Before the Blank Page
MINING EXCHANGE HOTEL - HOSPITALITY
When you’re mining a vein as rich as the story of a 100+ year old building that holds an entire region’s history in its walls, the research process can be daunting -- and not just where to begin, but where to end when there’s so much to discover.
Before we do what we do as artists, designers & writers, we go down the rabbit hole with our partners and their projects. We are hunting what’s real, What's surprising, what's human in the story, and How will we weave that DNA into what we’re building for them.It’s a great privilege to work this way. To uncover the story that’s already there, that still wants to be told. And the lesson we keep learning is that if you ask the right questions, you’ll find out that the page was never blank to begin with.
In the fall of 2022 we made our first trip to Colorado Springs on behalf of the Mining Exchange Hotel project. We dug through the 120 year old building’s basements; rifled through old papers, newsprint and maps in the Library’s Collections room; explored downtown and the local history and talked to as many locals as we could. But there was one we talked to the most.
Wendel Lowry was born in Iowa in the 1930’s. As a young man he came to Boulder for college and then made his life in Colorado Springs in the stock & commodities game. And in 1967, he was the last man standing at the Mining Exchange building when they traded their last stock.We read about him in a NY Times article from ’62 that mused on the folksiness of a regional stock exchange in comparison to a behemoth like the NYSE. It was 2022, so we weren’t bent over the microfiche machine, but it seemed like a smoking gun in our investigation. Surely Mr. Lowry couldn’t still be alive, let alone returning calls from strangers in Memphis, right?Only one way to find out. We found property records online associated with him along with a single, dusty old landline number. We left a message, crossed our fingers and made plans for our first site visit. Some weeks later, Our boots on the ground in Colorado Springs, he happened to called us back.A couple hours later we dropped a copywriter off at a gabled cottage abutting the grand Broadmoor’s grounds, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.“Late that afternoon he emerged with a story that came to inform every detail of the brand we built for the Mining Exchange Hotel.”
Turns out, Wendel had an attic overflowing with Mining Exchange history and a sharp mind full of first hand accounts from the old timers he worked under as a young man. Forgive us, there’s just no other way to say it: this find was a gold mine.
As the last man standing, Mr. Lowry had made off from the Exchange with loads of physical and printed material. The old trading board and placards with the names of Claims and stocks. The gavel that rapped the trading days open & closed. Old maps of the mining districts with all the little claims scratched onto them. Photographs from the turn-of-the-century scene at the Exchange. You will see touches and moments of this legacy, both physical and art-inspired-by, throughout the new hotel's identity, its narrative & branded environment, and among all the nooks and crannies in between.
Be ready.
