The Petroleum Club on 17th Street in downtown Denver was a private club for those in Colorado’s oil industry, and was the place to be if you were a Colorado oilman in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Then in the ’70s and ’80s…not so much. Its home, the 37th and 38th floors of 555 17th Street, became Qwest Tower after having been Anaconda Tower.

In the ’90s, along with the transformation of Petroleum to Pinnacle, came a new kind of oil rush: The dot-com era. With the new economy rearing its silicon head, all kinds of businesses and people were flocking to homes in Denver, homes in Boulder, and the towns in between, a region some called The Wired West, and others called the Silicon Summit. The US-36 corridor and the towns of Westminster, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, and Broomfield were bustling with business venture funding and real estate activity. The Petroleum Club became the Pinnacle Club, a private social club and facility for businesspeople and entrepreneurs. And then…not so much. The Pinnacle Club closed its doors in 2005.

That brings us to today, where we’re seeing a kind of convergence of the old and new. With what some call the Web 2.0 movement, a lot of the same high-tech conversations are picking up where they left off. ConocoPhillips is opening a new global technology center and corporate learning center at the Sun Microsystems/StorageTek site in Louisville. The learning center will handle research and development of renewable energy and high tech carbon fuels recovery. Grand Hyatt renovated the Pinnacle Club and opened it to the public.

And the old Petroleum Club is now the new Petroleum Club, and moved down the street, to 1325 Glenarm Place, downtown Denver.