A LOOK BACK

• Timeline Slide Show

• Reminiscing about Boulder 1
• Reminiscing about Boulder 2
• Reminiscing about Boulder 3

• Boulder Comes of Age

• Pearl Street Celebrates 25 Years as a Pedestrain Mall

• Local Musicians Make Music and History

By Silvia Pettem

As with most of us, Boulder’s earliest settlers came here for the mountains—although they were more interested in what was buried in them. In fall of 1858, a group of prospectors pitched their tents near Red Rocks at the mouth of Boulder Canyon. A small band of Arapaho was camped nearby, so the newcomers butchered an ox and invited them to a feast. Over dinner, a tribe member related a dream in which a great flood carried off the Native Americans but avoided the prospectors. Supposedly, this was a face-saving way to acknowledge the prospectors were here to stay.

The miners soon realized the gold flakes they’d found in Boulder Creek came from an upstream source. In February of 1859 the mild winter turned bitter, prompting the prospectors to pursue an alternate plan. “We thought that as the weather would not permit us to mine, we would lay out and commence to build what may be an important town,” wrote Alfred A. Brookfield, who would become the first president of the Boulder City Town Co. association. Thus, Boulder City was organized on Feb. 22, 1859.

At the time, wheat flour was almost as valuable as gold. A number of prospectors came down from the hills to homestead farms in Boulder City and nearby Valmont, a few miles to the east. Hungry miners and livestock provided a ready market for their crops.

Education was important to early settlers and Colorado’s first schoolhouse—with windows made of picture-frame glass from family photographs—was constructed in Boulder City in 1860, when the town was part of the Nebraska Territory. The following year, during the first session of the newly formed Colorado Territorial Legislature, Boulder County’s representative introduced a bill to establish a public university in Boulder. Fund-raising and property acquisition took several years, but the University Building—now Old Main—was completed in time for CU’s opening day in September 1877.

Despite its developing economy and infant university, Boulder City was still just a small frontier town of 3,000 people. Residents hoped a railroad might spur growth. In 1873, the Colorado Central and the Denver & Boulder Valley railroads came to town. Within a few years, residents could board a train in Boulder and transfer to rail lines that traversed the continent. At various times, as many as 16 different railroad and streetcar lines crisscrossed Boulder City, which gave birth to tourism.

Railroads gave Americans newfound mobility, and out-of-towners couldn’t resist Boulder’s scenery. In an 1878 account, journalist Helen Hunt Jackson compares her horseback ride down Boulder Canyon to the allegro of a symphony, writing, “If I tell it breathless, it is because I tell it true. And if I could tell it really true, the words would leap and break into foam like the creek.” She added, “I hold the Bowlder [sic] people lucky, not in that gold and silver are brought down to their streets every day, but that they can walk of an afternoon up into Bowlder Canyon.”

Healthy Beginnings

Along with tourists, health seekers began to visit Boulder for refreshment of mind, body and spirit. To serve them, the Seventh-Day Adventists under John Harvey Kellogg (of cereal fame) opened the Boulder-Colorado Sanitarium in 1896. Now the site of Boulder Community Hospital Mapleton Center, the sanitarium was labeled as a resort with the features of a hospital, religious retreat, country club and spa in an atmosphere of reform and asceticism. Sanitarium doctors even prescribed health foods such as wheat flakes, granola, “cereal coffee” and zwieback. A full-page ad for the sanitarium in the Colorado State Business Directory announced: “No Consumptive or Tubercular Patients are Received.” Sanitarium resorts were popular with the wealthy in the late 19th century and ideal guests included overweight women and overworked men.

But health wasn’t the only reason people came to Boulder. Attracted by the mountain scenery and cool summer evenings, a group of Texas educators selected Boulder as the ideal site for a cultural and educational Chautauqua retreat, named after the original near New York’s Lake Chautauqua. Hundreds of similar retreats catered to Americans’ voracious appetite for education and entertainment. Boulder voters overwhelmingly approved a $20,000 bond issue to purchase land for a Chautauqua and build the Auditorium (originally the Tabernacle) and Dining Hall. The Boulder Chautauqua opened in 1898, attracting speakers such as evangelist Billy Sunday, “silver-tongued orator” William Jennings Bryan, social reformist Jane Addams and composer John Philip Sousa, among others. It also offered entertainment including magicians, silent movies, climbing and hiking clubs, and classes in languages, math and science.

The turn of the century saw Boulder evolve from a rustic town into a sophisticated city. During the 1890s a tree-planting effort resulted in the venerable maples on Mapleton Hill and elsewhere. The Curran Opera House (now Boulder Theater) opened in 1906, showcasing Shakespearean plays, operas, local productions and motion pictures. The beautiful Hotel Boulderado opened in 1909, offering visitors upscale accommodations. With the university’s growth and Chautauqua’s popularity, city fathers began promoting Boulder as “the Athens of the West.”

In 1907, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie added to Boulder’s cultural treasure trove by funding the construction of the city’s first public library. Carnegie Library, a replica of a then-recently unearthed Greek temple, now houses Boulder Public Library’s local history collection including oral histories, tapes, papers, photographs and other materials on permanent loan from Boulder Historical Society.

The “Better Boulder Party” was also voted into power in 1907. Its mission was to “clean up” the town by shutting down the last of the brothels and banning saloons, in effect bringing prohibition to Boulder nine years earlier than the rest of the state and 13 years earlier than the rest of the nation.

In 1908, the Boulder City Improvement Association hired Harvard-trained landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to answer the question: “What physical improvements within the reach of the city will help to make it increasingly convenient, agreeable and generally satisfactory as a place in which to live and work?” Two years later, with metal-processing mills lining Boulder Creek west of 6th Street, Olmsted outlined Boulder’s original beautification plan that called for it to become a city of pleasant neighborhoods surrounded by gardens and small farms, and to avoid catering to tourists and industrialization.

Growing Pains

Although the city continued to try and attract new residents, Olmstead’s stand against major downtown industries made jobs scarce. To encourage growth, Chamber of Commerce representative Eben G. Fine traveled nationwide to show slides of the local attractions. Boulder was billed as “The Place to Live” and the “Gateway to the Glaciers.” Throughout the 1920s, tourists were whisked from trains to automobiles to horses’ backs to gaze at the Continental Divide’s giant snowfields and at Arapaho Glacier, which the city purchased as part of its watershed in 1929.

Tourism was brisk in the 1920s, but the Great Depression and World War II kept people closer to home for a couple of decades, during which time the “sleepy little college town” of Boulder maintained a population of slightly less than 20,000. As soon as the war ended, however, veterans cashed in on the GI Bill’s free tuition and flocked to CU. The early 1950s saw a period of vigorous growth—especially in scientific sectors—as the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) relocated from Washington, D.C., and Rocky Flats Atomic Energy Project opened south of town. These employers created a housing demand that was met by the development of Martin Acres and Table Mesa. To address consumer needs, Basemar Shopping Center opened in 1956, followed by Table Mesa Shopping Center in 1961 and Crossroads Mall in 1963.

Along with people and jobs came cars. Fifty years ago, the Boulder-Denver Turnpike (U.S. Highway 36) opened as a four-lane toll road with a fee of 25 cents. No longer did motorists have to drive north on U.S. 287, then west on Arapahoe Avenue to reach Boulder.

Postwar expansion also created a concern for growth management. In 1957, planners adopted a “Guide for Growth for Boulder and Vicinity” that included population projections and a resource assessment. The study noted the university’s projected development, the importance of government laboratories and the anticipated growth in technical and research industries. In 1959, citizens bent on preserving Boulder’s mountain backdrop initiated the Blue Line charter amendment, which prohibited water and sewer line extensions at elevations above 5,750 feet.

Just two years later, voters approved a Blue Line exemption for another government laboratory: the National Center for Atmospheric Research on Table Mesa. NCAR officials pledged the building would be environmentally sensitive and the area would remain a natural preserve. Famed architect I. M. Pei was hired to design a facility that would harmonize with the dramatic Flatirons backdrop. During NCAR’s construction, the city also purchased and preserved Enchanted Mesa and in 1967 Boulder became the first American city to establish a tax dedicated to the acquisition and maintenance of open space lands.

Mapping the Future

Between 1960 and 1970, Boulder’s population doubled from 33,000 to 66,000. To control explosive growth, the city and county worked together to develop “a vision of the future.” The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 1970, offered a general design for land-use patterns. Its objective was “to seek a balance which respects our environment and accommodates new growth in a harmonious manner, preserving what is good in the community and redeveloping what is poor.” In 1971 Boulder voters passed a height ordinance that prohibited new buildings taller than 55 feet—the maximum height of mature trees. In 1977, a revised Comprehensive Plan delineated city limits, defined annexation areas and designated rural tracts.

During the 1970s, the city also began preserving Boulder’s past. The controversial 1972 demolition of 99-year-old Central School (at the site of Boulder’s original 1860 schoolhouse) prompted the creation of Historic Boulder Inc. Two years later, the Historic Preservation ordinance was adopted to protect historic structures through individual landmarking and the
creation of historic districts.

Growth remained an ongoing concern throughout the 1970s. In 1976, Boulder voters approved the Danish Plan (named for its author, Boulder County Commissioner Paul Danish), which restricted the number of city-issued building permits. An exemption was made for the residential areas of Shanahan Ridge in south Boulder and Wonderland Hills in north Boulder.

In 1977 Boulder’s original commercial district—Pearl Street between 11th and 15th streets—was revitalized as a pedestrian mall. Crossroads Mall expanded four years later.

By the 1990s, vacant land was scarce in Boulder. Residential construction was outpaced by an increase in jobs, many in high-tech fields. Many Boulder workers could no longer afford to live in town so they moved to surrounding communities, which increased Boulder’s commuters. In 1993 the city initiated the Integrated Planning Project to examine the trade-offs of growth, affordable housing, transportation, the economy and the environment. The project’s motto became “What’s best for what’s left” and led to the 1995 Nonresidential Growth Management System, which limited nonresidential square footage to 2,200,000 square feet. Surrounded by greenbelt and with little land left for expansion, city planners are now addressing in-fill development and mixed uses of retail and residential space.

According to the 2000 census, Boulder’s current population is 96,727, which includes 25,000 CU students. Although NCAR and NIST are still major employers, the university is now the county’s largest employer, followed by high-tech companies including IBM, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, Centrobe and Ball Aerospace.

Boulder has changed dramatically in the 144 years since those gold seekers camped at Red Rocks, yet it honors its roots: culture, education, the mountain backdrop and a small-town feel. Many a newcomer still comes over the hill, looks down at Boulder and knows it’s “home.” So we lay out a feast and acknowledge that these folks are also here to stay.

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