In Cherry Creek, rare chance to preserve a little history
WHERE: Victorian residence of State Sen. James Crosby, built 1897, 330 Madison St., Cherry Creek. From Cherry Creek’s central shopping district, take Third Ave. east, past Steele Street, another three blocks to Madison and turn north.
PRICE: $1.25 million
PHONE: 303-883-4707 or 303-946-2784
by Mark Samuelson
In Cherry Creek’s fast paced, scrape-n-build climate, nothing old weathers very well these days. However, Devonshire Realtor Nancy Morgan will show you a rare piece of 110-year-old architecture that’s a three-block walk from the Third Avenue shopping district…and you can buy it for not much more than a scrape value.
A placard out front reads “Senator Crosby House 1892″…but other records show 330 Madison Street being built five years later…the same year Crosby, a former restaurant cashier from Leadville, ran a winning campaign for State Senate on a populist “single-tax” platform.
Whether you choose 1892 or 1897 (some projects came to a halt in 1893 when the silver market crashed), a Victorian home in Cherry Creek North is a limited commodity, said Julie Winger, Morgan’s daughter, who’s joining her mom in listing the property centered in the pricey, 65-block neighborhood.
Morgan, meanwhile, took me for a drive-around in her luxury model VW beetle that graphically illustrated how rare a real historic building has become in Creek. Average blocks have three kinds of houses: some new custom or luxury townhome designs that price about $2 million and up (there’s one across the street at over $2.6 million), one or two little bungalows built in the 1930s or 1940s that will probably scrape, and nicer homes built over the last 30 or 40 years.
Virtually nothing’s left from days when Cherry Creek was on the map as the village of Harman. (It was absorbed into Denver in 1897, the later of the two dates of the Madison house. Harman’s old town hall nearby is now morphing into a single luxury home with a 10-car garage!)
“A San Francisco style Victorian paint job would be a knockout,” Morgan said as we stood in front. Nothing else would be easy on this project, however. In the 1940s its innards were split into downstairs and upstairs apartments, each remodeled 20 years ago with newer baths and kitchens. Floors, woodwork, downstairs fireplace, and a cherry staircase are all still in place that could be preserved as part of a conversion back to single family. There’s a 4-car garage in back….
Meanwhile, says Morgan, the price at $1.25 million is pretty close to what the two most recent bungalow-scrapes sold for, at $1.1 and $1.209 million.
