Back in 2006, Trump — the New York developer then best known for his yellow pompadour and starring role on The Apprentice — had just seen his $1 billion bid to redevelop Denver’s Union Station shot down (his team’s six-paragraph proposal was considered “non-responsive” to the application requirements), but he didn’t give up on the Mile High City. Instead, Trump came back with a plan to construct the tallest building in town, one filled with a luxury hotel and condos, right at the corner of East 18th Avenue and Sherman Street.
To make that plan concrete, he put the circa 1906 El Jebel Temple at 1770 Sherman and its three adjacent parking lots under contract for $22 million, and hired Denver architect David Tryba to design a sixty-or-so-story tower that would “complement and be a juxtaposition to the historic El Jebel building,” Tryba told the Rocky Mountain News. While the Moorish-inspired El Jebel, a landmark on both the state and national historic registers, would be used for meetings and other hotel services, Trump would take advantage of air rights and zoning approvals granted a few years earlier to create a companion structure that towered 715 feet above downtown Denver.
But plans for the Trump Tower came crumbling down when the sub-prime mortgage industry collapsed.
Tryba went on to create a towering reputation of his own. He’s done work across the country as well as here at home, where he was the architect on the Union Station renovation project completed in 2014 (the Union Station Alliance, a local consortium, ultimately got that contract) and designed the stunning History Colorado Center, unveiled in 2012.
El Jebel still stands. It was never really a shrine; the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, aka the Shriners, sold the grand building to the Scottish Rite Masons in 1924; they sold it to Eulipions, a black theater company, in 1995. After the curtain fell on that overly ambitious artistic effort, a developer bought the property for $3.9 million in 2000. El Jebel continued to be used as the Sherman Street Event Center — until the structure and its adjacent lots sold again in April 2016 for over $12 million.
While a 61-story tower envisioned at the time for the parking lot by El Jebel never materialized, plans for a thirty-story structure submitted to the city by Denver Temple LLC remain in play. The historic building would remain, protected by its landmark status.
But while the Trump name never graced Denver’s tallest building, you can still see it on the Trump Plaza Apartments.
This (very) modest complex stands in all its partially-boarded-up glory at 4950 Morrison Road, in the heart of Westwood. The one-story building was built in 1953 and last remodeled in 1959; it has sixteen units that range from 300 square feet to 646 square feet.
This Trump Plaza is clearly no relation to the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, which opened as Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in 1984 and closed ten years later — shortly after Trump, who by then had only a 10 percent stake in Trump Entertainment Resorts, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding that his name be removed from the casino in order to avoid “further harm to the Trump name and brand.”
Since there’s been no similar lawsuit filed in Denver, Trump apparently doesn’t know of the existence of the Trump Plaza Apartments, since they do nothing for his post-presidency brand. Today, the history of the development and the origins of its Trumpian name are as lost as much of its paint.
This story has been updated from the version first published on July 19, 2016.
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