Places · 3 min read · updated August 2026
The Auraria campus, for people who only ever drive past it
Three colleges, forty thousand students, a brewery from 1866, and a neighborhood that was cleared to make room for it. What's across Speer, and how to walk it.
Cross Speer Boulevard at 14th or Auraria Parkway and you are on the Auraria campus, 150 acres shared by three schools: the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the Community College of Denver. Between them they enroll around forty thousand students, most of them commuters, which is why the campus is full on a Tuesday afternoon in October and empty on a Saturday in July. It is the largest single thing in our frame and the least visited by anyone who does not go to school there.
What was here
Auraria was Denver's twin. William Larimer's Denver City was platted on the east bank of Cherry Creek in 1858; the rival camp of Auraria sat on the west bank, and the two merged in 1860. By the twentieth century it was a working-class, largely Latino neighborhood of small houses, churches and corner stores around Ninth Street. In the early 1970s the city and state cleared it, house by house, to build the campus; roughly three hundred families were displaced. Ninth Street Historic Park, a single preserved block of restored Victorian houses along a green, is what remains, along with St. Cajetan's church (built in 1926 by the Hispanic parish, now an event hall), St. Elizabeth's, and the Emmanuel Gallery, a small stone building that was a synagogue and before that a chapel and is one of the oldest church structures standing in Denver. The three institutions now offer a Displaced Aurarian scholarship to descendants of the families who were moved. Walk Ninth Street with that in mind; it is the most human quarter-mile in this whole neighborhood.
The Tivoli
The Tivoli is the brick and copper landmark you can see from Speer. It brewed beer from 1866 to 1969 under a string of names ending in Tivoli-Union, sat empty for years, became a mall in the 1980s and, since 1994, the campus student union: food court, bookstore, meeting rooms, and, in the old brewhouse since 2015, a revived Tivoli Brewing Company tap house pouring lagers where they were first made. On a term-time weekday afternoon it is the best place to feel what the campus is.
The rest of the walk
From the Tivoli, the Auraria Library is a block south; the King Center for the Performing Arts, where the three schools' music and theater departments perform (its schedule is one of the harder ones to get by machine, so check the campus site), is on Lawrence Way; the Auraria Event Center on 5th Street is home court for MSU Denver's Roadrunners basketball and volleyball, and their home games are on our calendar. The Lola & Rob Salazar Student Wellness Center on 12th Street sells $10 day passes to the public, which makes it the cheapest gym and pool near LoDo. CU Denver's own buildings spill back across Speer along Lawrence Street between 13th and 15th; the Business School is the glass one at 1475 Lawrence.
Events
CU Denver and MSU Denver publish their calendars in formats a machine can read, so lectures, concerts, exhibitions and student events appear on our What's on page under "Auraria campus," refreshed hourly. In late November the Denver Christkindlmarket moves onto the Tivoli Quad (November 20 to December 23, 2026), which is the one time each year the whole city comes to campus.
Around the edges
Ball Arena is on the campus's north side, Meow Wolf is tucked into the highway ramps on its west, and Elitch Gardens is across the tracks. The Auraria West and Colfax at Auraria light rail stations serve it. If you want one hour here: the Tivoli tap house, then Ninth Street at dusk.