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South Pearl Street fairy doors fascinate neighborhood with whimsical miniatures

If you’re walking along South Pearl Street in Denver, keep your eyes peeled along the trims of doors.

There, where the street meets the walls of storefronts, are entrances into tiny worlds.

From shrunken storefronts with a purple door and gray brick to hobbit-style moss hideaways, you’ll find nearly two dozen “fairy doors” along the neighborhood’s main street.

“It’s very whimsical, but it also creates a little scene, and having the opportunity to offer that in a public setting has been a wonderful thing to be able to do,” said Denver miniature artist Scott Hildebrandt, who created five of the hidden scenes.

Hildebrandt, who creates dioramas with repurposed vintage items, recalls when he was approached to work on the project back in 2021 by then-Denver City Councilman Jolon Clark. The street was already home to 13 fairy doors installed in 2017, and community leaders wanted to expand the fairy neighborhood with the help of local artists.

“Really the idea when they approached me, it was kind of a fun thing to to hide things that people could find, because the whole idea of the fairy doors is that you never know where they’re going to be,” Hildebrandt said. “You just have to kind of keep an eye out for it unless you have a map that shows you where it is, and that’s when I got really excited about it.”

Collaborating with the shop owners of the storefronts his art would be placed, it took the artist about seven months to complete his micro worlds, several lit by solar power.

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“I had to come up with just five different vessels that I felt that could withstand outside,” he said. “Once you come up with the vessel, the fun part then for me is using my imagination and coming up with a theme.”

The theme: nautical. As for the vessels, Hildebrandt used his surroundings as inspiration. Take the piece he did outside of Hazel Bar, for example, where he stumbled upon a series of outside light fixtures — sparking an idea.

“She had these old light sconces that were outside, with fixtures that were blurred out and not used, they just still had the old white globes, and I’m like, ‘Well, what if I take one of those globes and I replace it with a white acrylic globe, and I make a fishbowl out of it and put tropical fish in it and light it up at night,’” he said.

A few doors down at Sexy Pizza is another mini installation in an old mailbox. This one like a scene out of “Jaws,” he said.

The magic of these mini sets and scenes extends beyond the installations. It brings the community together, with many families visiting the street to hunt down the different whimsical displays, almost like a scavenger hunt.

“When I build these little scenes, I feel like people kind of revert back to their childhood,” Hildebrandt said. “And it just creates such a warm memory in most people’s hearts that I think they stop, they realize what it is instantly. I love to watch people’s reactions.”

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