I want to ride a trolley to Tony’s
Article by Margalit Goldberg Art by Jake Greenblatt
I didn’t think what I was doing was LARPing till I found myself walking to the 7/11 in my medieval garb. We listened to Gregorian chants, drank mead, feasted, and then went to the backyard to mock sword fight… all part of a themed dinner party. So when we walked into 7/11, the serfs stood in the corner looking at sunglasses till the lords and ladies had purchased their various drinks and ice creams, and I felt shocked by the change from candlelight to fluorescent. The store became more crowded and, to add to the chaos, the 18-wheeler with the store’s restock had pulled up to the front doors. This is when I, as Lady of the Manor, decided it was time to leave the establishment if I wasn't purchasing any goods.
When we walked outside we realized that the 7/11 parking lot was being utilized for a mini-motorbike meetup. In that moment, a span of time lasting hundreds of years before and after 2024 collided. The bikers were adorned in futuristic suits and LED lights rimmed their tires as they wheelied and swerved through the cars who just happened to be there getting gas and were probably as astonished as I was. There was a furry on a one-wheeler and someone who had outfitted a folding lawn chair on top of a one-wheel (to have so much pickup I was surprised he wasn't wearing a helmet). They were just as much a spectacle for us as we were for them. As we walked through the parking lot, a biker asked us if we had just come from a renaissance fair.
“Something like that,” we replied.
Just two groups pursuing their passions crossing paths at a 7/11 on a Friday night. The Springs is not a place you appreciate because it has everything you need; instead, it's because of the incredible juxtapositions and irrationality of the city.
Imagine it is 1874 and you are riding the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad to Fountain Colony (now named Colorado Springs). You would cross Palmer Divide, to the confluence of Monument and Fountain Creek, where you would only pass one house standing alone, with the open treeless plains to the East and the Front Range to the West. There were apple trees and aspens planted in the quaint yard enclosed by a white picket fence which is still there because the house now exists as a museum and protected historical site.
The first and only house one saw when arriving in Colorado Springs needed to look nice, but not too nice. Attainable for a family who was trying to move out west and invest in coal and iron. So, the house’s design is entrenched in the gilded-age style yet restrained by Quaker sensibilities. Old Colorado City already existed as a laborers’ community, but it was corrupted by prostitution and liquor. Fountain Colony, however, was to be pure, polished, and progressive. They adhered to the sort of Northern progressivism which was informed by the causes of abolition, suffrage, and equality for all.
The first house was not a Victorian mansion which otherwise defines the architecture on Cascade Avenue. Those mansions came later, like the W. S. Montgomery House (at CC we now call it Jackson) which was built from Willis and Julia Montgomery’s Cripple Creek fortune. The Cripple Creek Gold Rush built the glitzy, flashy, ornate gilded age mansions that Colorado College students now live in.
The first house in Colorado Springs belonged to Major Henry McAllister and his family. Major McAllister was General Palmer’s right-hand man and was in charge of advertising Fountain Colony as the best frontier to establish. McAllister and Palmer met while serving in the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War. When the war was over, they moved west to invest in the railroads. When the Congregationalists (a branch of Protestantism that was established in New England in the 1600s) decided to establish a college in Colorado, they were deciding between Greeley, Denver, and Colorado Springs. Major McAllister used his prowess in the railroad world to campaign and succeed in establishing Colorado College down the street from his house. And with that, the seeds of the Springs were planted: transportation and higher education.
I recently started biking on the wide roads of the city. The Old North End streets have room for a bike lane, but 18-wheelers will also whizz past occasionally and almost knock you over. I would still sometimes rather drive when my parents' warnings about bike accidents ring through my consciousness. On one of my latest adventures, I decided to bike to Evergreen Cemetery. When I arrived at the closest intersection, there was no direct path to bring me into the cemetery so I awkwardly walked my bike towards the entrance across the bumpy lawn. Inside the gates of the cemetery, a sign informed me that you could not place firearms, rocks, seashells, or vases on graves.
I cycled my way to the end of the cemetery, whisking by names. So many names. There were people leaving a white lawn tent used for a funeral, all returning to their cars to drive home. As I passed by, an F-150 almost hit me because of how terrible the turning radius on those things are. Then, I happened to pass William Jackson Palmer’s grave. I didn’t stop because I wrongly thought I’d easily be able to come across it on my way out. The graves of famous locals interest me, but I like to go to the newest graves first whenever I visit a cemetery. At Evergreen Cemetery, the newest plots back up against Union Boulevard. Here there exists eternal highway noise, even in death.
Nearby to the section of freshest graves, I found a monument which reads “erected in memory of those unsung pioneers who helped build the Pikes Peak Region, the infants born to pioneer settlers of this area, and those later residents, both known and unknown who came to this final resting place.” The first thing I thought was that those poor settlers only ever got to hear the sweet roar of a highway in their final resting spot. The etching on the bottom of the stone illustrates a man and his wagon being pulled by two oxen. He holds a rifle in his arm outstretched towards the West. The “promised” land. The benches in front look out across the tall prairie grass towards a clear view of Cheyenne Mountain which holds the Space Force and Fort Carson. I guess this is the promised land.
The headstones in this pioneer memorial section date from the 1860s and haven’t been upkept. A few still stand with grainy inscriptions that have become indecipherable from time. The stones are mostly hidden by the switchgrass and white blooms that rise up to my knee. Despite being native, the flora feels out of place since the rest of the plots are on Kentucky bluegrass.
I dreamt of the Wild, Wild West as a child. Denver seemed like a metropolis compared to anywhere else in the state. Laura Ingalls Wilder convinced me for a time that I would have done really well as a pioneer child. I also attribute my numerous visits to the Four Mile Historic Park — where we learned how to churn butter and avoided mentioning the genocide of native peoples — for the sake of fantasy. I still find historical parks fascinating, but now for more nuanced reasons. What do we decide to showcase from the past, in war reenactments and quaint preserved homes, and what do we keep hidden in the cellars? Wild West imaginaries, influenced by truth and fable and desire, are alive and well in Colorado Springs. The pioneer now works for the U.S. military. Manifest Destiny made it to the Middle East.
A storm gathered on the peaks of the mountains, telling me I couldn’t stay for much longer. I biked away from the prairie towards the city of tombstones packed in rows. A sandstone memorial caught my eye, so eroded it was now unevenly pocked like the rock formations at Garden of the Gods. A marker with no trace of who it had once been for. I like the idea of a headstone made of sedimentary rock. Rock, too, must return.
I wish they still had a trolley system you could take out to Cheyenne Canyon or Old Colorado City. Imagine being able to go to Tony’s by way of public transportation. Like how in the early 1900s, Colorado College students would ride out to picnic among the pines and try to return before sunset so they could meet curfew for their dorms. Now we drive our cars up Highway 24 on weekends to skinny dip in the freezing ponds and return to campus to try and have enough time to complete our homework for Monday.
The last electric trolley ran in Colorado Springs in April of 1932. At this point, so many people owned personal cars that there was no longer enough demand for the trolley system, so the city abandoned the tracks, sold most of the trolley cars, and began running diesel buses. However, they keep the dream alive of reopening the tracks at the Pikes Peak Trolley Museum. I drove on I-25 to get there, thinking about how I probably would have contributed to the death of the trolleys.
Upon arrival, I was greeted by the kindest retiree who was eager to tell me about his grandpa who drove a trolley in the Springs. He pointed out his uniform that had been donated to the museum and joined the collection of fare tokens, model trains, and electric bells among other railway transportation paraphernalia. The building holding these objects used to be the Rock Island train line’s roundhouse. The line went from Chicago to Colorado Springs and once passengers were dropped off downtown, the train would return north to the Roswell neighborhood and receive repairs at this building. There are no longer any passenger trains on the tracks that run parallel to I-25, but coal still comes down from Wyoming.
In the museum’s in-house shop, there are always old men volunteering to repair trolley cars. The work is so slow and tedious that it seems like the cars are deteriorating at the same rate they’re being fixed. Dave, my docent, told me the city will never agree to bring back the trolleys because they would have to rip up all the streets. Yet, he’s still volunteering six hours a week to repair cars to their original condition and run the museum. Time moves very slowly here. There’s a trust that someone else will finish the work you started. In their railyard, there are over fifteen train and trolley cars waiting to be bought or fixed. Trolley purgatory, or something like that.
On my bike ride back from the cemetery, I passed the statue of Palmer within the intersection of Nevada and Platte. He is portrayed similarly to any statue of a town’s founder, riding a horse that towers over the traffic. The statue’s prominence in downtown Colorado Springs means that it has been graffitied modestly during protests with “BLM” and “Love Wins.” This graffiti, however, was not a direct call for removal. That call has come from the families of car crash victims at that intersection. I looked it up and there have been 80 car crashes at this intersection since 2018. So tell me, General Palmer, did you think you, a transportation mogul, would end up here, disrupting traffic?