In this American city, people kept asking us if we’re locals. I have a theory as to why

From the rooftop terrace of tapas bar El Five, Denver appears to be showing off. The city stretches below us in the late afternoon light, the hazy outline of the Rocky Mountains behind it, while plates of Spanish and other Mediterranean food arrive at the table and the bar fills with people.

It is not quite the Denver I had pictured. Nor, apparently, do my family and I look like visitors. For reasons I can’t quite understand, people keep assuming we’re residents. This seems unlikely given we are travelling with two children and hardly moving through the city with the confidence of locals. Yet, the questions keep coming: which neighbourhood are you in? How long have you lived here?

Perhaps it is because Denver doesn’t seem particularly interested in defining what belongs here. From El Five’s perch in the neighbourhood known as LoHi (its full name is Lower Highlands), the city feels young, energetic and decidedly urban, yet the mountains remain on the horizon.

At street level, the layers become easier to see. I’d already noticed Denver’s fondness for spacious communal spaces. In the public areas of The Maven Hotel, and in the Dairy Block and Union Station precincts, there are sofas and armchairs occupied by people who may be hotel guests or train passengers, but are just as likely neither. Like oversized public living rooms these are spaces where the people of Denver work, meet friends, drink coffee or just sit.

We’re staying at the 172-room Maven, where the lobby flows into the surrounding restaurants, bars, shops and laneways while showing off more than 700 works by Colorado artists. Our room feels part loft, part gallery; downstairs, for instance, coffee is served from an Airstream. The hotel is playful and fun, but what I like most is that it feels like part of the neighbourhood.

Buildings that double as public gathering places feel almost like the norm here. A few blocks away, the beaux-arts Union Station has been greeting people since 1914 (and there’s been a station on this site since 1881).

But Denver’s relationship with the railways has long been complicated. The city began in 1858 as a gold-rush settlement, but when gold exploration moved into the mountains, it reinvented itself as a supply town. Then, in a major blow, the transcontinental railway bypassed Denver, causing Union Pacific railway vice president Thomas Durant to declare Denver “too dead to bury” in 1867.

The settlement’s businessmen responded by raising the money to build a railway spur to Cheyenne, connecting Denver to the national rail network. Union Station followed, helping to turn Denver into the commercial hub of the region.

You can still read that history in the streets of LoDo (Lower Downtown), the neighbourhood surrounding the station. Walking through it, I notice unusually high restaurant terraces built into old brick warehouses. These look like a design flourish, but they’re not; the platforms once sat at streetcar height, allowing goods arriving by rail to be unloaded directly into the warehouses. More recent Denver businesses have simply put tables and chairs on them.

This is, in a sense, the story of Denver, where many old mercantile buildings now host boutiques, bars and restaurants. Larimer Square, Denver’s oldest commercial block, is strung with lights and filled with diners, yet might not exist at all if preservationist Dana Crawford hadn’t begun buying its threatened buildings in the 1960s, when there were few mechanisms to protect them.

These days, the mood shifts surprisingly quickly from one neighbourhood to the next. LoDo has its handsome warehouses and slightly rougher edges; LoHi, where we’d eaten the night before, feels younger and more polished.

There is no great costume change required between city and mountains here. Hiking shoes turn up in good restaurants. Kids do, too. Nobody appears especially bothered by either.

Lunchtime finds us in RiNo, as the River North Art District is known, eating at Safta inside The Source, an 1880s iron foundry turned food hall and hotel. Here the industrial backdrop continues, only louder: murals cover the facades of old factories and warehouses, while breweries, studios and restaurants have moved into the spaces behind them.

There are other expressions of the city’s creative side. The angular Denver Art Museum, for instance, looks almost as interesting from the outside as anything hanging within it, while there are galleries and museums scattered through the surrounding streets.

What surprises me is how little fuss the people of Denver make about any of this. There is no great costume change required between city and mountains here. Hiking shoes turn up in good restaurants. Kids do, too. Nobody appears especially bothered by either.

In similar vein, old buildings haven’t been polished into untouchable monuments; people eat, drink, shop and work inside them. And those lounges I’d noticed are still full of people doing not very much at all.

The mountains, meanwhile, are never far away. They appear between buildings and peep over rooftops, sometimes little more than a hazy outline, then suddenly clear enough to pull your eye from whatever is happening at street level. People talk about skiing and hiking as casually as they talk about a new restaurant they’ve tried or a bar that’s just opened down the road.

Perhaps that’s what I’d misunderstood about Denver before I came here. The city and the outdoors aren’t competing versions of the site; one simply seems to be part of the other.

And perhaps that ease extends to the city itself. By the end of our stay, I’ve changed my attitude to all those people who keep assuming we live here. I still have no idea what’s given them that impression but I’m no longer in any hurry to correct them.

The writer was a guest of Colorado Tourism Office.

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