As electronica music plays in the background, a cell phone video quickly pans over the ivied cloisters, abandoned chalkboards — “Open this as a homeless shelter,” someone has scrawled — and graffitied sanctuary of the former Cathedral High School in Denver’s Uptown.
The TikTok video, which has 37,000 likes, was posted in March by urbex, or urban exploration, trespassers. Below the video, fellow urbex hobbyists recounted their arrests there.
“I went to this place when it was more recently abandoned a year ago and it was so pretty before people started doing stuff to it,” one lamented about vandalism at the site.
Last month, the City of Denver fined GFI Development of New York $140,000 for allowing the property at 1840 Grant St. to become a magnet for vandals, vagrants and the very curious, and threatened to fine it far more in the coming weeks. GFI has sued the city in response.
Their legal dispute follows a decade of disuse and failed redevelopment of the aging property, whose red clay-tiled roof, off-white stucco and cruciform features date back to 1921.
“It has been a number of things. It started life as a high school, it has been a convent, it has been a care facility, and it has accommodated artist studios,” said Historic Denver CEO John Deffenbaugh. “So, it really does illustrate how accommodating older buildings can be.”
Prolonged stretches of vacancy have befallen the Spanish Renaissance Revival property since 1982, when it was a convent called Seton House that shuttered due to dwindling enrollment. Mother Teresa visited Denver in 1989 and reopened it as a hospice for AIDS patients.
Seton House closed again in 2009, narrowly dodged demolition in 2011 when neighbors and Historic Denver organized to save it, and reopened as a homeless shelter in 2012. After that closed, GFI paid $4.2 million for it in 2016. It has been largely vacant since.
GFI planned to renovate the historic buildings and build its 11-story Ace Hotel atop an adjacent parking lot at 19th and Logan. But the pandemic’s shakeup of the hospitality industry put an end to that idea, GFI managing director Stan Spiegelman said at a city hearing July 24.
“That made it a scary venture for both lenders and investors, so it became impossible to finance its construction then, and still to this day,” hearing notes sum up Spiegelman as saying.
Meanwhile, complaints from neighbors and police officers have piled up, city records show.
“The building needs to be re-secured to prohibit entry and further vandalism. I worry the homeless will start a fire accidentally and ruin the building,” a June 2024 complaint reads.
“I contacted the nonemergency police line earlier today and reported, nobody has come to investigate. It is unsafe for all the individuals and children in the area,” another says.
In May, the Denver Police Department reached out to Spiegelman with its own concerns.
“Multiple social media posts are now circulating, encouraging individuals to break into the structure, sharing instructions on how to gain access, and even urging others to further damage the property,” Kayla Knabe, a community resource officer, emailed him on May 28.
“Compounding these concerns, the building is no longer structurally safe for first responders to enter, and we’re beginning to see it attract juveniles, which raises serious concerns that someone could be seriously injured — or worse — inside the building,” she added.
Knabe advised the developer to have “a consistent, visible security presence” at 1840 Grant rather than a guard who only stops by on occasion, but this advice was not heeded. According to the lawsuit GFI filed on Sept. 19, guards “walk the property several times per week.”
So, in July, Denver’s Department of Community Planning and Development asked city hearing officer Stecéban Hudson to label 1840 Grant St. a neglected and derelict neighborhood nuisance, fine GFI $139,500 for failures to maintain it between October 2024 and July 2025, and fine it $999 per day if it does not bring the property into compliance by Oct. 9.
“The Denver Police Department informed (the city) that they would no longer be able to send officers to the building to remove unauthorized individuals because the building was too dangerous for the officers to enter,” Hudson wrote in his August decision. Specifically, officers are “blind” and “vulnerable to attack” in the courtyard, because it is so overgrown.
Hudson took the developer to task for failing to follow through on its own plans to improve the property in 2022 and 2024, and noted it has not submitted development plans since 2020. But he gave GFI credit for spending “thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years” boarding up windows and doors, even if “after every time they board it up, it gets broken into again.”
Hudson agreed with the city’s proposed penalties and issued them Aug. 25. GFI then responded by suing and asking Denver District Court Judge Mark Bailey to nullify those fines.
GFI’s lawyers are Jonathan Pray and Codi Cox with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in Denver. Through their attorneys, GFI declined to discuss its plans for 1840 Grant.
Spiegelman, GFI’s manager, told Hudson over the summer that GFI wants to redevelop the site or sell to someone who can. The firm has also signed a letter of intent with “a local group that does smaller types of development” to sell a cathedral building, according to Spiegelman, but closing is on hold while they “try to come up with the right economic incentive structure.”
Deffenbaugh, with Historic Denver, says his group has reached out to GFI and the city in order to bring them together “and identify a long-term, sustainable solution” for 1840 Grant.
“This building is architecturally significant, it is culturally significant, it is beautiful, and it is much loved by the local community,” Deffenbaugh says. “There is absolutely no reason why, with a bit of effort and foresight, this building cannot be brought back into meaningful use.”
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