The Bella Vista hotel was built in the early 1880s at 12th and Jackson Streets. In 1920, a salvage company dismantled it, selling off the woodwork, flooring, doors and windows, the pipes–even the bricks. What they couldn’t sell, they left behind. There, the pile of wreckage remained for 16 years.
88 Years Ago
The April 16, 1936 Colorado Transcript included an article titled “RATS!”
The cleaning up of the old foundations of the Belle Vista hotel preparatory to constructing the new PWA consolidated grade school building has disturbed the homes of innumerable rats and will undoubtedly scatter them out pretty well over Golden. Arrangements should be made at once to exterminate these destructive rodents.
The Transcript frequently wrote about rats, sometimes offering helpful hints about how to kill them–poison, shooting, and asphyxiation by car exhaust being among the suggestions.
Why did we have such a rat problem? It’s probably because we did not have a good method of disposing of our waste. Over the years, Golden’s town dumps were in surprisingly central places, including Parfet Park, 11th Street next to the Creek, and the west end of 8th Street. Theoretically, those dumps were intended for non-smelly things, such as construction waste or unwanted furniture, but people often dumped food waste, dead animals, and other rat attractants. Apparently, from 1920-1936, many of those rats called the Bella Vista waste pile home.
Golden offered curbside garbage collection beginning in the 1950’s, and made it mandatory in 1967. References to rats in the local paper dropped off sharply after that.
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!
