Article by Ed Quillen
Local History – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
ASK SOME PEOPLE WHERE Laura Evans’s whorehouse was, and you’ll hear that it was on Sackett Street.
However, there’s one piece of Salida trivia that goes something like this: “Despite what you may have heard, there’s no Sackett Street in Salida.” “How can you say that? It’s right there, between Riverside Park and the Victoria Tavern.” “Yeah, but if you look at the street signs, or on the city maps, it’s really Sackett Avenue.”
That makes it something of an oddity, since all the other old downtown thoroughfares are streets, not avenues. Plus, the others are identified by numbers and letters (e.g. First Street, F Street), not by names (Salida’s two Park Avenues are in other parts of town). But is this anomaly near the river really named Sackett Avenue?
When Salida was platted in 1880 by the Central Colorado Improvement Co. (a name we admire, and the land-development subsidiary of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad), that road was Front Street.
It was a notorious tenderloin in that day, where gin mills, beer joints, opium dens, card parlors, gambling halls, and whorehouses flourished for the entertainment of working men (the railroad shops with hundreds of employees were just across the river) and traveling men (it sat close to the depot where they had time on their hands while waiting for trains).
In Victorian times, publications were euphemistic as they followed the “politically correct” standards of that day. Prostitutes were often called “soiled doves” or “denizens of the demimonde” in the local press, and Salida city directories listed their bordellos as “female boarding houses.” Local newspapers referred to the area as “the Front Street Resort District.”
These zones had bad reputations, and as reformers purified Colorado in the early 20th century, there were new street names that presumably improved real-estate values. Leadville’s notorious State Street became mundane Second Street, and there is no sign to mark nearby Stillborn Alley. Denver’s infamous Holladay Street became Market Street after the major whorehouses were shuttered. Cripple Creek, angry at its depiction by a travel writer named Julian Street in 1914, briefly changed red-light Myers Avenue to, you guessed it, Julian Street.
And at some point, Salida’s scandalous Front Street became sedate Sackett Avenue. It’s just that nobody seems to know when it happened, or if it was ever done officially. The new name came from George Sackett, a real-estate developer who made a big addition to the city in 1884.
It was Front Street on the original 1880 town plat, and an undated but obviously old map at the Salida Museum shows it all as Front Street.
Kevin Nelson of the city Public Works Department found a detailed 1914 map drawn by the city engineer.
[1914 map of downtown Salida]
On that map, if you were headed toward the river on F Street and turned right at the Victoria corner, you’d be on Sackett Avenue. If you turned left, you’d be on Front Street. The formal dividing point is not clear — it might have been the crossing of the railroad tracks which then connected Salida to Gunnison and points west, or it might have been F Street.
THAT’S HOW Orville Wright, who grew up in Salida in the 1930s and ’40s remembers it — the street changed names at the corner, in much the same way as First Street turns into Oak Street at Wood Avenue now.
The maps in old telephone directories at the Salida Museum show the entire thoroughfare as Front Street in 1958, and as Sackett Avenue in 1959. Plats and property descriptions at the Chaffee County Courthouse use Front Street, clear up into the 1970s (and perhaps beyond; there’s only so much time for perusing old records).
The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t recognize a Front Street in Salida any more, but the local post-office records don’t go back far enough to determine when those numbers became Sackett Avenue addresses.
Surveyor Bob Biglow grew up in Salida, and he’s working on a map which “might become the official map if I can get the city to pay for it.” He doesn’t think that the name was ever officially changed from Sackett Avenue.
People might have started calling the east part of the street Sackett because it connected downtown to some of Sackett’s Addition, even though it was formally Front Street — and Front Street had a bad reputation.
That’s just a guess, but Biglow figures that when the city got around to putting up new street signs in the 1950s, “they just called the whole thing Sackett,” rather than call part or all of it Front Street.
A thorough perusal of city council minutes for the past 123 years might produce a relevant ordinance or resolution, but so far, nobody’s been able to come up with anything specific. For all anyone can tell, the official name, long out of common and postal use, might still be Front Street.
STREET DIRECTIONS
In the main part of Salida, many addresses are on “East Second Street” or “West Seventh Street.” This would make you think that these streets are aligned with the compass, but they’re not. Indeed, they’re nearly 45 degrees away from such alignment.
The directions come from the railroad, not the North Pole. Salida was a railroad town, and American railroads have generally operated “eastbound” and “westbound” trains, even if the tracks actually run in many other directions. This was probably done to avoid confusion that could lead to collisions.
The Denver & Rio Grande called it an “eastbound” train if it was headed toward Denver, and a “westbound” if it was headed away from the city. A train pointed downriver in Salida was on track for Cañon City, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and eventually, Denver. That made it an eastbound, even if it was pointed south in Salida. And a train pointed north to Leadville (and away from Denver by the railroad mileposts, even if it was getting closer to Denver as the crow flies) was a westbound.
The “east” and “west” on Salida streets thus makes sense as railroad east and west, not compass east and west. F Street is the divide.
These railroad directions also define north for addresses like the Victoria Tavern at 143 North F St. First Street divides north and south, but the Postal Service says that there is an F Street and a North F Street, but there is no “South F Street.”
Twenty-some years ago, merchants on North F talked about asking the city to rename the street along those two blocks, but talk was as far as that idea went.
And in case you’re curious, there was an A Street in Salida. Two street grids (downtown with railroad directions, and the Teller-Park system aligned with the compass) come together nearby, so A Street was only half a block long. It looks like an alley near the intersection of East Third Street and Park Avenue — and it’s blocked to traffic because the city vacated it long ago.
So despite the superficial simplicity of Salida’s street system with its letters and numbers, it’s actually rather complicated and confusing — even without the question of whether Sackett Avenue is still really Front Street.
There are still many streets in Salida which Ed Quillen can’t find without a map or at least some aimless driving around.
