The is an accidental piece of history, really, just an ordinary thing that outlasted a lot of other ordinary things and so became an important artifact of its era.
The humble 1948 building, just one story tall and two tiny guest rooms wide, looks positively stately these days, cleaned and painted and moved to its new location at the . Itap a museum object now, not just another rundown relic on .
Lakewood went to great lengths to save the place. Carefully hoisting the structure on a trailer and trucking it from the original location just east of Kipling Street to the town park 4miles away — heading south on Simms Street, making a hairpin sort of turn onto Alameda Avenue and a right onto Wadsworth Boulevard.
Then it spent a few years in waiting as it was made ready forvisitors, shoring up its wooden frame, adding a few present-day safety features, such assmoke detectors and fire alarms and putting in a handicapped ramp. The preservation effort included salvaging heating units from other old Colfax motels and painting them to match what was originally in the Estes.
It was a heroic effort to save a building that a lot of other towns might not even have noticed. Preservation efforts across Colorado tend to focus on the state’s mining history, its pioneer homesteads or the grand hotels and opera houses of the early statehood days.
But Lakewood understands its real roots and has made a goal of exalting them. For a town that was plotted out in the 1880s and incorporated in its present form in 1969, a 68-year-old building serves as a time-sensitive heirloom.
“We do all we can to honor and preserve Lakewood’s 20th century history, which is essentially when Lakewood grew up,” said administratorJeff Murray.
It would be unfair to call the mid-20th century Lakewood’s glory days. The town is doing just fine in 2016, growing, prospering and .
But the stretch of Colfax it contains was a center of Colorado’s soul in the post-World War II era. There was no Interstate 70 back then and barely a U.S.6. Colfax Avenue was the bustling thoroughfare that got an automobile-crazy country from flat Denver to the Rocky Mountain foothills.
The area, then an unincorporated section of Jefferson County, built a whole economy around the busy tourist turnpike. Scores of restaurants and motels went up, including the Trail’s End, the Siesta, the Del Norte Hotel and Monterey Lodge.
Among the mom-and-pops who staked a claim there were Clifford and Christine Estes, who put up two of the two-room structures and offered four more rooms in another building, where the couple lived themselves. The buildings are simple and stripped-down in the no-frills manner of modern architecture. The most notable feature is probably the giant carports attached to each room, which allowed guests to keep their treasured Fords and Buicks as safe as their children during a single-night stopover.
Lakewood historians don’t know every detail about how the business operated — no one recognized it would be important one day — but there are interesting details. Advertisements show the inn charged as little as $4 a night and that its phone number was BE3-5297. There are photos from over the years, showing how the place began to deteriorate, like many of its competitors, just a decade or two later as the new transportation routes steered customers in other directions.
The pictures show that there was a red-and-blue electric sign out front letting motorists know if there were vacancies for the night. Itap gone, but Lakewood is having it re-created and installed in front of the relocated building, which was donated to the town by Michael Bettmann, who owns the Colorado Frame Company, the business that now stands on the original site.
The motel takes itsplace among the other structures Lakewood has preserved and moved to the Heritage Center. Itap a few steps away from the preserved Ethel’s Beauty Salon, across the street from the Peerless Gas Station, the 1950s shell of an old Texaco franchise that will be the next structure preserved.
The buildings are the opposite of grand; handsome for sure, functional and highly stylized in a 20th century way. But the story they tell is of an ordinary town, with modest ambitions, maybe not the finest in the West but certainly full of hard-working people doing all they could to livewhat was then the American dream.
“To fully understand the past, you have to save buildings like this,” Murray said.
The Estes Motel site opens to the public permanently at 6:30 p.m. June 11 as part of Lakewood’sannual Rockin’ Block Party. It’s free to visit. The Heritage Center is at 801 S. Yarrow St. For more information, call 303-987-7848 or visit
