University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Colorado

The university's administration building started life as a tuberculosis sanatorium that sold for one dollar.

historicalengineering

The oldest building on this campus was built for people dying of tuberculosis. In 1902 William Jackson Palmer put up the money for a sanatorium here, and the Cragmor Sanatorium opened three years later. Its architecture was built around sunlight, so people called it the Sun Palace. Wealthy patients came, and over the following decades it drew a following among the cultural elite. Then the Great Depression took their money away. Cragmor limped through financial distress into the nineteen forties. In the fifties a contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned it into a treatment center for Navajos with tuberculosis. About ten years after that, those patients were moved elsewhere. In 1964 the sanatorium's executive director, George Dwire, sold the whole property to the state for one dollar. It became University of Colorado land that same year. The old Sun Palace still stands, and it is now Main Hall, where students go to pay their bills and see an academic advisor.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The solution came when George T. Dwire sold the Cragmor Sanatorium property for $1 to the state, which became the property of the University of Colorado in 1964.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Old North End Historic District (Colorado Springs, Colorado) 2.7 mi A college president bought this land as an investment, named it New Massachusetts, and was fired when it lost money.
  • Old Colorado City 4.6 mi This place was the capital of the Colorado Territory, and it effectively functioned as one for only five days.
  • Modern Woodmen Sanatorium 5.3 mi Tuberculosis patients here slept one to a tent, in octagonal cottages modeled on Ute tepees and left open at the top.
  • Cheyenne Creek 5.5 mi Two men dammed this creek in the 1880s to make a lake that would help sell a hotel and casino, and then had to sue the city for stealing the water.
  • Peterson Space Force Base 7.6 mi The base is named for a lieutenant who died on takeoff there, four months before the field got his name.
  • United States Air Force Academy 7.7 mi The Air Force turned to a Hollywood director to design its cadet uniform, and cadets still wear it on the parade field.