›› Few works of art are as practical as the gray trail under your feet. As if Picasso himself poured, shaped and brushed concrete sidewalks all over the city, artisans for generations have left their signature stamps behind.
You’ve seen them your whole life. Egg-shaped or square stamps in the sidewalk signaling who created the walk and when.
The stamps, like the branding on livestock, were a symbol of ownership and pride. They’re also a mark of accountability, a way to trace the work back to the cement company if any cracks or unsavory blemishes appear on the sidewalks over the years. Sometimes, however, the companies become untraceable.
Names like Trujillo, Aragon, LaSasso are now just phantoms of small, family-owned companies that thrived decades ago. They were the symbols of moxie. Hard-working concrete workers would strike out on their own, looking for work in the growing suburbs after World War II, pouring a few sidewalks or driveways, always leaving their indelible calling card.
The small businesses were often first- or second-generation immigrant startups. North Denver Italians. Baker District Mexicans. American dreamers looking for life beyond what a hard-day’s work with trowels, wheelbarrows and brooms usually brought.
“Some of them go belly up,” said Bill Lee, a street maintenance superintendent who celebrated 40 years with the city of Aurora in January.
The concrete business isn’t lucrative if you don’t know what you’re getting into, he said. The equipment costs can be overwhelming, and all concrete contractors must be licensed and bonded, designations that aren’t easy to obtain.
The practice of stamping portions of sidewalk has been around for decades. Some of the oldest sidewalk stamps can be seen under your feet in original Aurora, and date back to the 1950s, said another street aficionado, Terrall Rankin, who’s been with the city since 1981. Some of the cement sidewalks in Aurora were constructed in the 1970s by companies with obscure family names like Robinson and Chet Pritchard. Other names featured on stamps of that era are better known in the concrete world, like Thoutt Bros.— the company that lauded itself in 2000 for pouring more than 177,765 cubic yards of concrete, which made it the largest concrete company in Colorado.
The stamps weren’t the only hardened signature left behind by contractors. The sidewalks themselves hold tell-tale signs of the artisans who created them. How the walks were brushed, wet or dry, the size and position of joins and smoothed frames vary from contractor to contactor.
The concrete that was poured decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, was more organic. It was composed of mostly cement, Rankin said. Nowadays, concrete is infused with myriad chemicals; different types of aggregate.
Many sidewalks no longer even carry a stamp. Designs and finishes are now utilitarian, if they’re included at all, paving a way to a different future in Aurora. n