Post reporter pens biography of Denver Developer

I haven’t read former Denver Post reporter Mike McPhee’s biography of Denver developer and historic preservationist Dana Crawford, but I like how Post reviewer Dana Coffield, in describing what’s in the book, tells the story of  Crawford’s discovery of Larimer Square, which Crawford later turned into one of Denver’s first historic Denver attractions.

Coffield wrote a couple weeks ago:

As it is told by Mike McPhee in “Dana Crawford: 50 Years Saving the Soul of a City,” the renaissance began on a sizzling summer day in 1963, when a group of winos came to Crawford’s rescue after her puke-green Ford convertible died on Larimer Street.

“Vapor lock,” one of them rasped from the doorway of a building on Denver’s skid row.

She found what she was looking for in the 1400 block of Larimer, near where the band of drunks, rewarded for their trouble only with a big smile and twinkling blue eyes, solved her engine problem with a dirty rag and a little water.

McPhee conducted extensive interviews with Crawford and folks who know her. I’m going to buy it for myself for holiday reading.

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