AURORA | People wanted to escape, even if it was to dull Midwestern towns like Alton, Ill., and Akron, Ohio.
Judging from the way they named their streets, the first residents of Fletcher, Colo., had left their hearts in other cities, places where they wouldn’t have to face crushing debt, short supplies and high mortality rates. Early on, the town that would eventually become Aurora took its street names from exotic locales in the Carribean, Europe and even Kansas.
“Early Fletcher had so many problems, so many deaths. It never took off the way Donald Fletcher thought it would,” said Colorado historian Phil Goodstein, referring to the Denver businessman who skipped town after his pet real estate project took on massive water debt in the 1890s. “What’s interesting for me about Aurora’s streets is there’s a belated impact of Fletcher on the community. The early town of Fletcher named its streets for cities, and you still have that as the key defining characteristic.”
The hard times would get better, but the street names wouldn’t.
Taking a drive down East Colfax Avenue can still feel like a taking some kind of cruel, middle school geography quiz. Dayton, Geneva, Hanover, Jamaica, Lansing, Lima, Peoria, Scranton. The cross streets are a hodgepodge of cities and countries. Streets named after ho-hum American cities run parallel to routes with much more epic namesakes. Xanadu Street, for example, is named after a mythical city referenced in a Samuel Coleridge poem from 1816.
But most of the places immortalized in Aurora’s street system are much less spectacular, especially in a modern context. Elkhart Street’s namesake is a town in Indiana that boasts the title of “Trailer Capital of the World.” The claim to fame for Ironton, Ohio, is as the home of the Ironton Tanks, one of the first professional football teams in the United States. Oswego, New York, sits on Lake Ontario, and tourism officials never miss a chance to promote life jackets.
As dull as the names may seem, they’re part of a system that was adopted more than 50 years ago. The street grid system in the Denver metro area has distinct guidelines — it’s the reason that numbered “avenues” run east and west and titled “streets” run north and south. It’s the reason why developments in the newer parts of the city follow the familiar naming conventions, why all directional designations are based on the intersection of Broadway and Ellsworth Avenue in Denver.
“Aurora uses the Denver metropolitan street grid. That was adopted by a commission back in 1956,”
said Cathryn Day, an addresser in Aurora’s Planning Department. “The grid system encompasses the whole metro area, except Douglas County … The most important thing about using a grid is public safety, so that fire and safety can locate your house in the case of an emergency. When we’re going to name new streets, we look at where that street is going to be in accordance to the grid.”
That’s not to say that it’s impossible to find traces of Aurora’s history before the adoption of the 1956 agreement in the city’s street names. For every new Kentucky Avenue and Picadilly Circle that’s been added to the system in the past 30 years, there are still plenty of thoroughfares that speak to the personalities and land features that gave Aurora its early identity.
“About every half mile or mile, on the arterials, you break away from the grid and commemorate what the area itself was,” Goodstein said. “Every half mile or so, you have these old county roads in place.”
Those former country roads tell their own stories. The old railroad town of Sable used to sit east of Aurora near the Union Pacific railroad tracks and was eventually eaten up by encroaching development. Sable Boulevard was once its Main Street. Chambers Road was named after business owner Roy Chambers, who once owned a storefront on Colfax. Tower Road got its name from the KOA radio towers that used to stand along the strip; Gun Club Road (formerly Hunt Road) got its name from a shooting club that used to sit in the middle of nowhere.
Some of the stories have been lost to history. Hampden Avenue was supposed to be part of a series of streets named after fancy universities, but there’s no record of a Hampden College.
“There are about three or four theories. One is that the guy that was naming it couldn’t find any “H” names he liked and he named it for a friend; John Hampden,” Goodstein said.
Other tales seem just plain silly to modern residents. For anyone who’s ever driven down Smoky Hill Road, it’s hard to connect the name to the place. Southeastern Aurora is hardly the moors of England or the misty mountains of Tennessee.
“That gets back into the early Pikes Peak area,” Goodstein said, referring to the Smoky Hill Trail. The route ran into Colorado from Kansas, parallel to Cherry Creek. “The amount of air pollution in 19th century Denver should not be underestimated,” he added.
Such quirks aren’t liable to show up in the names of many new streets in Aurora. Apart from the occasional exceptions for shopping centers (Southlands includes a Main Street and a Commons Drive) and changes for branding purposes (the renaming of a street on the Anschutz Medical Campus to “Aurora Court” followed pushes by city leaders for more local recognition in the titles of the new buildings), the pattern of the city’s streets follows a fairly rigid course.
“One of the areas that I had to map in New Mexico had a Sherwood Forest theme. There was Friar Tuck and Robin Hood drives,” Day said. “One of the reasons we don’t do that is that we won’t have a confusing mass of street names. There’s real value in having a system like the grid system.”
Looks like local residents can pine for places like Akron and Ironton for many generations to come.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707