The Strater Has Been on Main Avenue Since 1887

A Brick Building at the Corner of Seventh and Main

Durango was seven years old when Henry H. Strater completed his four-storey hotel at the corner of Seventh Street and Main Avenue in 1887. The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad ↗ had platted the town only in 1880, yet by mid-decade the ore traffic out of Silverton had made Durango a genuine commercial center, and Strater's ambition matched the moment. The building he put up was pressed brick with sandstone trim, four storeys, with enough rooms to serve the mining men, merchants, and travelers who moved through La Plata County on business rather than sentiment.

The original construction was substantial by the standards of any Colorado railroad town. Strater commissioned a building meant to last, and the structural envelope — the brick walls, the floor plates, the street-facing façade — is the same one that stands today. The hotel's address, 699 Main Avenue, has not changed. The National Register of Historic Places ↗ listed the property in 1979, recognizing both its architectural integrity and its continuous role in the commercial life of the city.

Ownership Through the Twentieth Century

Henry Strater did not hold the property long. By the early 1890s the hotel had passed through the hands of several owners as Durango cycled through the boom-and-bust rhythms common to Colorado silver towns. The Panic of 1893, which collapsed silver prices and idled mines across the San Juan Mountains, hit Durango hard; the hotel survived, but ownership was unstable for a decade. Through the early twentieth century the building functioned as a working commercial hotel, plain in its ambitions if not its address.

The transformation that fixed the Strater's present identity came in 1926, when Earl Barker Sr. purchased the property. The Barker family undertook a sustained program of renovation and collection that defined the hotel's character for the rest of the century. The most consequential of their acquisitions was a collection of American Victorian walnut furniture — period pieces in the style that dominated American parlors and hotel rooms from roughly 1860 through 1900. The Strater assembled what has been described as one of the largest such collections in the United States, furnishing guest rooms and public spaces with documented antiques rather than reproductions. The walnut pieces are traceable, catalogued, and integral to the hotel's listing on the National Register.

The Barker family also built the room that now defines the hotel's public identity: the Diamond Belle Saloon, fitted out in the Victorian manner with an ornate bar back, honky-tonk piano, and period millwork. The saloon occupies the Main Avenue corner of the ground floor and opens directly onto the sidewalk, putting it in continuous conversation with the street outside — which is precisely the relationship the original building was designed to sustain.

The Building and What It Holds

The Strater's façade is one of the anchoring elements of the Main Avenue streetscape that Durango has protected through successive decades of development pressure. Main Avenue retains an unusual density of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century commercial architecture — cast-iron fronts, pressed brick, corbelled cornices — and the Strater is among the most intact examples on the block. At four storeys it remains the dominant vertical element on its corner, reading from a distance much as it did in the decades after it opened.

The hotel today carries 93 guest rooms, the Diamond Belle Saloon, and the Mahogany Grille, all within the 1887 shell. Structural alterations over 130-plus years have been interior in character; the street elevation and the massing have not changed. The National Register nomination, filed with the National Park Service ↗, cites the building's significance under criteria for architecture and commerce, grounding it in the documented record rather than in the promotional mythology that accumulates around long-operating hotels. The Strater earns its place on Main Avenue the same way it always has: by still being there.