Pour It On

April 4, 2003

Take a look downtown at any U.S. city with any kind of history in the 19th century, and you’ll find a few surviving buildings from the 1800s. In nine of ten cases, these old and elegant structures share one thing – solid stone.
Today, it’s still the rare building that even features a cladding of dimensional stone. Anyone suggesting the use of stone for the entire structure — unless it’s a major government project, with the bill footed by taxpayers — would be immediately frisked for a concealed buggy whip.
Most people cite the high cost of stone for its fall as a major building component. Not me. I blame Charles Boettcher.
Right now, 100 out of 100 readers selected at random are thinking, “Charles WHO?” Given that he died 55 years ago, it’s not surprising that Boettcher (pronounced “Bett-cher”) draws a blank … but one radical act helped to change how people thought about construction. Stone use, as it turns out, would never be the same.
Boettcher became one of those regional titans of industry in the early 1900s, with a business empire based in Denver. Born in Germany in 1852, he came to the United States at age 17 — by some accounts, to avoid conscription and the harsh life of the Prussian army — and wound up in the Rocky Mountains, where many sought their riches in mining gold and silver.
Boettcher decided to tap the fortune hunters, selling them mining equipment, hardware and household goods. Plenty of miners went bust while some hit pay dirt, but losers and winners alike bought (always in cash) from Boettcher. Without staking a claim, he stockpiled a sizeable sum and retired before age 50 — for about six months.
Returning as a wealthy man of leisure, he visited his German homeland and noticed farmers bringing in an unusual cash crop. The legend is that Boettcher sailed back to the United States with his luggage full of the strange plants — sugar beets — and provided the seed for his new enterprise, the Great Western Sugar Co., and a new U.S. cash crop.
The sweet tubers weren’t the only items of interest Boettcher found in Germany. He also noticed that processors stored the refined product in large silos made with something novel at the time: Portland cement.
Boettcher like the material so much that he set up another company in Denver; in time, the Ideal Cement Co. (and later Ideal Basic Industries) became a dominant Western U.S. purveyor of Portland cement. The material begat one of the largest competitors to natural stone for ornamental work, which makes Charles Boettcher as one of the unwitting forefathers of the cast-stone industry.
However, that pales to what he did along Seventeenth Street in Denver’s financial district. Boettcher planned a new building along “the Wall Street of the Rockies” and saw a great opportunity to promote his product. To house the Ideal Cement Co., he constructed a high-rise building made with concrete.
Concrete structures began popping up in the United States in the 1840s, according to the Portland Cement Association. The first high-rise concrete building — Cincinnati’s Ingalls Building — went up in 1902. However, use of the material for large structures remained novel when Boettcher finished his Ideal Building in 1907.
What Boettcher did with his building, however, was extraordinary. At the end of construction, he brought the city building inspector to the scene to show him the work scaffolding surrounding the building.
On cue, the work crew set the scaffolding on fire.
The wooden work supports burned to a crisp. The building suffered no damage, providing an on-the-spot test that, for a high-rise building, concrete is fireproof.
The significance here is that, some 96 years ago, even brick paled in its fireproof ability to stone. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey shows that, in 1907, builders used 4.9 million tons of dimensional stone; more than 95 percent of that came from domestic quarries.
Concrete didn’t exactly set the building world on fire after Boettcher’s stunt, as stone kept rolling out of quarries in high volume until the Great Depression. When the economy boomed after World War II, however, it built its foundation on structures using concrete; with all the interest in stone today, its use still lags behind the top consumption year of 6.1 million tons in 1931.
Of course, Charles Boettcher didn’t swing construction away from stone by trying to burn down his own building. But, he planted a seed that ultimately changed how people used stone in the United States.
Don’t think of Boettcher as a villain, though. Much of his family’s fortune went to good causes, with the Boettcher Foundation becoming one of the largest philanthropic sources in the Rocky Mountain region. And, one story about the man shows that all of his money didn’t exactly go to his head.
In his later years, Boettcher acquired the grandest hotel in Denver — The Brown Palace — and lived in a top-floor suite. Every night, he appeared at the building’s main entrance, walked across the street to another hotel, and returned a few minutes later.
One night — as the tale goes — a newspaper reporter followed him and discovered Boettcher would go to the basement of the other hotel and buy a bottle of Coca-Cola from a vending machine for a nickel. He would then take the bottle back up to his suite and drink it before retiring for the evening.
“Mr. Boettcher,” the reporter asked, “why are you going to such trouble every night? You own the best hotel in town. Room service could bring you a bottle with just a phone call.”
Boettcher didn’t hesitate with his answer.
“Have you seen what we charge for room service?”