The Colorado Building at 409 North Main Street in Pueblo was built in 1925 on the site of the former Grand Opera House. The four-story rectangular building housed many of Pueblo’s major artistic and commercial outfits throughout the twentieth century, including the Publix Theater, the Southern Colorado Power Company, Colorado & Southern Railroad, and several other retail stores and business offices. In recent years, it has struggled to retain tenants, though several parties have considered renovating and repurposing the building.
History of Pueblo
In 1870 the town of Pueblo was established near the site of El Pueblo in Colorado Territory. William Jackson Palmer’s Denver & Rio Grande Railroad reached South Pueblo in 1872, facilitating the city’s continued growth. As Pueblo expanded, it enveloped the surrounding towns of South Pueblo, Central Pueblo, and Bessemer by the end of the century. In 1881 Palmer constructed a Bessemer furnace south of the Arkansas River, solidifying Pueblo’s legacy as an industrial center. As industry flourished, Americans and European immigrants flocked to the area and local culture began to develop.
Along with amenities such as schools, stores, and government buildings, Puebloans demanded sites for modern entertainment. In 1887 the city’s economic and social elite financed construction of an opera house at the corner of Main and Seventh Streets to host live performances. When the building burned down the next year, well-to-do Pueblo residents envisioned a replacement, an elaborate building that would host extravagant theatrical productions and make a statement about the city’s growing affluence. The influential early Modernist architect Louis Sullivan helped design the Grand Opera House, which was completed in 1890 on the corner of Fourth and Main.
The Grand Opera House attracted affluent Puebloans for several decades, but a pair of disasters doomed it in the early 1920s. In 1921 the Arkansas River flooded the streets of Pueblo, devastating the Grand Opera House and much of the city. Then in April 1922, the opera house was engulfed in flames. The fire gutted the wooden interior of the building, rendering it unsafe and unusable.
Construction of the Colorado Building
Once again, the citizens of Pueblo united to construct a new building as a statement of economic recovery and civic pride, hoping to build a new theater at the corner of Fourth and Main. The site was in part sentimental, but also practical. The location would maximize downtown foot traffic while encouraging visitors and locals to patronize the new multiuse building’s theater, shops, and offices.
In 1925 three Pueblo businessmen—Charles Lee, G. Harvey Nuckolls, and E. G. Middlekamp—organized the Southern Colorado Investment Company to erect the Colorado Building at Fourth and Main. They financed the project with $305,000 from Pueblo capitalists and an additional $350,000 in bonds sold to Denver investors. Designed by notable Denver architect William Norman Bowman, the Art Deco–style Colorado Building emulated earlier works by architect Louis Sullivan. Sullivan embraced the new technology of using steel frames to erect taller buildings, but wanted to avoid drab uniformity. His structures were divided into three sections: a ground level with prominent windows and doors, a middle section with banded windows, and a top section with a highly decorated cornice (ornamental molding). Bowman emulated this Sullivanesque style in the Colorado Building, which recalled the appearance of Sullivan’s Grand Opera House.
The Denver firm Windsor & Lund completed the four-story building in 1925. Made of reinforced concrete with steel beams and a brick exterior, the building featured a flat roof, double-hung oak-framed windows, and heavy plate-glass doors with aluminum frames. The first floor presented spaces for shops facing the street, as well as a theater lobby and the theater itself. Offices were located in the upper floors. The entrance to the theater and offices was located on Main Street, where a thirty-five-foot-wide sign reading “Colorado Theater” in orange and white light bulbs drew the eyes of pedestrians and motorists. The theater could seat an audience of more than 1,000.
Tenants and Renovations
The Colorado Building’s first major tenants were the Southern Colorado Power Company and Publix Theater Corporation. Soon the building’s 130 office rooms also housed the Middlekamp Agency, Colorado & Southern Railway, Republic Building and Loan, and Federal Abstract & Loan as well as several doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurance agents, and real estate agents. In its ground-level storefronts, the building boasted retailers such as Day Jones Women’s Clothing and Breetwor Shoes in 1935 and Overton’s Coins and Stamps in 1950. The upper-floor offices housed several important Pueblo institutions over the years, including the Pueblo Musicians’ Association in 1950 and the Social Security Administration in 1986.
Ownership of the Colorado Building changed several times. In 1947 retailer J. J. Newberry’s New York–based Newberry Company purchased the stock holdings of Southern Colorado Investment Company and opened a five-and-dime department store in the Colorado Building in 1950. Newberry made several alterations to the building; he replaced some of the original storefront windows with brick facing, removed the large theater sign, replaced the square marquee over the main entrance with a curvilinear aluminum marquee, and built two new entryways. By 1960 the original crystal chandelier was removed from the auditorium.
Although it remained an important local landmark, the Colorado Building saw its office occupancy rates decline over the twentieth century, dropping to forty-four occupied offices in 1958, thirty-six in 1965, thirty-four in 1970, twenty-four in 1980, and fourteen in 2005. These trends mirrored the economic decline of Pueblo itself, as the local industrial economy struggled through periods of labor unrest and the American steel industry collapsed in the 1980s. Prior to 1984, the National Life Insurance Company purchased the Colorado Building, and then in 1984 Richard Leach acquired it and replaced much of the flooring. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, but it struggled to retain permanent tenants. The theater has been closed since the 1970s, and the vast majority of the offices and retail spaces have been vacant since 2005. Midtown LLLP bought the building in 2005, and then Theodore Knowles acquired it in 2007.
Currently, Harding-Bulloch Jewelers is the only retailer located in the Colorado Building, but several parties have expressed interest in rehabilitating it. In 2010 the Pueblo Performing Arts Guild received a $10,000 State Historical Fund grant to perform a historic structure assessment of the building, eyeing it as a possible venue for hosting shows and housing performers and artists, but the building’s $2.2 million price tag dissuaded further action. In 2011 the Denver-based landscape development firm Pueblo Land LLC purchased the Colorado Building, hoping to convert the offices into senior housing. In 2012 contractor Dave Eller expressed interest in turning a portion of the building into a nonprofit assistance center for military veterans and reviving the historic theater as a community theater, but a lack of funding also derailed this project. Despite the interest expressed by multiple parties, none of these redevelopment plans for the Colorado Building have yet come to fruition.
