After reading the article in the business section of Sunday’s Post about downtown Salida, it struck me that there are certain aspects of that area which require further explanation, lest visitors get confused.
As originally laid out in 1880 by the Central Colorado Improvement Co. (the land-development subsidiary of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad), Salida was what American geographers call a “Midwestern T-town.” The upright on the T is the town’s main street. The crossbar is the railroad tracks, and their intersection is the railroad depot. Think of Union Station at the head of 17th Street in Denver, and you’ve got the idea.
Salida, however, no longer has a depot across the Arkansas River at the end of its main drag, F Street. Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz had the depot torn down in 1985, when he owned the railroad. There’s a turn-around where the depot used to sit, thereby simplifying matters for the kids who drive up and down F Street on many evenings.
Two blocks up from where the depot used to stand, at the intersection of First and F streets, is the “town stoplight.” Salida now has three, but the other two are relatively new, and they’re out on Highway 50.
There’s a thoroughfare between First Street and the river. Logically, it should be Zero Street, but Granby is the only place I’ve ever seen with a Zero Street. Even though many people call it “Sackett Street,” it’s actually Sackett Avenue.
Or so the street signs say. Originally, it was Front Street, and it was a notorious tenderloin back in the day. That day lasted until about 1950, when District Attorney John Stump Witcher closed Laura Evans’ whorehouse. Across the street were “the cribs,” operated by the more-affordable working girls.
Local newspapers a century ago frequently recounted tales of yet another “denizen of the Front Street Resort District” who “took the fatal final draught of laudanum, like so many of her fellow soiled doves.”
At one time in the late 1940s, Front Street west of F Street was Front Street, but east of F Street, it was Sackett Avenue. Then they all became Sackett. But when and how did this happen? I once spent most of a week poring through old newspapers, directories and city records, as well as asking old-timers. I learned nothing definitive and found nothing official.
I suspected that Front Street had become so notorious that the better element of the community, in the hope of improving the town’s reputation and attracting some economic development, had changed its name. After all, Market Street in Denver once held considerable ill-fame as Holladay Street, and sedate Second Street in Leadville had been infamous State Street, flanked by Hop Alley and Stillborn Alley. That was back when Americans were chaste and drug-free, so I can’t imagine where those names came from.
Anyway, downtown Salida got more respectable as you went up F Street from the depot; by the time you got to Second Street, there were department stores and banks. We used to joke that Salida had everything that any other city had, except that here you could go from skid row to the financial district in just two blocks.
For many years after I moved here in 1978, downtown Salida’s directions confused me. They’re not even close to being aligned with the compass (about 38 degrees off), and yet we have a North F Street (the merchants prefer that to the vernacular “Lower F Street”) as well as East and West Sackett, First, Second, etc.
Eventually I realized that because Salida was a railroad town, its east and west were railroad east and west, not geographic east and west. East is the direction of an eastbound train, that is, toward Cañon City, even if a train here would be heading south by the compass. West is toward Leadville, even if that city is really north of Salida, since that’s where westbound trains went. These directions persist even though the trains haven’t run through here since 1999; the tracks remain in place, rusting and overgrown.
Some years ago, Martha described Salida as “a company town without a company.” But for some people, a pleasant backwater just isn’t enough, not when there’s a chance of getting closer to the mainstream of American enterprise.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
