DENVER — For nearly 30 years, Rocky Mountain PBS operated out of the building at 1089 Bannock St. in Denver. On Monday, Jan. 24, the building’s demolition began.
In March 2020, most Rocky Mountain PBS employees began working from home due to COVID-19 and were never able to return to the Bannock Street building before we moved our operation to the Buell Public Media Center on Arapahoe Street.
Known for colorful murals, meandering hallways and the infamous Mrs. Bird, Bannock—as it was often referred to by Rocky Mountain Public Media staff—was full of television history. Rock Mountain PBS moved into Bannock in 1992. Before that, it was the original home of 9News (KUSA). Channel 9 started broadcasting from Bannock in the early 1950s, back when the station's call letters were KBTV and it broadcasted a mixture of local news, ABC and CBS programming (photos below).
Demolition crews told Rocky Mountain PBS the project of tearing down the building would take about three weeks. One of the workers said Bannock, with its layers and layers of walls, was one of the oddest-built buildings they’d have ever worked on.
But the workers probably don’t know many of the building's little-known secrets. For example: deep in the basement, a massive walk-in safe dates back to the building's use as a Packard car dealership. And, in one of the conference rooms, a large mirror above a fire place conceals a secret storage space that is rumored to have held the previous tenant's libations.
Bannock also included a "tape library" that held almost 16,000 tapes with recordings of past productions. As part of leaving Bannock and decommissioning the library, the tapes were inventoried by Rocky Mountain PBS’ Station's Archived Memories (SAM) team and a digitization process began. To date, hundreds of programs have been digitized and posted to the American Archives of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) site for viewing.
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