Main Avenue
The cast-iron and brick blocks, the Strater Hotel (1887), the depot, Fort Lewis College on the mesa, and the buildings Main Avenue kept because pulling them down was too expensive.
- 01
The Strater Has Been on Main Avenue Since 1887
The Strater Hotel opened in 1887 as Durango's leading commercial lodging and still occupies its original four-storey brick building at 699 Main Avenue, including the Diamond Belle Saloon and a documented collection of American Victorian walnut furniture.
- 02
The Depot That the Railroad Built Twice
The Durango passenger depot was built by the Denver & Rio Grande in 1882 and rebuilt in its present form in 1900 after the original structure burned; the adjacent freight house is the oldest surviving railroad structure on the property.
- 03
What Main Avenue Kept Because Nobody Could Afford to Pull It Down
Main Avenue's cast-iron and pressed-brick commercial fronts survived the twentieth century largely because Durango's post-mining economy never generated the pressure to replace them; several blocks are intact from the 1880s and 1890s.
- 04
Fort Lewis College Moved to the Mesa in 1956
Fort Lewis College relocated from Hesperus to its current campus on the mesa above Durango in 1956, occupying land formerly held by the federal government as part of the Fort Lewis military installation.
- 05
The Old Power Plant on the River, and What It Became
The Durango electric generating plant, built in 1904 on the Animas River, operated as the city's power source for decades and was converted into the Powerhouse Science Center, preserving the original turbine hall as an exhibit and event space.
- 06
Two Films, One Train, Forty Years Apart
The Durango & Silverton's narrow-gauge locomotives appeared in Michael Anderson's Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), making the line one of the most filmed working railroads in North America.