“Greeley is where cows go to die and people go to kill them,” writes Dave Gilmartin in his new book, “The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America.” “It is a society based on slaughter, and the smell of death hangs heavily in the air.”
Slaughter. Death. Smell. Worst.
Poor Greeley.
Gilmartin selected 50 places to shellac in the book, from Philadelphia to Dodge City to Albuquerque. He’d never been to Greeley but polled Coloradans via websites like Craigslist for tips about especially unfortunate Colorado towns. All signs pointed to Greeley.
“It was a huge vote getter,” says the New York writer. “I couldn’t stop hearing about it. People were telling me, ‘Greeley, Greeley, Greeley.”‘
They told him quite a bit about the aroma. They led him to describe the town as ideal for “men with mullets,” “women with BIG hair,” and carnivores, among other things. Cultural highlights? “Death metal goat roasts” and “E. coli.”
Harsh stuff for a place originally founded in 1867 as “Union Colony,” a utopian agricultural community financed and championed by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley.
The town today doesn’t pretend it’s utopia – a recent headline in newspapers across the state publicized a big methamphetamine bust in the city, for example. But is it one of the worst places to live in America?
“We really are a community with a can-do spirit,” says Tom Selders, the fit, barrel-chested mayor who looks a bit like Johnny Carson.
While sitting in his extremely neat and spartan mayor’s office, in a round building formerly serving as a bank, Selders rattled off the city’s advantages:
Voter-approved taxes that finance everything from a new ice-skating rink to a “family funplex,” with miniature golf, pools and more. Only an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, and about half that far to the foothills. Scant traffic. A growing population that today dwells around 85,000 people.
“It’s a very comfortable place to live,” he said. “Lots of opportunities. People don’t often talk about our climate, but they should.”
The town, he says, doesn’t get much snow, but it does receive plenty of sun.
What about the smell?
“In the 1950s there was a bigger odor problem” because of the location of feedlots, said Selders, who grew up in Greeley. “Most of the time (now) we are upwind and at a higher elevation” than the feedlots and processing plant.
The smell is the source of “chuckles” to longtime Greeleyites, said Kris Cazer with the Greeley Convention and Visitors’ Center. In fact, she said, the infamous odor is only occasional. Fleeting.
“Venice can smell really bad,” she offered. Gilmartin, she said, is “jumping on that funny little thing.”
She added: “Do you smell anything?”
During an afternoon wander around the old part of Greeley, with its attractive University of Northern Colorado campus and its density of historic housing stock decorated with grand old trees, several people asked the same thing: “Do you smell anything?”
Well, yes.
It smelled like growing up in a certain Pennsylvania small town in the 1970s, when corn fields and grazing cows ribboned the sprouting subdivisions. It smelled like neighborhoods anywhere pressed close to farms.
It smelled like agriculture. It smelled neither good nor bad. At least not on one October afternoon.
“The smell varies; it varies with the seasons,” said Daniel Obluda, 20, a music education major at the University of Northern Colorado who grew up in Arvada. “Most of the time it doesn’t smell. But other times, it’s really potent.”
“You get maybe one whiff a month, if that,” said Kate Mahoney, 21, another Arvada native who now studies marketing at the university. “It’s really not that bad.”
Obluda said before he moved to Greeley, people fixated on the odor, and told him Greeley “was an isolated, terrible environment. But the more I live up here, the more my opinion changes for the better.”
Jennifer Dever, 21, has spent her whole life in Greeley, and like the rest of the Greeleyites interviewed, doesn’t much notice a bad smell.
She waitresses and tends bar at her father’s restaurant, Randy’s Pub & Grill, and works as a massage therapist.
“I love the atmosphere here,” she said. “A lot of people want to go away to college, but they’re coming back, in many cases, to go to college. They miss it.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
THE SMELL OF HOME
In his book “The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America,” Dave Gilmartin characterizes Greeley in the most unflattering terms.
The climate? Odoriferous.
The town is ideal for “Carnivores, Farm Folk, Slaughterhouse Workers, Men with Mullets, Women with BIG Hair, People Who Don’t Mind Smelling Like (Manure), Washed-up Cowboys, Republicans.” Cultural highlights? “E. coli, Death Metal Goat Roasts, Broncos Games, Duck Hunting, Quarter Night at the Local Saloon, Rodeos, Road Trips to Denver, the Outlet Mall in Loveland.”
“The best that can be said about present-day Greeley is that some days don’t smell quite as bad as others,” he wrote. Some Greeleyites think he got it all wrong. Here’s what they trumpet about their town:
- The Greeley Independence Stampede, which features the largest July 4th rodeo in the nation.
- Union Colony Civic Center
- Flourishing voter-financed public art
- The Poudre River Trail
- Vibrant community centers
- The University of Northern Colorado
- Aims Community College
- Affordable housing, with a median house price of $196,000
- Its ranking as fastest-growing metro area between 2000 and 2003, according to U.S. Census Bureau. The Census says the region grew from 181,000 to 211,000 during the time period.
- The new Greeley History Museum
- The new Greeley Ice Haus (an indoor, NHL-sized ice rink)
- One of the lowest sales tax rates in northern Colorado, at 3.46 percent
- Easy access to the Rocky Mountains
- Great views of the Front Range
- 340 days of sunshine a year
