I’m heading to the lovely city of Denver this week, that beautiful bastion of liberty, to sit quietly in their archive departments and pour over anything I can find about the long standing heritage of motorcycling there. Denver, with its rugged history and challenging terrain has hosted nearly every form of racing over the years. It was also the only city in the country to have not one, but two board track motordromes, a pair of 20th Century cathedrals of speed which sparked the career’s of legends like Eddie Hasha and Wells Bennett. Denver was home for other American icons like Joe Wolters, Erle Armstrong, and Leslie Parkhurst, and the city can even claim their own early American motorcycle manufacturer with the Thor-powered Apache brand. It has been a while since I was last in Denver as a young traveling musician so I am excited to return and I can’t to see what remarkable stories are waiting to be uncovered.
Seen here a race on the shallow banking of Denver's Tuileries Motordrome ca. 1912, one of the first board track motordromes built in America. The track originally opened in the Spring of 1911 along with a second track at the White City Amusement Park, also known as the Lakeside Motordrome, an unique experiment in multi-track sustainability.