Colorado

55 places with something worth saying about them.

• 10th Field Hospital A unit based here kept ninety-eight out of every hundred wounded soldiers alive, the highest survival rate in the history of American warfare.
• 2021 Boulder shooting The gunman at the Boulder King Soopers was handcuffed with the handcuffs of the officer he had just killed.
• 88 Drive-In A school in Commerce City had to fence off its own roof because students kept climbing up at night to watch the drive-in.
• Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities This suburban arts center runs Colorado's third-largest theatre company.
• Broomfield, Colorado The road you'd take from Denver to Boulder was the first toll road in America to pay itself off and go free.
• Buckeye, Colorado The school in Buckeye, Colorado had a stable on the grounds, because students rode in on horseback.
• Castle Rock, Colorado A star built on the butte above Castle Rock went dark for the whole of the war, then came back as a V for victory.
• Cheyenne Creek Two men dammed this creek in the 1880s to make a lake that would help sell a hotel and casino, and then had to sue the city for stealing the water.
• Cheyenne Mountain Complex A single bad computer chip inside Cheyenne Mountain once issued false warnings that a missile attack had begun.
• Chez Artiste A suburban Denver twin cinema was opened by a man who would later buy Twentieth Century-Fox and sell it to Rupert Murdoch.
• Colorado State University Pueblo A bill to give Pueblo a four-year college died in the state senate by a single vote.
• Columbine Mine massacre A twenty-one-year-old miner died carrying an American flag that was found with seventeen bullet holes in it.
• Comanche Solar Project Colorado's biggest solar farm was built right beside a coal-fired power plant so it could borrow the coal plant's wires.
• Denver Art Museum A famous Italian architect built exactly one thing in the United States, and it is a twenty-four-sided castle in downtown Denver covered in a million glass tiles.
• Denver Technological Center This office park started on forty acres, split between two developers who each took one side of the interstate.
• Dick's Sporting Goods Park A World Cup qualifier here was played in a blizzard, and the losing team filed a protest with FIFA over the state of the field.
• Disappearances of Paul and Sarah Skiba and Lorenzo Chivers Police thought a father had run off with his daughter, until his friends climbed the fence and found bullet holes and a piece of human scalp on his moving truck.
• Drop City The domes here were built from the chopped-off roofs of cars.
• Fountain Creek (Arkansas River tributary) During one flood in 1999, seventy million gallons of raw sewage poured into this creek at Colorado Springs.
• Fountain, Colorado A murder cover-up on a freight train sent eighteen tons of explosives rolling toward Fountain in 1888.
• Fourmile Canyon The 2010 Fourmile fire began in a brush pit on a volunteer firefighter's own property, and nine of the homes it burned belonged to firefighters.
• Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of the Rockies The marble gods inside this Colorado temple were carved by hand in Jaipur, India, and shipped here.
• Kelsey Lake Diamond Mine For a few years in the nineties, the only modern diamond mine in the United States was working a patch of northern Colorado near the Wyoming line.
• Key Lime Air A cargo plane from this airport lost a section of its cabin roof in a midair collision and landed anyway.
• Lafayette History Museum A small museum in a miner's cottage keeps the file on Lafayette's vampire.
• Lone Tree, Colorado Lone Tree turned away IKEA because the store's blue and yellow paint job didn't meet local design standards.
• Loveland, Colorado Loveland's welcome sign called it the Nationally Famous Sweetheart Town, and a smaller handmade sign beside it said the town observed Jim Crow laws.
• Ludlow Massacre Detectives hired by the coal company built an armored car with a machine gun on it and called it the Death Special.
• Marshall Fire A December grass fire here became the most destructive fire in Colorado history in under twelve hours, and snow was what finally stopped it.
• Modern Woodmen Sanatorium Tuberculosis patients here slept one to a tent, in octagonal cottages modeled on Ute tepees and left open at the top.
• Morley, Colorado A demolition crew leveled an entire Colorado town but refused to touch the church, and its bell tower is still standing.
• Naropa University Allen Ginsberg and a fellow poet, sharing a room one summer in Boulder, came up with the name the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
• Nature and Wildlife Discovery Center For twelve years, a footrace here started not with a gun but with a live bird of prey let loose into the canyon.
• Old Colorado City This place was the capital of the Colorado Territory, and it effectively functioned as one for only five days.
• Old North End Historic District (Colorado Springs, Colorado) A college president bought this land as an investment, named it New Massachusetts, and was fired when it lost money.
• Palmer Lake, Colorado The town of Palmer Lake spent years without a lake, its namesake bed sitting completely dry.
• Peterson Space Force Base The base is named for a lieutenant who died on takeoff there, four months before the field got his name.
• Pikes Peak International Raceway A rival racing company bought this speedway for eleven million dollars, shut it down, hauled the scoreboard off to Texas, and then sold it with a clause forbidding professional racing forever.
• Regis University Queen played their first concert in the United States on this campus, in April of 1974.
• Rueter–Hess Reservoir A rancher sold her land on one condition: the reservoir had to carry both her married name and her maiden name.
• South Cheyenne Cañon A poet asked to be buried at the top of the trail above Seven Falls, and for a while she was.
• Standley Lake The dam holding back Standley Lake was meant to be the largest earth-filled dam in the world, and it started cracking a year after it was finished.
• Taylor Memorial Chapel A woman built an entire pueblo-style church in the pine forest and worshipped in it alone for thirteen years.
• The International (golf) For twenty-one years, a PGA Tour event here scrapped counting strokes and handed out points for gambling.
• Union Avenue Historic Commercial District In 1921, water eighteen feet deep wiped out nearly every building along Union Avenue.
• United Air Lines Flight 629 When a bomb destroyed an airliner over Colorado in 1955, prosecutors found there was no federal law against blowing up an aircraft.
• United States Air Force Academy The Air Force turned to a Hollywood director to design its cadet uniform, and cadets still wear it on the parade field.
• University of Colorado Colorado Springs The university's administration building started life as a tuberculosis sanatorium that sold for one dollar.
• Virginia Dale, Colorado The prettiest place name on Highway 287 was chosen by one of the most feared men on the Overland Trail.
• WWV (radio station) In 1958 a professor used this station's radio signal to watch Sputnik break apart in the sky.
• Washington Park, Denver A Titanic survivor bought a condemned cottage in Denver and had it hauled across town into a park.
• Western Museum of Mining & Industry A replica 1890s ore mill here still runs, one of only five working stamp mills left in the country.
• Westminster, Colorado A university here closed in 1917 because every single student left to fight in World War One.
• Windsor, Colorado The tornado that tore through Windsor in 2008 travelled backwards, running west instead of east.
• Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum Parked among Cold War fighter jets in a Denver hangar is a three-quarter scale X-Wing built to promote the Star Wars re-release.