Aspen – After 56 years, Charlie Paterson finally turned over the keys to his landmark Boomerang Lodge last week, having watched this town transform from a rough-hewn mining camp into perhaps the glitziest resort town in the country.
The three lots he purchased in 1949 for $750 sold for $7.5 million in June, and the 76-year-old now will ease into retirement as an enduring mainstay in a community that has changed so dramatically from those early days.
“You have to recognize changes happen everywhere, and this place is no different, although it is special,” Paterson said.
Through it all – the constant come and go of short-timers and the flood of tourists and the astronomical explosion of real- estate prices – Aspen somehow has retained its sense of community through people like Paterson.
And so he was joined by several hundred Aspen locals on a beautiful late-summer evening last week in Paepke Park – named after a founding family – where they lined up for free hot dogs and hamburgers and gathered for a special community portrait.
“It’s a way of saying, ‘This is who we are,”‘ said Georgia Hanson, executive director of the Aspen Historical Society, which organized the event along with the City Council.
“The thing that’s important to me – and I think it’s important to the population base here – is we have this solid, wonderful community that goes on, in spite of influences from the outside.”
She admittedly chose her words carefully in an effort not to offend the tourists, newcomers and owners of second homes who visit Aspen only for a couple of weeks each year and drive, in Hanson’s words, “the Hummer that’s too wide for the Jeep trail.”
But she said even some of the town’s most famous celebrities – Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Jack Nicholson and Kevin Costner – are considered “locals” because they “embrace the same values that we do” (although none appeared at the picnic).
With newborns and their parents lined up in front and everyone else arranged chronologically by the decade in which they arrived, the crowd reflected Aspen today, documented for perpetuity.
Hanson acknowledged that one reason for staging the photo – an every-five-years event – is to drum up support for the historical society, which has a measure on the ballot in November to create a special district and collect property taxes.
The measure would raise about $477,000 for the organization annually through a property tax of 0.3 mills, “or $119 for a $5 million home,” Hanson said, putting the costs in Aspen terms.
The difficulty of breaking into the local real-estate market, in fact, is one of the major reasons that Aspen has struggled to bring in new permanent residents.
Demographers estimate Aspen’s population, at 5,717, has dropped by about 200 since the 2000 census, making it one of the few Colorado resorts with a declining population.
Many workers commute from the “down valley” communities of Basalt and Carbondale – some from as far away as Rifle – while others wait in line for deed-restricted employee housing that severely limits the appreciation on their investment in what has been termed the most expensive real-estate market in the nation.
Scott Kendrick, 37, who arrived in Aspen in 1994 as a ski bum, called himself lucky to be able to afford a free-market house after he and his wife, Alex, bought a package-and-shipping business.
“It was already expensive when I got here,” he said, wheeling his single-speed “townie” bike that towed his toddler, Cooper, in a buggy. “A lot of my friends were forced down valley.”
Although often lost in the flood of tourists and transient ski bums, real locals can still be found at events such as the community picnic, on the ski slopes and at games in the local softball league, said Mayor Helen Klanderud.
She arrived in Aspen in 1971.
“You see them at church. If you have a child in school, you see them there. You see them at the grocery store,” she said, pausing from serving burgers to a long line of familiar faces. “We do a lot of things that from the outside, you may not see.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
