FOR ONE THING, few other cities have a downtown filled with Victorian architecture that’s remained nearly unchanged during the last century. But should you need a reminder of where you are, all you need do is look down: The sidewalks and streets are paved with red bricks, and each brick is stamped “TRINIDAD.”

Most of Trinidad’s streets are straight, but not Main Street, which was built in the 1860s along the gently curving wagon ruts of the old Santa Fe Trail. To take a tour of Main Street is to see the city’s past, present and future unfold before your eyes.

At the corner of Main and Animas streets, you’ll notice a curious sight. There are normal storefronts at street level, but there’s another set of storefronts one story below, down a seldom used flight of stairs. It’s a remnant of what once was an entire underground block of Main Street that connected to tunnels traversing wide stretches of the city.

Ask three people in Trinidad the purpose of these subterranean thoroughfares and you’ll get three different answers. Some say they were built during Prohibition, when Trinidad had an undercurrent of Mafia activity, and bootleggers – even Al Capone, according to rumors – used the tunnels to transport illicit booze. Others say Main Street simply was raised up one story to avoid damage from the flooding Purgatoire River.

By the 1950s, the tunnels had become a playground for Frank Cordova and his six brothers. When they were kids, they ran through the darkened passages, shooting Roman candles at each other – he’s amazed, in retrospect, that none of them got hurt by the sparks bouncing off the tunnel walls.

Cordova, like many people in Trinidad, is descended from Italians that came in the early 1900s to work in the coal mines. But Cordova and his brothers weren’t destined to be miners. They left Trinidad in the 1960s to pursue a career in rock ’n’ roll, and their band played on bills with Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers, among others. Cordova didn’t leave show business behind when he returned from Las Vegas to Trinidad to open Rino’s Italian Restaurant & Steakhouse on Main Street.

Diners enter Rino’s to the sound of music – not just pipedin Muzak, but actual singing, courtesy of the staff of singing waiters. Cordova makes sure he gets to sing a few songs each night, favoring Italian tunes by Andrea Bocelli. Cordova doesn’t speak fluent Italian – “I just got the accent,” he jokes – but you wouldn’t know it to hear him sing. After he’s done, he sits for a while at the table where Allyson Sheumaker eats with her young daughter, only to be interrupted by a messenger from the kitchen – someone ordered the tenderloin, and he has to hand-cut the steak to order. “Kids think they’re rock stars because Frank comes down and sits with them,” Sheumaker said. “They don’t realize he does that with everybody.”

Right up Main Street from Rino’s is the block known as “Millionaire’s Row,” whose historic houses tell the story of Trinidad’s early glory. There’s the 1870 adobe mansion that belonged to the family of Felipe Baca, who founded Trinidad after moving north from New Mexico to farm the fertile Purgatoire Valley. Next door is an 1882 Victorian mansion, and though it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Addam’s Family’s house, it actually belonged to banker and cattle baron Frank Bloom, whose cattle empire stretched from New Mexico to Montana. Both houses now are part of History Colorado’s Trinidad History Museum, open to the public from May to September.

Farther down the street, you can get a stiff drink and rare steak at Black Jack’s Saloon & Inn, a watering hole and eatery that looks little changed from 1895, when it was built. The stuffed heads of a longhorn steer and a white buffalo look downas you eat, and if you want to stay the night at Black Jack’s, proprietress Cheryl Clark will lead you upstairs to an old, wooden hallway. You’ll note that instead of numbers, all the rooms are emblazoned with a woman’s name – Opal, Daisy, Lily. That’s because long before it was a bed and breakfast, this was a brothel, and each room is named for the lady who used the quarters to conduct her business.

Black Jack’s gets its name from Black Jack Ketchum, a member of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, who used to hide out in the hills and canyons south of town. Ketchum’s criminal career came to an end in 1899, when he tried to rob a train in New Mexico, and the engineer – a dauntless Trinidad man – nearly shot off his right arm with a shotgun. Ketchum was taken to Trinidad’s Mount San Rafael Hospital, where his arm was amputated, and then sent back to New Mexico to be hanged in one of the most bizarre spectacles of the Wild West – the noose didn’t just break Ketchum’s neck; it decapitated him. 

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Trinidad is a city built on coal. Not literally, perhaps, but the coal mines that sprang up in the surrounding hillsides made the town rich. “Trinidad, Colo., has enough coal to melt the North Pole till it runs,” wrote Will Rogers after a 1935 visit. In the city’s heyday a century ago, Trinidad was home to 30,000 people, and most of their livelihoods were somehow tied to the mines.

David Hadad, owner of Hadad’s Home Furnishings in downtown Trinidad, has a personal connection to coal, even though he’s never worked in the industry. His grandfather came to Trinidad from Lebanon in the 1900s and built up the family business traveling between the many coal camps to sell goods to the miners. The Hadads made enough money to start a general store in Segundo, a mining town west of Trinidad, but when the mines there closed down in the 1950s, so did the store. In 1959, the family opened its Trinidad store at its current location on Main Street, where they sold just about everything you can think of. But mines kept closing, and Trinidad lost more people – and Hadad’s lost customers – until the population dropped to 9,000, a level that’s held steady for the last few decades.

Sales are down from when he first took over the family business, but Hadad, now in his 70s, never gave up on the store – and he never gave up belief in Trinidad’s future. The store’s inventory, once diverse, is now mostly beds and furniture, but people still come in. Customers are often the grandchildren of Hadad’s earliest customers, and he asks about their family members as he cuts them a deal on a mattress or love seat.

As one industry waned in Trinidad, another, rather unusual one was emerging – one that got the city nicknamed the “Sex Change Capital of the World.” Dr. Stanley Biber, an Army MASH unit surgeon during the Korean War, came to Trinidad after the war as a general practitioner at Mount San Rafael Hospital. In 1969, a man asked Biber if he would help him become a woman, and Biber was game for the challenge. He did the surgery, with help from diagrams borrowed from a doctor in Baltimore, and the results were a resounding success. Wordof-mouth spread, and with few doctors in the country performing the surgery, Biber emerged as an expert in the practice, taking patients from across the globe. He performed more than 4,000 gender-reassignment surgeries by the time he retired more than 30 years later. A new doctor, Marci Bowers, took over in the 21st century, but in 2010 she moved the practice to California.

Trinidad’s economic hardships have had a spectacular silver lining.

“During the 1950s and 1960s, when other towns were tearing down historic buildings to modernize, Trinidad couldn’t afford to do that,” said Cosette Henritze, historian and former publisher of The Trinidad Chronicle-News. “That proved to be a good thing because we ended up having most of our historic buildings survive all that.”

Trinidad is an almost perfectly preserved Victorian city. And the architecture isn’t just run-of-the-mill old buildings – the historic downtown is studded with Italianate stonework facades that give the city an almost European look. Walk around town with City Planner Louis Fineberg, who moved to Trinidad two years ago, and you can see his wide-eyed marvel at the grandeur of its buildings, but also his worry that something must be done to preserve them.

“This wall looks like Berlin in 1945,” Fineberg said as he approached a crumbling stone wall. “But it wasn’t bombs that hit it – it was the economy.” Fineberg has started an all-out effort to get grant money to stabilize abandoned buildings, and the city is looking for potential tenants to occupy them. Fineberg and others see a creative rebirth in the city’s future: Trinidad as a cultural center where artists can move into historic buildings at a fraction of what it would cost in other Front Range cities.

That dream is already starting to come true – just ask artist couple Rodney Wood and Susan Palmer, who in 2011 moved to a 100-year-old building to set up their home and respective galleries; he’s a painter specializing in magical realism, while she’s a quilter and masseuse. Wood and Palmer both have moved dozens of times – Palmer has never lived anywhere longer than three years – but neither has any plans to leave Trinidad.

A friend visiting from Denver asked them, “Why Trinidad?” Before Wood could respond, the doorbell at his gallery rang: It was a florist delivering a plant for the newcomers, sent by a local business owner they hadn’t even met. That was all he needed as an answer.

Wood has created a signature event for Trinidad – the Artocade – that he hopes will draw more artistic types to the city. The Artocade, slated for its inaugural run in September, is a parade of art cars, a type of folk art that includes things like the “Chewbaru” – a Subaru covered in dentures – and other cars modified to look like giant animals and other wild things. Dozens of art cars will come from across the state and country, as well as a strong contingent from Trinidad; the local pingpong club is even working on its own car. 

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Trinidad native Arthur Roy Mitchell was an artist here before being an artist was cool. Mitchell grew up working on local cattle ranches, then became one of the premier Western artists of the 20th century. He was called “King of the Pulp Magazine Covers” for his action-packed, pulp-fiction paintings. Step into the namesake A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, and it’s easy to see why – each of his pictures tells far more than the proverbial thousand words. In one, a red-shirted cowboy crouches behind a sandstone boulder, peering around the edge to see if the shot from his smoking six-gun has hit its target; unbeknownst to him, an outlaw is climbing over the rock, dagger raised to plunge into the cowboy’s back.

Mitchell made his name in New York City, but when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1944, he returned to his beloved Trinidad to die – or so he thought. In fact, he lived another three decades. In his second life in his hometown, he fought to save the historic Baca house and joined the art faculty of Trinidad State Junior College.

The Mitchell Museum is housed in the grand building that once was Jamieson’s department store. Down the street, another former turn-of-the-century Main Street store – this one an exJ.C. Penney – is the new home of the Southern Colorado Repertory Theatre. One of the troupe’s biggest hits was “Trinidad: Our Stories,” a collection of vignettes about the city’s real-life characters. Harriet Vaugeois, who co-founded the theater with husband, Fred, wrote the script after interviewing dozens of residents, such as restaurateur Manuel Bueno.

Now in his late 80s, Bueno dropped out of school in fourth grade before starting a grocery store, then a sandwich stand, then three well-loved restaurants. In interviewing Bueno, Vaugeois was fascinated by his delivery. “When something was emotionally important, he would very slowly and thoughtfully say, ‘Yeah … yeah ….” So she incorporated that idiosyncrasy into the scene she wrote about him.

When opening night came, Vaugeois didn’t watch the actors (she already knew what they were going to do) – she watched the audience. When the actor playing Bueno came to the emotional climax of his story, ending with, “Yeah … yeah …,” members of the audience elbowed each other, turning to their friends, amazed that the characters of their hometown had been captured in such minute detail.

Art might be Trinidad’s future, but it’s also keeping alive the memory of its past. 

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