Antique & Vintage Postcards

Rising in confident Romanesque Revival brick above the young streets of Denver, Colorado, St. Luke's Hospital commands this early twentieth-century hand-colored postcard with the gravitas of an institution built to last — and it did, serving Denver patients for most of the century before its eventual closure and conversion. The sprawling red-brick complex, with its characteristic mansard-roofed pavilion and arched entrance portico, is shown here in the warm polychrome palette typical of the Illustrated Post Card Company era, the bare-branched trees suggesting an early-spring shoot. St. Luke's was founded in 1881 by Episcopal Bishop John Franklin Spaulding and grew into one of Colorado's premier medical centers; this card, numbered 1927 in the publisher's series, was produced during the hospital's period of greatest expansion. The undivided-back format and one-cent domestic postage instruction date this card firmly to the 1907–1909 window. A wonderful piece of Colorado medical and architectural history in remarkably vivid color.