If you don't like random dudes standing in the street taking pictures of your front porch, then don't move into Ike's house. That's what I always say.

Who's house? Well, not really Ike's house. This is the Doud Mansion. Ike and Mamie Doud were married in the living room here in 1916. The house belonged to John Doud, one of Denver's many highly successful cattlemen, or as I like to call them, cowmen. The cowmen of the West traded herds that were unleashed onto the land that had been the home of Indians and bison just a few years earlier, and collected riches to match the seeming boundlessness of the resource. They purchased spanking new mansions wherever they sprang up. The Doud Mansion was built in 1905 in Denver's new streetcar suburb on the slight hill just east of downtown.

The Doud house was the undisputed star of the neighborhood in the 1950s, as President Ike and Mamie D. would return regularly to Denver for rest and relaxation at her girlhood home. The house was Ike's version of Camp David or the Crawford Ranch. Imagine the scene fifty or so years ago at 750 Lafayette Street. A line of black cars out front, a handful of secret service agents chatting casually with the neighbors. There's Mamie and her mother, Little Mim. There's Ike himself, standing on the porch enjoying a crisp Colorado afternoon and watching the children play on the grass. And who's that there, it's ... it can't be. Oh, but it is. The profile is unmistakable. It's Dick Nixon. So much for the bucolic nature of  that scene.

The mansions of Capitol Hill are all crowded with ghosts but few are quite as Presidential as the spirits over at the Doud Mansion.