Strasburg – In this small, dusty plains town, the main thoroughfare is as anonymous as a blade of grass. Men load seed in the backs of growling diesel pickups as their wives load children into back seats. The Lucky Strike Lanes bowling alley is packed every weeknight during league season.
Certainly, the town’s residents say, hardly anything noteworthy happens on the road here, a bit odd considering that the road is East Colfax Avenue.
Town life on this portion of Colfax is vastly different from the bustle out west in Aurora, Denver and Lakewood. There are no prostitutes or drug deals, just one- and two-story buildings, no stoplights and a few children eating ice cream.
“We’re Colfax, but we’re not that Colfax,” says Tom Boyle, 54, who works at the co-op feed and grain store along the avenue and is a retired Aurora police officer.
But as hundreds of new residents started moving to this unincorporated bedroom community off Interstate 70 beginning five years ago, the folks here faced a dilemma. While more people were living in the area 30 miles outside Denver, business was virtually stagnant.
And so was East Colfax.
Now, Strasburg’s eight-block swath of downtown Colfax is undergoing a revival. While smaller in scale than efforts in the cities, the work nonetheless is as important to the people who live here, says Charlotte Winklepleck, who co-owns the bowling alley with her husband.
“Colfax is our main street,” she says. “It’s our life.”
A plan and a purpose
The revitalization effort started with a few grassroots meetings. Then came painting, planting, piped-in music and two festivals.
Most of the materials for the job were purchased locally, which townspeople say is a testament to their plan: If Colfax is to be revitalized, the community has to do it together.
The effort started with a few meetings, then a few hundred dollars’ worth of new paint on 50-year-old buildings. Then a shack on the eastern edge of Colfax was torn down and turned into a carwash. Trees were planted along parts of the street. The gift shop got new mocha- brown stucco, and local women offered to paint flowers and bushes on the facade.
And there are festivals, one in the summer and one in the winter. A sound system was wired to the wooden light posts, and music is piped intermittently onto the avenue. A Valley Bank & Trust opened on the site of a former gas station, and bank employees bake cookies every Friday for Colfax business owners. A bar on one end of the street was converted into a dentist’s office, and a strip mall with a Mexican restaurant and a flower shop opened on the other end.
“It just needed a little scrubbing and some polish,” says Allen Holcomb, who has owned the town hardware store on Colfax for more than 30 years.
The hard work appears to be working for Strasburg, which is divided by the Arapahoe-Adams county border. While a 2004 population count put the town at 1,500 residents, community leaders say that number has easily doubled in the last two years, and retail sales have outpaced that growth.
Sales from 2003 to 2005 on the Arapahoe County side have soared. In that time frame, retail sales nearly quadrupled, from $57,300 to $190,700, according to state records.
The idea that Colfax could reshape itself with a modest grassroots effort is in stark contrast to the work in Colfax Avenue’s other cities, where special redevelopment districts and zoning changes, not to mention millions of dollars in investments, must be realized to revive the street.
“It’s an exciting time to be here,” Winklepleck, 55, says, “and we all take pride that we have addresses that say ‘East Colfax.”‘
‘Colfax … hasn’t died’
Strasburg residents are proud to claim the Colfax Avenue name. They plan to launch a website to promote their main street.
While Colfax Avenue is commonly considered to run east-west along U.S. 40 through the Denver metro area, the road extends much farther. As U.S. 40 bends east of Aurora and follows I-70, U.S. 36 picks up the Colfax name as a virtually seamless route to Watkins, Bennett and Strasburg. Farther east in Byers, some residents continue to use East Colfax in their addresses, though the name is rarely, if ever, used beyond the town.
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In honor of the Colfax Marathon, a look at the history and influence of this storied avenue – with multimedia galore! Click to launch |
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When those communities took the Colfax name is anyone’s guess. Originally named in Denver for former Vice President Schuyler Colfax soon after the Civil War, the avenue has had the moniker in Strasburg for at least 80 years.
“Years ago, people maybe felt like they wanted to be closer to Denver,” says Cliff Smith, curator of the town’s Comanche Crossing Museum, which celebrates the last link in the nation’s coast-to-coast rail network 136 years ago.
There is no irony, he says, that a road Playboy magazine once called the “longest, wickedest street” in America runs through a town that has a “United We Stand … Go America!” banner festooned on a building.
“I really don’t think people here think much about” Colfax’s history, Smith says. “It’s just the way things have always been.”
Inside Becca Faulkner’s coffeehouse, a constant stream of teenagers and parents order mochas and lattes. Faulkner rattles off the ever- growing list of Colfax improvements, and the fact that the town’s Christmas festival “has real, live reindeer.”
The most recent addition to the Colfax plan, she says, is the Strasburg Businesses Growing Strong group that wants to attract even more new residents downtown. A website will be launched touting attractions from the spa to the tattoo parlor.
“Colfax is a name that hasn’t died out here,” says Faulkner, who also owns a used-book store and plans to open an Internet cafe. “We want this to be the best part (of the avenue).”
Too much success?
The hundreds of homes being built have residents worrying how much their town will change with so many newcomers.
Despite the goodwill and the hopes that have been raised, there are fears that the town did too well reshaping its main road.
Hundreds of homes are being built on every side of Strasburg, attracting former city dwellers who want urban comforts on the wide-open prairie.
A new grocery store is opening in nearby Bennett, and there’s talk that one is being planned on Strasburg’s western edge. A larger grocer, people worry, might ruin the town’s corner market and potentially lead to big-box retailers.
“What we have here is a good thing,” says Holcomb. “(But) someday we’re going to have to face those corporate stores and the changes that they’ll bring.”
Outside Holcomb’s hardware store, it seems the change already is underway. On a recent weekend, a Nissan Frontier XE is parked beside a Ford F-350 Power Stroke Diesel; and a teen’s bass-pumping hip-hop drowns out the wind chimes.
The people here so far are taking the change in stride. They plan to welcome newcomers as best they can, knowing they might be extending a hand to the very people who could indirectly transform their avenue.
“It’s a different world out here,” says Boyle, the feed-store worker. “But everyone wants a part of it.”
Staff writer Robert Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-1282 or rsanchez@denverpost.com.
