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August
13/19, 2002
A Journey to
Central City, Colorado
Played
Out
by Susan Davis
Colorado is my home, sort of. I spent childhood
summers on my grandmother's ranch in the Front Range of the Rockies.
My cousins and I ran in packs, unhindered by grown-ups all day
long, riding horses, fishing, building forts, or hunting for
buried gold bars and Indian treasure. There were only two rules:
wear long pants and never tie a bridled horse. We drank freely
from the creeks ( this was long before the giardia scare), we
stayed out till all hours (before the cougar invasion), and there
were plenty of fish to catch (this was pre-whirling trout). Grunge
reigned. Only once or twice a summer did we cleanup -- when our
grandmother took us over the pass, up winding Clear Creek Canyon
to Central City, into the old mining district and its
beloved, make-believe past. There'd be a picnic at a mountain
overlook, and the opera matinee, and we'd return, slightly cultured,
to our grubby glories.
The coming of opera day prompted a lot
of bathing, ironing and dubious fashion choices. Granny favored
a blue silk dress with a jade brooch at the throat, Jack Purcell
sneakers, and a tennis visor around her sparse top-knot. She
looked pretty good for 85. The rest of us struggled along, ironing
our hair and our dresses and feeling itchy. The big day also
opened the floodgates of family folklore. Central City loomed
large in our family history: a huge gold strike about 30 miles
west of Denver, the camp had been puffed by Horace Greeley in
1859. For a decade, it was almost a metropolis, served by little
Denver, and for a few years the diggings seethed with thousands
of dissatisfied men and women, many of whom succumbed to cholera
or typhus. Yet men grew rich enough to build sumptuous music
halls and hotels.
My grandmother's grandparents arrived
in the 1860s on a civilizing mission, aiming to bring Methodism
and education, law and railroads to the foothills. Or so the
story goes. A different version reminds us that my great-great-grandfather
was assigned by Lincoln to eradicate the Ute and Cheyenne, or
at least move them out of the way a little bit. Civilization
lurched toward genocide at Sand Creek, but I didn't find out
that part of family history until college, when I read Dee Brown's
BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. And there was great-great-gramps,
prominently fingered in the account of the slaughter. I had always
wondered why my great-Aunt Kay mumbled bitterly "None of
it is true..." Now I knew what "it" was, and it
was true.
Like every other hard rock mining town
in the west, Central City was built on the grinding labor of
immigrants and the ruination of land and water. Over the decades
it boomed, crashed and boomed, and my family was involved, one
way or another. Our ranch in the next basin over supplied mine
timbers, potatoes, milk and hay for the town. By 1900, Central
City and Blackhawk were nearly ghost towns. But every time the
gold or silver seemed played out, an engineer found a better
mode of extraction, until finally the deep mines became dangerously
wet and too expensive to pump out. When a drainage and ore tunnel
finally collapsed in 1943, with great loss of life, mining in
Central ended completely.
But Central City and Blackhawk found
another life, an imaginative life. They became fashionable. The
writing of old West history --- gambling men, painted women,
six-gun law --- was rendering the rotting shacks and toxic tailing
piles interesting, even romantic. My great - aunt Anne, a civic
minded, well-educated New Woman, worked with her wealthy friends
to preserve Central's beautiful old opera house, built in the
Second Empire style. In the 1930s, they started an opera festival
there that drew stars from Europe and the Metropolitan. The ghost
town became Denver society's playground, and it struggles to
remain so. Anne is said to have pronounced that the stained tailings
and abandoned ore breakers should be seen as beautiful, not ugly.
What she meant was that the rubble of the dead industry told
a story that deserved appreciation. But it's hard not to think
that the Central City Restoration was an odd kind of compensation
-- giving back high culture in exchange for blood and her father's
scandal. Meanwhile, my grandmother and grandfather, who did not
believe there was such a thing as too much fun, drank and gambled
there during Prohibition. My father and his sister worked there
as opera stagehands. My parents courted there at dances. Thus,
our childhood opera parties were encrusted with stories, part
of a tradition of visiting our family past, a past that somehow
left out crushed miners, brutalized Cheyenne, and the flow of
all that gold back to English investors.
Call it multiple distortions. By the
time I was a kid, Central was full of what we disdainfully called
"tourist traps", knickknack shops, rock hound stores,
and bars that managed to be morally if not quite physically separate
from the opera house. These two sides of town touched in the
bar of the grand Teller House Hotel, which we were always allowed
to visit to view a dark eyed and seductive "Face on the
Bar Room Floor." The woman was rumored to be Challis , "one
of the Walker girls," a friend who visited the family from
back East in the 1930s.
Usually, Granny chose an opera she knew
kids could endure. But not too light. She knew my taste, anyway.
I was impressed by the babies switched at birth in il Trovatore,
awed by the bloody mad scene in Lucia, and tickled by the lubricious
Viceroy of Peru who offers La Perichole anything ("Jewels,
carriage, a title?") If she will surrender her virtue. The
story of Don Giovanni had everything, I thought: Sprightly peasant
lovemaking, aristocratic libertinism, grief, revenge, terror,
Justice. When the statue dragged the Don off into the flames,
I was transported. What could be more fun?
By the time I was in college, Central
City Opera seemed stuffy and faded to me. Apparently, a lot of
other people felt the same way. The festival almost went under.
Then the energy slump of the 1980s hit Denver hard, followed
by a real estate bust. People lost their houses, while the rich
scraped mountaintops for their palaces overlooking the plains.
The small towns of the Front Range fell into ferocious competition
for skiers and tourists, and following the logic of tourism development,
in the late '80s voters were urged to approve bonds for the new
Denver International Airport. In 1991, a statewide referendum
legalized low stakes gambling but limited it to three famous
gold rush towns: Cripple Creek to the south, and tiny Blackhawk
and Central City. My family's reaction was predictable: "Thank
God your grandmother didn't live to see this!" As if we
were not in large part responsible for the romance of the gambling
towns!
And now my own mother was going to fill
Granny's role and take my daughter Lucy to see Benjamin Britten's
Gloriana, in which Elizabeth I has her lover executed for the
good of England and preservation of the dynasty. You can see
this same plot on The Sopranos, but I went along. They needed
a chauffeur to help negotiate Clear Creek Canyon, made more treacherous
now by the traffic jams headed to the casinos. And I'd get to
check out what gambling had done to Central City and Blackhawk.
On a blazing July day, we retraced the
route used by more than a century of tourists: West on old Highway
40, paralleling Interstate 70, under Floyd Hill, scarred with
weekend mansions, to the spot where Soda Creek crashes down into
Clear Creek. We zagged back east on Route 6, between sharp hillsides
lined with cottonwoods, boulder raspberry and willows at the
bottom. Farther up the slopes cling jack pine and Douglas fir,
and cedar facing west. (I remember a lot of fights about which
road to take -- Clear Creek, or the Virginia Canyon, also known
as the "oh my God Road": "Absolutely Not
Virginia Canyon, not with the kids, Mom!") I tell Lucy she
can spot old diggings by looking for the yellow rubble that spills
down into the Creek. Someone said there are fish in Clear Creek
again -- it looks unlikely.
When we pull into Blackhawk, it's unrecognizable.
My mother recalls it as a few shacks and a rusted smelter; but
the casino companies have made the best of the deep gorge by
building an enormous parking garage and vertical casinos up against
the cliffs. With names like the Riviera, the Mardi Gras, and
the Rich Man, strangely, they've been constructed to look like
ore breakers.
Central City seems only a little less
changed. It too has a vertical casino -- Harvey's Wagon Wheel
-- currently owned by Harrah's -- on top of the spot where Green
Russell first found blossom rock. But the upper end of town has
many of the old mercantile stores, foundries, and stables I remember,
mostly shuttered and emptied. Tightly terraced on both sides,
the streets hug the hillsides, held up by beautiful unmortared
yellow granite walls built by the Cornish and Welsh miners. Tiny
carpenter's gothic houses are pushed right up under old mines
and the ruins of other long gone buildings. Rhubarb gone to seed
tumbles down the streets.
Up Eureka Street, past the Boodle Mill,
and out-of-town, we drive to explore the four separate cemeteries
on Negro Hill (Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Anglo, and Catholic),
and make the traditional picnic on Bald Mountain, taking in the
sweep of the Arapahoe Range. And then back down past what's left
of tiny Nevadaville and the Glory Hole, once the largest open
pit gold mine in the world, to drop off the operagoers.
It's a dismal moment when I realize that
Gloriana is four hours long. But, it dawns on me, in that time
I can hike the entire town from up and down, edge to edge, taking
in not only the slot parlors and bars, but more inspiringly the
wonderful riot of old houses, gardens gone wild, grand administrative
buildings, and even the Gilpin County Art Association annual
show. In the Gilpin County Museum, there are one or two good
pieces of art by a miner named Angelo di Benedetti. A longtime
Central resident, di Benedetti hauled old equipment out of the
tunnels and breakers, and welded it into sculptures that look
like rusted jails. Later, his sculpture became radically abstract,
but in di Benedetti's one painting on display, his vision of
the mines as Hell keeps the hard history of Central City alive.
A label says he produced murals of hard rock miners at work for
Denver's Administration of Justice Building, but I don't have
time during this trip to go look for them. No one in my family
can remember having seen the murals, but then my family has usually
managed to stay out of court and jail. Sort of.
Talking to bartenders, musing with museum
docents, I relearn the old real estate story: Central's casinos
are on the ropes because location is everything in the gambling
industry. When the big companies came to woo in 1991, they pitted
the Blackhawk and Central residents, separated only by a mile
of highway, against each other. Blackhawk, more pliant and already
mostly owned by Chinese -- Canadian investors, got the big corporate
contracts. Central City's voters split down the middle. A faction
tied to old Denver wanted to preserve the Victorian character
of the town and fought for growth restriction, keeping the giant
multistory parking structures at bay. The local -- or at least
regional -- business owners wanted gambling; they got casino
permits and converted their gift shops, bars and restaurants
into slot parlors. These are all exactly the same inside; I arouse
suspicion by ordering a Coke and wanting to chat. A woman wearing
hiking boots, who's not drunk and not gambling -- a true anomaly.
One bartender proudly shows me an autographed photo of Connie
Chung, but that's about it for novelty.
With the advent of gambling, cash has
flowed into Gilpin County and the gaming towns through a special
state tax marked for improvements and preservation of what is
now a national historic district. Today the giant casinos run
buses daily from all points in Denver and beyond, from the nursing
homes and senior centers -- the main targets of low stakes gambling
-- as well as from downtown depots and parking lots. The buses
won't go the extra mile up to Central. And most car tourists
stop abruptly at Blackhawk, too. Meanwhile Central's Bobtail
Mine and Glory Hole tours are closed, one local alleges because
of tighter safety regulations, but really, I think, because they
are obscured by the casinos.
Blackhawk gets the lion's share of state
revenue with Cripple Creek coming in second. Meanwhile, Central
City's casinos have dwindled from 23 in 1992 to 5 in the summer
of 2001. Blackhawk and Central City are a tough new kind of ghost
town.
The town governments are rich, but few people live there. There
are no viable businesses except casinos and the opera. And the
Opera Association adds to this problem: it has acquired more
than twenty of the oldest Central City houses, using them for
rehearsal rooms and lodging for their first string artists. Beautifully
kept up with the help of gaming taxes, they sit empty nine months
a year, while casino workers, priced out of mountain housing,
commute from all over, up and down the slick canyons. There are
no decent hotels or motels ("no one wants to stay in the
casino hotel," one local tells me), no enticing restaurants,
fancy or cheap, unless you like casino buffet. People drive twenty
miles down to Golden to find a grocery store or pharmacy.
But entrepreneurial hopes spring eternal.
The Central City casinos owners have become elected officials
and formed a Business Improvement District. This allows them
to recirculate tax revenues within their own four or five block
area. They have lots of plans to get people past Blackhawk --
an arts festival, a blue festival, a rhubarb festival. For the
last six years they've tried to get the state to build a new
highway, straight over Quartz Hill to Idaho Springs, another
busted mining town that had the good luck to have I-70 slice
through it. The city fathers and mothers floated bonds, acquired
the land, and got the Department of Transportation to sign on,
thus creating a literal end run around Blackhawk. Recently, fighting
broke out anew, as the anti-casino faction tied to stop "The
Road" by holding a recall election. The Mayor and City Council
survived, but just barely. And then Blackhawk waded into the
fight. Since any competition would be too much competition, Blackhawk's
officials bought up land essential for the new access road and
secretly transferred it to anti-highway residents of Central
-- thus blocking the right-of-way. Such a quiet little historic
district!
In spring 2001, a grand jury found Blackhawk
officials had misused city funds and abused their authority in
trying to block the road to Idaho Springs. Central City immediately
sued Blackhawk for conspiracy to kill its economy. Although Central
claims the road will go ahead, it has found it nearly impossible
to sell bonds; any observant investor would see that Central
is racked by internal dissension. Its government is now trying
to use redevelopment authority to condemn the property standing
in the way of the road. The recalcitrant are countersuing but
refuse to discuss it, on or off record. Even the editor of the
local newspaper, the Gilpin County Record-Call, refuses my phone
calls. Blackhawk says that if Central builds the road over the
mountain, they'll drill their own connector tunnel under it,
by God! Meanwhile, Clear Creek County thinks tiny Gilpin County
is only adding to its serious problem. A crucial stretch of the
state's main East -West connector, I -70, becomes a treacherous
parking lot from Loveland Pass to Denver during the summer and
ski season weekends. All Clear Creek County needs is more traffic
heading to and from the casinos at the Idaho Springs turn off.
Tourism is a devil's bargain. A place
markets its essential something, only to find the outside forces
that control tourism must destroy that specialness of place.
In Central City and Blackhawk, that placeness was a rich architectural
history, and a vivid mythology of the old, wild West, laid down
for more than a century by civic leaders, writers, artists and
earlier tourism promoters. Blackhawk as anyone knew it even two
decades ago is long gone, and Central City is in its death throes,
access road or no access road. Gambling, that new Glory Hole,
hollowed out what was left of an older life and then collapsed
in on itself.
I found that I could rest and listen
to the last act of Gloriana by sitting in an alley under the
production shop's loudspeaker, set up to let stagehands follow
sound cues while they catch a smoke. The counselors had voted
to execute Elizabeth's lover, the Earl of Essex, for treachery:
he tried to negotiate peace in Ireland. "Today is the assigned
day...." It would take them about 20 minutes to whack Essex,
so I still had time to hike up the other side of town to see
the tour buses and condos parked on top of the buried railroad
station, and to photograph the abandoned Coeur D'Alene shaft.
One of Colorado's perfect thunderheads reflected a peach light
off the yellow rock walls. Once again, the tight little town
with so many shuttered windows is best viewed from above.
It was time to pick up the opera goers.
As they flooded out of the heavy wood doors, I saw my daughter
and realized that at 13 she was the youngest person there by
at least 50 years. My mother raved about "Gloriana"
and Benjamin Britten and the perfect acoustics of the old opera
house. Lucy twisted in her unaccustomed dress, as I had so many
years before. Solicitously, my mother noticed.
"Did it hurt your ears, dear?"
"Only when she sang."
A scent of roasted chicken wafted up
from the Teller House Hotel, and I felt hungry and hopeful, but
based on experience, I thought it best to let hope die. We swerved
back down the canyon, avoiding the drunks and the accidents and
bingo buses, in search of something nice and safe, at home.
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She
can be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
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August 14
/ 19, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
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