Willoughby: Historic designation, historic memories

Aspen began its historic preservation program in time to save many structures, Victorian architecture, especially the brick/sandstone downtown building facades. Some — like the Crystal Palace Building, known to my family as the Midnight Mine warehouse/office — have a saved exterior, but everything else is new construction. There are enough preserved buildings to signal, even to a casual visitor, that Aspen had a previous history.

Not available to newcomers or visitors is the deeper historic connection, one constructed from personal experience and preserved primarily by memories. While I am sure the tangible preservation continues to make Aspen a special place, for those of us who grew up there, history is much more than a photogenic building frontage.

My childhood memories for the downtown buildings are less about the exterior and more about the sensual realities, sound and smell, from inside. As an example, many of the buildings were heated with coal fueled steam boilers delivering heat to radiators. The closer you were to the radiators, the warmer you were. In quiet moments, like late in the night, the sound of the expanding and contracting pipes suggested ghosts. Touring the basements where the steam boilers were located is not scenic, but the piles of coal and the large boilers are more memorable than the results of the most recent exterior coats of paint.

Again, from a child’s point of view, the high ceilings are a stronger memory. They might not be as memorable for adults. The buildings, mostly, still have the high ceilings, but many of those interior spaces used to have larger footprints, store areas of the past have been cut up into smaller retail spaces. Several of those locations have shifted use to retail space with limited customers. As an example, the post office used to be in the Elks Building, and Beck and Bishop’s grocery occupied much of the bottom floor of the Wheeler; they were large spaces, but they were places a large percentage of the town visited at least once a week. You can’t preserve that ho-hum history, but old-timer’s memories are more likely to be connected to the social experiences as well as the high ceilings and the large open spaces.  The interior decorations would be laughable today — walls needing painting — but the overall memory defines the era.

The Red Onion is another example. The rebuilding, with large additions, retained the historic, original building frontage — iconic, as many of the Aspen postcards tourists used to send to their friends and family while visiting Aspen featured the Onion. What historic preservation does not preserve is the experience of dining there or whiling away time at the bar. The very old timers, some going back into the 1890s, would share stories (some totally fictitious) about Aspen’s past. The bartenders and waitresses were much more important to creating lasting memories than the photogenic postcard front side of the building.

Cowenhoven Building photographs are mostly about the corner of the building: the bank entrance. The backside of the building, as seen in the photo, does not suggest much in the preservation criteria. But, it was my backyard (I lived there until I was eleven); there was an area of grass with sweet peas growing along the fence. The huge, ice wall happened annually — and not just for the Cowenhoven building. Many of the Aspen Victorian downtown buildings had flat or slightly sloped roofs. Roof leaks were common, especially when the buildings had been around for a few decades with little maintenance.  

Since the building was named after its builder, there is some obvious historic connection. But knowing that Henry Cowenhoven opened Aspen’s first store in a cabin at the corner of Cooper and Galena in 1880 and that he became a major mine owner and the founder of the bank in his building adds context to the architecture. Leaving the vault and making it visible to the public (when it was part of the Ute City Banque restaurant) gave visitors a better idea of the importance of the building than just viewing the outside corner.

Tim Willoughby’s family story parallels Aspen’s. He began sharing folklore while teaching at Aspen Country Day School and Colorado Mountain College. Now a tourist in his native town, he views it with historical perspective. Reach him at redmtn2@comcast.net.