I at first assumed from their Depression-era timing. 

The images are the usual, "Indians were here at first, but then white men came and did a bunch of things (no more Indians anymore!), and there were no women either except maybe watching the men doing things."

The last image panel is a 1930s' imagining of the future, so it's extra-silly. And the final panel is a message lauding the murals' sponsor, a Colorado millionaire bigwig named Charles Boettcher. I can't believe his name is the most prominent single text part in the whole set of panels. That seems very wrong.

There's a poem that starts on the first panel and then runs below the images to the end. It's by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, who was later the poet laureate of Colorado, but when he wrote this poem, his day job was in corporate public relations, specifically for the Great Western Sugar Company. And the poem reads like PR for Colorado.

Present-day Colorado is obviously embarrassed by these murals (as are many of the people of present-day Minnesota by the attached art in our State Capitol and other public buildings), so there are compensatory objects nearby.

The next room is a colonnade, with offices and, I assume, the entrance to at least one of the legislative chambers.

There were three flags arrayed down the length of this majestic room, and below each a plaque:

The first, under the blue flag, is for the Southern Ute Tribe. The Utes, in general, are the oldest, most continuous inhabitants of the State of Colorado. Currently the Southern Ute Tribe lives on a reservation near the Four Corners.

The white flag is for the Ute Indian Tribe. "When settlers discovered gold and greed for the land, they forced [us] out of Colorado to Utah, at gun point..." This tribe's reservation is in Utah.

The yellow flag is for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. Their reservation is also close to the Four Corners area.

Just around the corner from the colonnade room, I found this large, framed tapestry:

 

It was created during and just after the U.S. Bicentennial to commemorate the contributions of women. I could see that it had the words of "America the Beautiful" around the edge. I knew that the song was written by Katherine Lee Bates after she visited Pike's Peak, near Colorado Springs. 

The tapestry has the years 1876–2076 under the rainbow near the center top, and the words "Women's Gold" (which is the title of the tapestry) near the center. At the bottom it says, "Their Heritage Gives Colorado Women Faith in the Future." 

The women portrayed are all specific people, though a casual observer like me would not know that. This PDF identifies them. At the time of my visit, I observed one Indigenous woman (at the very top left), what I thought was one Black woman (near the cabin at upper left), and otherwise all white women. Checking the PDF, I think I have that correct.

Here's a close-up of the creators' signatures from the bottom right corner, which give a bit better idea of the scale of the piece:

Near this, there was also a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which was donated to the state of Colorado in 1969. 

And then somewhere else as I wandered around the first floor, I saw this plaque:

In case it's hard to read, the plaque was presented in 1974 by the Japanese community, and it reads in part:

Ralph L. Carr...governor of the state of Colorado 1939–1943 [was] not influenced by the hysteria and bigotry directed against the Japanese-Americans. By his humanitarian efforts no Colorado resident of Japanese ancestry was deprived of his basic freedoms, and when no others would accept the evacuated West Coast Japanese, except for confinement in internment camps, Governor Carr opened the doors and welcomed them to Colorado.

Carr was a Republican. He opposed FDR and the New Deal, but he was very correct in his stance on internment. I've never heard of him until now. Here's a quote (via his Wikipedia page) from a speech he gave "to a large and hostile audience":

An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. ... If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened [pointing to various audience members] the happiness of you and you and you.

That man had a backbone. An example to us all. 

As I left the Capitol area, I noticed another difference from Minnesota's Capitol. Colorado's Capitol is ringed with asphalt: close-in reserved parking for legislators, the governor, and lieutenant governor (and, I assume, a few other constitutional officers, though I didn't see those reserved signs). In Minnesota, there's a small parking lot close to the Capitol building, which may contain some accessible spots and possibly ones for the constitutional officers only. It's definitely not big enough for the legislators, though! 

This seems like a bad use of space by the Colorado Capitol, especially given how close it is to very usable transit: it's much more accessible than Minnesota's Capitol overall.