Penciling art into fiscal framework
Struggling rural towns are turning to crafts and culture in the hope of reviving economy
Like many things in this brick L town built by coal workers along the New Mexico border, decades of boom and bust have illuminated not only a fascinating history, but a series of cultural losses that have gutted buildings along Main Street.
The 135-year-old Trinidad Opera House is boarded up and vacant, its roof caving in after it was bought by an investor for a promise of legalized gambling that never materialized. Down the block and across the road, the 109-year-old Fox Theatre is also empty and shuttered, having stopped screening movies in the summer of 2013.
Arts and culture can seem like a luxury in towns such as Trinidad, which have been hit hard by job losses in coal mining and manufacturing.
But if the tourists who pull off Interstate 25 to buy legal marijuana in this border town look closer, they’ll see a sign advertising the future site of Space to Create Trinidad — a $17 million live/work project slated to break ground in May.
From Trinidad to Mancos, Ridgway to Salida, a growing number of communities far outside the Front
Range are putting arts and culture at the center of their economic development strategies. They’re joining other rural, mountain and border towns that have tapped into state-level resources to end the boomand-bust cycle of failed natural-resource industries that has drained their populations.
It helps that the definition of “creative industries” has expanded in recent years.
A 2015 National Endowment for the Arts study showed $5.9 billion in revenue from Colorado’s creative industries, ranging from performing arts and publishing to film, media, design, custom fabrication and heritage sites.
With 96,000 workers and $609 million in nonprofit cultural revenue statewide, there’s plenty of evidence that arts and culture are thriving in towns and cities outside the Front Range, officials say.
“Every one of these cities has its own personality,” said Margaret Hunt, director of Colorado Creative Industries, a division of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. “I don’t see it as competing with Denver and the Front Range so much as focusing on their authentic stories.”
Trinidad natives Mike and Yolanda Romero, who opened their Southern Colorado Coal Miners Museum nearly four years ago, are working to preserve a vital part of the history of Las Animas County — the state’s largest in square miles — which less than a century ago hosted 108 coal mines and attracted workers from more than two dozen nations, ranging from Greece to China.
“Three years ago, you go down Commercial Street and almost every building was vacant,” said Mike Romero, 71, a retired miner who serves as president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 9856. “And now every one of them is filled, thanks to marijuana. But people are coming to buy pot and then leaving. What we need are more good-paying jobs. With benefits.”
Trinidad’s population has fallen to half of what it was at its height, having peaked at around 16,000 in 1940.
Hilly and windswept Trinidad, which sits 200 miles south of Denver, has been known for its pot boom — being one of Colorado’s first cities to sell recreational marijuana — its concentration of sexchange clinics, and a colorful, sometimes tragic history that includes Al Capone, the Rockefellers and the Ludlow Massacre, in which dozens of striking coal miners and their families were killed in 1914.
City officials have committed the equivalent of 15 percent of its general fund balance, or $2.1 million, to Space to Create Trinidad. With the support of Gov. John Hickenlooper, Colorado has billed it as the first state-driven initiative in the nation to offer affordable housing for creative-sector workers.
Trinidad’s version will convert a drafty, oilstained garage — which now contains more than a dozen festively decorated art cars — and its neighboring former fire station and bank into 41 residences, along with a gallery, studios and 20,000 square feet of community space along Main Street downtown.
That, in turn, will spur more investment, city officials say.
“One of the hardest things to do is attract small manufacturing or other businesses to a small community,” said Trinidad Mayor Phil Rico. “But we’ve laid the groundwork with incentives and commercial construction.”
The trick, they say, is to preserve the city’s character and history while experimenting with arts and culture that attracts new residents and fosters sustainable, progressive industries.
Simple, right? “Trinidad has its architecture and its eclectic personality,” Creative Industries’ Hunt said. “Whereas Mancos, for example, has an authentic Western heritage with Native American history, Louis L’Amour’s novels, their School of the West and all the things unique that have been happening there.”
But communities must be willing to see the value of networking with state officials, and of accepting state resources — such as applying to become a certified Creative District, as Mancos recently did.
Mancos straddles U.S. 160 near Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, known best for its outdoor recreation and history of the Ancient Puebloans.
Now its most visible pioneers are the artists reviving its tiny main street and partnering with traditional ranching and agricultural workers on the outskirts of town.
“They’re feeding off each other in an authentic way,” said Sarah Syverson, director of the Mancos Creative District, which was officially certified in June 2016. “It’s not just a façade.”
The district is small, encompassing about a halfdozen galleries and popup shops in a downtown with only two dozen stores and eateries combined. The city matched a state grant of $30,000 to support its artists, which has been used to market and brand Mancos to a growing number of creative workers moving there to escape high rents in Santa Fe, Denver and elsewhere.
“The creative district has been invaluable in terms of providing resources and networking with other districts further down the road,” said Carol Mehesy, associate director of the Mancos Creative District, who grew up in the area and moved back a year and a half ago. “When we were in Denver, we stayed in the RiNo district and talked to board members and volunteers and people who were part of those programs. It was really helpful.”
Whether they’re promoting outdoor recreation, American Indian art or blacksmithing, the artists and co-ops in Mancos are well aware that they need to balance the town’s heritage with its burgeoning growth, or risk becoming the same gentrified environments that artists are fleeing.
“That’s something we talk about, but it’s more from the lens of ‘How do we evolve and grow, but maintain this pristine beauty, this connection to the artist’s community, and that small-town feel and genuine connection that people have with each other?’ ” Mehesy said.
Part of the challenge is including all residents in the growth, including the Latino community that Syverson — who took over the director job this summer — sees as having been left out thus far.
“We’ve only been going for a year and a half,” she said of the district. “And there was a huge mill that burned down just this past year, the Western Excelsior plant (the town’s biggest employer), and a large portion of that community that depended on those jobs has been struggling economically. So how do we support them and tell their stories? There’s a gap there.”
An increase in property values has also exacerbated inequities in the rental and homebuying market in Mancos, Mehesy said.
“This is, of course, a similar pattern as we’re seeing across the state, although Mancos remains relatively affordable compared to many parts (of Colorado),” she said.
Arts, cultural and tourism investment is central to the town’s camaraderie. The Mancos Opera House was recently bought for $195,000 by residents Philip and Linda Walters, who are planning a million-dollar renovation over the next three years in collaboration with the State Historical Fund.
“There’s a hard-cider house in the works that will open in February,” Mehesy said. “And Mancos is home to Alpacka Rafting Company, (which) just moved its headquarters to the downtown area and is leasing an area to the Mancos Creative District for an outdoor makers space and event area for the community.”
The creative district certification helps channel investments that benefit all of those projects, said Hunt, who oversees 21 certified creative districts in Colorado, from Denver’s well-known Art District on Santa Fe to successful districts in Greeley, Carbondale and the North Fork Valley.
“We’ve done a better job of educating communities at the municipal level in recent years that arts and culture is a real development strategy,” she said. “But to be successful, they’ve really got to have a community fabric of people who are involved and support it, and who see it as an important part of their identity. Their civic DNA, if you will.”