Colorado Springs (July/August 1989 | Volume: 40, Issue: 5)

Colorado Springs

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July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5

Expectations are everything where travel is concerned, and when I set off last July for Colorado Springs, a Victorian-era resort a mile high in the Rocky Mountains, most of mine were wrong. There are no springs in town, for one thing, so no park takes shape around them, no pattern of streets and alleys converges there, no ramshackle hotels or tidy storefronts line the route to and from the waters. The famous Antlers Hotel, which conjures up visions of a shingle-style edifice crammed with hunting trophies, turns out to be a high-rise built in 1962, its two previous incarnations having long ago been destroyed. I drove the city’s clean, wide avenues for half an hour before giving up and asking where the center of town was, only to find I was in it.

Within a day or so I’d found the touchstones I was looking for; they just were scattered. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Colorado Springs began as that phenomenon we’ve all read about—a resort created out of thin mountain air by the railroads.

Colorado Springs was founded by William Jackson Palmer, who was engaged in building the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Raised in Philadelphia, Palmer in 1870 married an Easterner accustomed to the pleasures of Newport and Saratoga; Colorado Springs, the story goes, grew out of his determination to build a resort rivaling these for his bride.

Palmer bought up some ten thousand acres on a plateau just east of Pikes Peak in 1871 and laid out streets in a grid, naming them for streams and mountain ranges along his rail line. With a developer’s reach for the romantic, he named the town itself for some springs in Manitou, five miles away. Today, driving the thoroughfares he platted on the empty plains, you sense both his foresight and his presumption. “What we have out here is sky,” said Debbie Kovalik, who works at the tourist bureau, as she showed me around. And she’s right. It’s no wonder the Air Force decided in 1954 to build its academy here. Its soaring, ultramodern chapel draws more visitors than any nearby natural or historic site.

In its early years Colorado Springs prospered or declined with the fortunes of nearby mining camps. But that it would finally thrive seems to have been clear almost from the beginning. Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman who arrived on horseback in 1873, grasped the future even then, although her letters home to her sister dwelt more on the present. “From the top of one of the Foot Hill ridges,” she writes in one of them, “I saw the bleak-looking scattered houses of the ambitious watering place of Colorado Springs, the goal of my journey of 150 miles.…A queer embryo-looking place it is, out on the bare Plains, yet it is rising and likely to rise, and has some big hotels much resorted to.…To me no place could be more unattractive than