The city of Denver has been bedazzling City Hall with thousands of holiday lights for more than 100 years. 

And while the Mile High City may have gotten its original “spark” from a local electrician, David Dwight Sturgeon, who devised a way to dip light bulbs in red and green paint and string them on an evergreen outside his home on 34th Street, it was another electrician who would take the bright new idea to then-Denver Mayor Dewey Bailey.

North Denver native Johnny Malpiede, a city electrician born in 1891, is credited with creating the first illuminated tree in Civic Center Park around 1917, according to reports published by the Denver Public Library and Rocky Mountain News.

The public response to the tree was positive, and the idea grew over the years, with evergreen branches added to city lamp posts. 

The concept of outdoor holiday lighting first appeared in the Civic Center area with Malpiede swapping out the standard white globes for red and green ones, starting a holiday lighting tradition the city still enjoys today.

By 1926, Malpiede convinced Mayor Benjamin Stapleton to let him also decorate the city building, and sometime after Denver’s current City Hall opened in 1932, the lights became an official city project.

However, logistics for the tree proved problematic.

Before the tree idea rally took off, workers had to go into the mountains to harvest a tree and bring it back to the park.

The rough ride back to the city often damaged the tree, so Malpiede suggested “building” a tree around an 85-foot telephone pole, which he got from the local power company.

“This pole has 28 rows of holes and five holes in each row,“ Virginal Malpiede wrote in a Dec. 15, 1955, article in The Rocky Mountain News. “Mr. Malpiede says the men start to build the tree from the top. They use 4,500 branches of all sizes to make the tree.”

The two-fronted star at the top of the tree had 100 lights on each side, and more than 1,200 pounds of wire were used to hold the branches together. 

“Mr. Malpiede says each year the design at the bottom of the tree is changed, she wrote. “City employees make all the decorations.”

At one time in the mid-1920s, live reindeer were brought to the Civic Center and penned up in the fountain area in front of the Voorhies Memorial.

By the late 1950s, newspaper reports stated the city’s holiday display contained 17 miles of wiring and between 22,000 and 25,000 bulbs. 

It required 12 tons of evergreen boughs for the manmade Christmas tree for the Civic Center. 

However, over the years, Denver has continued its annual holiday lighting ceremony, with the mayor throwing the switch on the municipal building every year except for 1956, when Mayor William Nichloson was hospitalized.

His wife stood in for him at the event. 

The unique lighting attracts visitors from all over the world.

Denver also has a long-standing tradition of leaving holiday lights up after Christmas to keep things festive-looking and welcome visitors to the annual National Western Stock Show.

The city-wide tradition is explained in a Dec. 29, 1955, article published in The Steamboat Pilot. 

Fast forward to the 21st century, Denver’s current tree — a 7-story-tall, 39-foot-diameter conical structure — features light shows every 15 minutes, choreographed to multicultural holiday music on a pixel LED-technology tree.

It was first installed at Sculpture Park in Denver in 2019. The tree moved to the then-16th Street Mall in 2020 and 2021, then to Civic Center in 2022.

This year, the Mile High Tree can be found on the Tivoli Quad at the Auraria Campus. 

ILMEX Illumination, a decorative lighting production company in Spain, created the tree. Madrid-based Brut Deluxe handled the lighting design using pixel-mapping technology.

The tree stands 10 feet taller than the Rockefeller Center tree and features 60,000 LED lights.