WHAT’S HAPPENING IN GOLDEN TODAY?
9-10AM Women’s Exercise and Bible Study @ First United Methodist Church
9:15-9:45AM Baby Time @ Golden Library
10-10:45AM Storybook Tour @ Colorado Railroad Museum
10AM and 1PM Wild West Walking History Tour
10AM and 1PM Wild West Short Tour
10-10:55AM Silver Sneakers Classic (Virtual)
10:15-10:45AM Preschool Time @ Golden Library
12-12:55PM All Levels Yoga (Virtual)
1-3PM Hexie Ladies @ Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum
1-1:45PM Silver Sneakers Yoga (Virtual)
5PM Books on Tap: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers @ On Tap Credit Union
5:30-7:30PM Textile Society @ Golden Library
6PM New World Disorder Movie Night @ Pedal Pushers Cyclery
6PM City Council @ City Hall (NOTE THE EARLY START TIME)
City Council will split into three teams to interview candidates for the board and commission openings. The interviews will take place off-camera, but in previous years they have made audio recordings. The applications are available for perusal in tonight’s meeting packet, and make interesting reading.
TRIVIA
6PM Trivia Tuesdays @ Golden Mill
6:30-8:30PM Team Trivia Tuesdays @ Buffalo Rose
6:30-8:30PM Bar Bingo Night @ VFW Post 4171
LIVE MUSIC
6PM Karaoke with Linda @ Dirty Dogs Roadhouse
6PM Open Bluegrass Pick Night @ Over Yonder Brewing
GOLDEN HISTORY MOMENT
As I’ve described in several previous history articles, Golden has always, always, always been frustrated at its lack of available housing. The City’s time of greatest growth came in the two decades after World War II, when the growth of Coors, the Federal Center, and the Schools of Mines combined to drive a great demand for housing in Golden.
The area north of downtown grew considerably during the late 1940s-1959s. The south end of town (which, at that time, ended at 24th Street) grew too, but the expansion was stopped by the presence of the state-owned Lookout Mountain School for Boys.
The School had been designed to teach its students useful vocations. Chief among these was farming, so the institution encompassed more than 500 acres, including fields, pastures, and orchards.
Growth in Cities Surrounding Denver, 1950-1960
Westminster – 717.6%
Arvada – 713.7%
Aurora – 323.2%
Littleton – 302.5%
Englewood – 97%
Golden – 35.6%
Golden’s city leaders were frustrated that the other metro-area cities were growing so much more quickly than Golden. They wanted desperately to add more residential neighborhoods, but the Lookout Mountain School stood in their way. They undertook a decade-long pressure campaign on the state, trying to get them to remove the school, or at least shrink its acreage. By the early 1960s, they were finally making headway.
60 Years Ago
The April 4, 1963 Colorado Transcript announced that the state at last seemed ready to sell off a large part of the Lookout Mountain School lands.
The bottleneck to Golden’s future residential expansion appears certain now to be broken as City Manager Walt Brown told THE TRANSCRIPT at its front page deadline time…. An estimated 1,000 residential homes could be built on the land….
Later that year, an auction was held on several parcels south of the School. Seeing the amount of land available, the City Manager estimated that the area would soon be filled with 2,000 new homes.
To Golden’s great disappointment, the land sales went very slowly and none of it was sold to home builders. Some was used for commercial development, some for Ulysses Park, some for an expansion of the High School, and some was sold to Public Service. Finally, in 1972, some of the property was purchased to build the Lunnonhaus/Summit View apartments.
Over the years, developers found other places to build homes and the City annexed around the “bottleneck” of state land. In the year 2000, the City combined the former Parfet clay mining land with some state land and built Fossil Trace Golf Club and the Splash water park.
The present demand for affordable housing has brought residential development to the forefront once again, so the City is hoping to acquire some of the remaining state land to build affordable housing.
Thanks to the Golden History Museum for providing the online cache of historic Transcripts, and to the Golden Transcript for documenting our history since 1866!
