A First-Timer's Guide to Old Town Fort Collins

Most first-time visitors get told to go to Old Town and given no more instruction than that. They walk one lap of the square, agree that it is nice, and leave unsure what the fuss was about.

The fuss is real. It is just not about the square, which is the newest thing in the district by roughly a century. What makes these blocks feel unlike any other downtown of this size is an argument two groups of surveyors had in the 1860s and 1870s, and the evidence is still in the pavement.

Two street grids, fourteen years apart

The town starts as a military post, in the wrong place. Camp Collins was established at Laporte in 1862 to watch traffic on the Overland Trail. On the night of June 9, 1864, a flood came down the canyon of the Cache la Poudre and took the camp with it: tents, ammunition and some of the cabins went downstream. On August 20 that year the post's commander set aside a new site a few miles down the river, which is the ground Old Town stands on. The soldiers were gone again by September 1866.

What they left behind was a plat. Surveyed in 1866, it ran parallel to the river with no reference at all to the national public lands survey, which made complete sense: the river was where the water, the timber and the traffic were.

Then in 1872 the reservation was opened to settlement, an agricultural colony bought three thousand acres next door, and a second town was surveyed onto the first. This one was laid out on the compass, its major roads following section lines, because that is how land was subdivided almost everywhere else.

The two grids meet at an angle, and neither gave way. Where the newer plat ran up against the older one, the southwest and southeast corners of the original town were simply cut off along what became College and Mountain avenues. That truncation is why Old Town has a triangle at its heart instead of a crossroads, why several corner buildings come to a wedge, and why the district reads as a separate place rather than the top of the main drag. Everything inside the angle is the old town. Everything squared to the compass came later.

You can stand on one corner and see two centuries of thinking about how a town should work. The city's historic sites and museums and galleries are largely clustered inside that angle, and the rest of the Fort Collins directory fans out from it.

Why the streets are this wide

The man who surveyed the newer half was Franklin Avery, who came to Colorado in 1870 with the Greeley colony and was hired in 1872 to lay out the streets here. He filed his plat in 1873, and he was not modest about the space. College and Mountain went in at 140 feet wide, Laporte at 150 (later narrowed), everything else at 100, in blocks four hundred feet square. He is supposed to have remarked that there was plenty of room out here and he was going to use it.

A century and a half later, that decision is doing more work than any amount of streetscape design could. Old Town can absorb sidewalk seating on both sides of a street and still have room for the street because Avery gave it forty feet more than it needed, and Mountain Avenue has a planted median wide enough to run a trolley down for the same reason. Nothing had to be taken away to make this walkable, which is why the restaurants and coffee shops here spill outdoors so easily.

You will also hear, usually within ten minutes of meeting anyone from here, that Disneyland's Main Street was modelled on Old Town: the better documented version is narrower, that a Hollywood art director who grew up here worked on Main Street's design and drew on buildings he remembered alongside those of Walt Disney's own hometown in Missouri.

What the buildings are actually made of

Two materials, and both are local.

The first is sandstone, quarried out of the foothills west of town and good enough that it was shipped east to pave sidewalks in Denver, Lincoln and Omaha. The quarry town it came from is under a reservoir now, which is a story about water more than a story about stone. The second is brick, which is what most of the surviving commercial blocks are, put up through the 1880s and 1890s as frame storefronts burned down or were outgrown.

The architect attached to more of this than anyone else was Montezuma Fuller, the town's first trained architect, who designed the long two-story block at College and Mountain built in sections between 1880 and 1897. Twenty-six acres of this, with thirty-eight contributing buildings, went onto the National Register of Historic Places on August 2, 1978.

Worth knowing before you walk it: almost none of this is a reconstruction. The brick is the original brick. That is unusual, and part of why the district carries the makers and craft businesses and arts and culture venues it does without feeling staged.

The square is much younger than the buildings around it

Until the 1980s, the 100 block of Linden Street was a street. Cars drove down it. Downtown Fort Collins was in the condition of most American downtowns at the end of the 1970s, emptying out, with improvement efforts that kept stalling. In 1981 the property owners, businesses and residents downtown voted to create a Downtown Development Authority, which partnered with a local developer to rehabilitate that block, fill the gaps with new construction, and close the street.

Old Town Square opened in the mid 1980s and was rebuilt in 2015, which is when it got the performance stage, the splash pad children run through all summer, the fire feature and the play area. The plaza is a deliberate piece of 1980s urban design wrapped around genuinely old buildings, and both halves are worth knowing.

The same authority has spent two decades doing much the same to the alleys. The first two were enhanced in 2006, two more designed to carry vehicles followed in 2010, and around ten are now complete, with lighting, planting, paving and public art. One is named after Montezuma Fuller. The alleys are where a good share of the district's boutiques and record and book shops actually are, and a first-timer who walks only the streets will miss most of them.

The drinking history is stranger than the beer suggests

Fort Collins is a well-known beer town. It was also dry for seventy-three years.

Larimer County's commissioners put prohibition on the books in 1896, more than twenty years before the country did. That ordinance outlasted national Prohibition entirely: alcohol was illegal here before the Titanic sailed, and still illegal when the moon landing happened. The city finally voted wet in 1969, and the first legal drink of spirits since 1896 was poured on the top floor of a downtown bank building that August.

Then nothing happened for twenty years. The first brewpub did not open until 1989, because American craft brewing barely existed before that. When it arrived, this turned out to be an unusually good place for it: a university town with an agricultural research history, cheap industrial space, and very good water. The longer version, including how Greeley managed to be founded dry on purpose, is in its own piece. The result is the density of breweries and taprooms and bars that visitors notice first and locals stopped noticing years ago.

Old Town is not the whole town

A first-timer's guide that stops at the historic district is describing the part of town that got preserved, which is not the same as the part of town that built it.

A beet sugar factory went up northeast of Old Town in 1902 and 1903 and processed its first crop in January 1904. It passed to the Great Western Sugar Company within a couple of years, and it changed who lived here. The local labour supply was nowhere near large enough, so the company recruited: German Russians from 1902, and then, as the First World War cut that off, Mexican families moving north through the 1910s and 1920s.

Three neighbourhoods were built for those workers, all within about a square mile of the factory. Buckingham Place came first in 1903, named for a Boulder banker. Andersonville followed in 1904, on the farmland of one of the sugar company's own incorporators. Alta Vista was last, in 1923, and built differently: the company supplied materials, and the families made adobe brick on site during the off season and built their own houses. Locally the three are known as the Tres Colonias. They are still there, and some of the adobe still stands under later siding.

None of it is on the walking tour, and it is a short distance from the square. If you want to understand why the specialty grocers and farms and markets around here look the way they do, that history is most of the answer.

How to actually walk it

Start at the seam. Stand at the truncated corner where College meets Mountain, then walk northeast into the old grid and feel the streets stop agreeing with the compass. That is a ten-minute walk and it explains more than an hour of reading.

Then take the alleys rather than the streets, at least one way. Then go west on Mountain, where the median is planted and the residential blocks begin, including the sandstone house the surveyor built for his own family in 1879 on the street he had made too wide.

Two things are worth timing a visit around. A restored 1919 streetcar runs a heritage line on Mountain Avenue, back in service since the mid 1980s after volunteers spent seven years rebuilding a car that had sat rotting in a park for twenty-five. It runs a seasonal schedule, so check before planning a day around it. And a whitewater park opened on the Poudre in 2019, about half a mile north of the square, on eleven acres where a diversion dam used to be. It is the closest the river comes to the middle of town, and part of why the parks and trails north of the district are busier now.

Last thing: do not drive it. This has been rated a platinum bicycle-friendly community since 2013, the trail network reaches the district from most of the city, and Avery's streets are far pleasanter at eight miles an hour than at twenty-five. Everything else worth doing is on the things to do page, and almost none of it needs a parking space.