Colorado's capital city marks June 16 — from the Irish pubs of Capitol Hill and the Highlands to the western Irish mining story, and what James Joyce means to a diaspora community that came to America through a very different door than Boston or New York.
Denver is not the first city that comes to mind when you think of Bloomsday, but Colorado has one of the more interesting Irish-American stories in the country — and one of the least told. The Irish who came west in the second half of the nineteenth century came as miners, railroad workers, and labourers in the silver and gold camps of the Rockies. They brought the same parishes and the same culture, but they came to a landscape that could not have been more different from the one they left.
Denver has a long-established Irish-American community — the city has hosted a St Patrick's Day parade since 1962 that is among the largest in the Mountain West, and the Catholic parishes of Capitol Hill, Highland, and Berkeley have maintained Irish-American congregations since the nineteenth century. The Ancient Order of Hibernians has had a Denver division since 1884.
Bloomsday in Denver is observed with a combination of literary seriousness and pub culture that suits a city which has always had a somewhat independent relationship with the east-coast Irish establishment. The literary events at the Tattered Cover bookshop, one of the great independent bookshops in the United States, occasionally mark the day, and the Irish pubs of Capitol Hill and the Highlands provide the more informal backdrop.
Denver has a significant number of Irish-born residents — the city's technology and energy sectors have attracted Irish emigrants over the past two decades, and this community brings a more direct relationship with Joyce than the longer-established Irish-American families. The result is a Bloomsday that mixes academic reading groups, pub gatherings, and informal celebrations in roughly equal measure.
Denver's Irish pubs — Fadó Irish Pub on Lodo, Pints Pub in the 16th Street Mall area, and the older establishments of Capitol Hill — mark June 16 in varying degrees of formality. Some host readings, some simply acknowledge the day with Guinness and a nod; all are worth checking closer to the date for any organised programming.
The Tattered Cover — Denver's most celebrated independent bookshop, operating from multiple locations including Colfax Avenue and the LoDo historic district — has a strong literary events programme. It does not always mark Bloomsday, but when it does, the events draw Denver's literary community as well as the Irish diaspora. Check their calendar in the weeks before June 16.
The University of Denver's English department and the Denver Public Library's events programme occasionally mark Bloomsday, particularly in years when Joyce or Irish modernism is featured in their programming. The library's Schlessman Family Branch has strong community engagement programming.
The Irish arrived in Colorado primarily through the mining camps. The silver boom of the 1870s in the San Juan Mountains — Leadville, Silverton, Telluride — drew thousands of Irish miners from the coal regions of Pennsylvania and the copper mines of Michigan. They came with the Molly Maguires tradition, the union organising experience, and the Catholic faith, and they built the parishes and the mutual aid societies that sustained them through the violent labour conflicts of the late nineteenth century.
Leadville, which was briefly one of the wealthiest cities in America during its silver boom, had a significant Irish population. The Matchless Mine — whose story, through the figure of Baby Doe Tabor, became one of Colorado's defining myths — employed Irish miners alongside Cornish and Eastern European workers in the difficult high-altitude conditions of the Rockies.
This is a story that has been somewhat overshadowed by the more dramatic Irish-American narratives of the east coast, but it is no less real. The descendants of the Colorado mining Irish are spread across the Mountain West, and their relationship with Ireland — mediated through the Church, the AOH, and the GAA — has its own character.
Denver's St Patrick's Day parade is one of the largest in the Mountain West, drawing crowds that have sometimes exceeded 300,000 along the 17th Street route through downtown. The parade reflects the breadth of Denver's Irish-American community — from the established families whose names appear on the founding rolls of the oldest parishes, to the recent Irish emigrants who arrived in the last twenty years.
The same community that makes the parade significant also tends to be the audience for Bloomsday events. There is a direct line between the cultural energy of St Patrick's Day in Denver — the pride in identity, the celebration of specificity — and the literary engagement with Joyce that Bloomsday represents. Both are about the same thing: the persistence of Irish identity in a place that is not Ireland.
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Subscribe free to Love Ireland →Denver in June is, by most standards, an excellent city to read Ulysses. The days are long, the afternoon light has a clarity that comes with the altitude, and the city's tendency toward outdoor culture means that park readings and garden pub events are genuinely pleasant. The temperature is warm but not oppressive — unlike Houston, Denver's June is comfortably readable outdoors in a way that the novel, with its precisely rendered summer day, seems to invite.
Joyce was writing about a single day — June 16, 1904 — with an obsessive attention to the specific conditions of that day in that city. Reading him in Denver in June, where the afternoon light is different from Dublin but the sense of a long, significant day is exactly right, catches something of what the novel is trying to do: to pay absolute attention to the texture of a single ordinary day, which turns out not to be ordinary at all.