Why Trinidad (yes, really) might be Colorado’s next great art, music and culture enclave

Original article posted November 14, 2020 by The Denver Post. Read the full article here: https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/11/14/trinidad-colorado-art-town/248604/?fbclid=IwAR1dzN7RHdpuK7gJapJpqEs_1mHJXsDubGNBh2S5YdzC3djUnx30jz5PEEA

By John Wenzel

Wally Wallace loves Trinidad, and it’s not for lack of trying to love other places.

The 33-year-old grew up visiting his family’s cabin between Buena Vista and Salida. He attended college in Durango before moving to Telluride and, eventually, Denver.

“My grandparents also had a place between Gunnison and Crested Butte,” said Wallace, who since January 2019 has called Trinidad home. He doesn’t expect he’ll leave anytime soon.

The roughly 9,000-resident town on the New Mexico border — a three-hour drive south of Denver on Interstate 25 — has found varying levels of infamy over the years for its massive legal-weed business, its brief title as gender reassignment-surgery capital of the world and, going back decades, its boom-and-bust coal industry and labor-rights history.

Now, it’s experiencing another surge of investment as artists and Denver-area business owners flee expensive rents, rising coronavirus cases and a capitalist culture that has soured them on the promise of big-city civic engagement.

They’re hoping to hasten Trinidad’s slow evolution from a 158-year-old way station to a bustling, artist-friendly haven. That includes making it a live-music and comedy hotspot that reroutes touring artists from the east-west, Interstate 70 corridor to the north-south, I-25 passage. (The busy stretch also connects Santa Fe and Taos, N.M., with Colorado’s Front Range, Cheyenne, Wyo., and points north.)

“It’s COVID and it’s interest in rural America, but it’s also social unrest and unaffordability and neoliberalism in major cities,” said Kayvan Khalatbari, a former Denver mayoral candidate and early canna-biz success story, via his former Denver Relief business. “Trinidad offers clean air and clean water and a higher quality of life, especially now that I’m a full-time dad of two adopted daughters.”

Despite his frequent travel in past years, including helping state legislatures and private companies in the U.S. set up their own legal-cannabis frameworks, Khalatbari had never visited Trinidad before May.

In the six months since then, he’s bought 10 properties — including main street historic buildings, residences, five vacant lots and even a church — and bet more than $1 million of his money on what he sees as Trinidad’s coming cultural and economic renaissance.

“I hope the things I’m doing don’t contribute to it becoming an unaffordable mountain town,” he said Thursday, shortly after closing on the Trinidad Lounge building with business partner Curtis Wallach. “We’re working on solutions, including fixing the housing dilemma and building new affordable housing on some of these vacant lots.”

The “we” in this case isn’t just Khalatbari and his friends from Denver’s South Broadway cultural scene — where he, Wallach, Jim Norris and others who are now moving to Trinidad first built their businesses. It’s a growing cadre of progressive entrepreneurs and cultural leaders who have decided Trinidad is their solution, too, for an overcrowded, expensive Denver-Boulder area — and states as far away as Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia.

They include pied-piper Wallace (who worked with Khalatbari on Sexpot Comedy in Denver); Wallach (co-owner of Denver’s Hi-Dive venue, and new co-owner of the Trinidad Lounge building); Suzanne Magnuson (Wallach’s business partner, and a popular Denver stylist, musician and event producer); well-known Denver comics such as Nathan Lund and Jay Gillespie; award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Holloway; Norris (owner of Denver’s Mutiny Information Cafe); and dozens more who feel the pull of this gritty, eerily well-preserved slice of the Old West that once hosted residents speaking more than 50 languages.

“About five years ago, we found out about Dana Crawford’s interest in the town,” said Wallach, referring to the acclaimed preservationist who saved much of Lower Downtown Denver in the 1960s. “The (city-owned) Fox West Theatre was in pretty bad disrepair, and I wanted to see what the expectations were for booking it — and if we could fit in there.”

They could, Wallach discovered. Crawford is supporting a mix of public and private efforts to raise $18 million to restore the architecturally unique, 950-seat theater, which was built in 1908 and rivals New York’s Carnegie Hall in its splendor and historic significance, city boosters have said.

“Trinidad is very much at a tipping point, because it’s got so many innate attributes,” Crawford said this week. “Outdoor recreation is going to be a huge thing with Fishers Peak (a newly opened, 19,200-acre state park), and there’s the architectural history, creative community, the new hospitality businesses, housing, and all the big galleries people are looking at opening up.”

Continue to read full article here: https://theknow.denverpost.com/2020/11/14/trinidad-colorado-art-town/248604/?fbclid=IwAR1dzN7RHdpuK7gJapJpqEs_1mHJXsDubGNBh2S5YdzC3djUnx30jz5PEEA