Wally Wallace loves Trinidad, and it’s not for lack of trying to love other places.
The 33-year-old grew up visiting his family’s cabin between Buena Vista and Salida. He attended college in Durango before moving to Telluride and, eventually, Denver.
“My grandparents also had a place between Gunnison and Crested Butte,” said Wallace, who since January 2019 has called Trinidad home. He doesn’t expect he’ll leave anytime soon.
The roughly 9,000-resident town on the New Mexico border — a three-hour drive south of Denver on Interstate 25 — has found varying levels of infamy over the years for its massive legal-weed business, its brief title as gender reassignment-surgery capital of the world and, going back decades, its boom-and-bust coal industry and labor-rights history.
Now, it’s experiencing another surge of investment as artists and Denver-area business owners flee expensive rents, rising coronavirus cases and a capitalist culture that has soured them on the promise of big-city civic engagement.
They’re hoping to hasten Trinidad’s slow evolution from a 158-year-old way station to a bustling, artist-friendly haven. That includes making it a live-music and comedy hotspot that reroutes touring artists from the east-west, Interstate 70 corridor to the north-south, I-25 passage. (The busy stretch also connects Santa Fe and Taos, N.M., with Colorado’s Front Range, Cheyenne, Wyo., and points north.)
“It’s COVID and it’s interest in rural America, but it’s also social unrest and unaffordability and neoliberalism in major cities,” said Kayvan Khalatbari, a former Denver mayoral candidate and early canna-biz success story, via his former Denver Relief business. “Trinidad offers clean air and clean water and a higher quality of life, especially now that I’m a full-time dad of two adopted daughters.”
Despite his frequent travel in past years, including helping state legislatures and private companies in the U.S. set up their own legal-cannabis frameworks, Khalatbari had never visited Trinidad before May.
In the six months since then, he’s bought 10 properties — including main street historic buildings, residences, five vacant lots and even a church — and bet more than $1 million of his money on what he sees as Trinidad’s coming cultural and economic renaissance.
“I hope the things I’m doing don’t contribute to it becoming an unaffordable mountain town,” he said Thursday, shortly after closing on the Trinidad Lounge building with business partner Curtis Wallach. “We’re working on solutions, including fixing the housing dilemma and building new affordable housing on some of these vacant lots.”
The “we” in this case isn’t just Khalatbari and his friends from Denver’s South Broadway cultural scene — where he, Wallach, Jim Norris and others who are now moving to Trinidad first built their businesses. It’s a growing cadre of progressive entrepreneurs and cultural leaders who have decided Trinidad is their solution, too, for an overcrowded, expensive Denver-Boulder area — and states as far away as Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia.
They include pied-piper Wallace (who worked with Khalatbari on Sexpot Comedy in Denver); Wallach (co-owner of Denver’s Hi-Dive venue, and new co-owner of the Trinidad Lounge building); Suzanne Magnuson (Wallach’s business partner, and a popular Denver stylist, musician and event producer); well-known Denver comics such as Nathan Lund and Jay Gillespie; award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Holloway; Norris (owner of Denver’s Mutiny Information Cafe); and dozens more who feel the pull of this gritty, eerily well-preserved slice of the Old West that once hosted residents speaking more than 50 languages.
“About five years ago, we found out about Dana Crawford’s interest in the town,” said Wallach, referring to the acclaimed preservationist who saved much of Lower Downtown Denver in the 1960s. “The (city-owned) Fox West Theatre was in pretty bad disrepair, and I wanted to see what the expectations were for booking it — and if we could fit in there.”
They could, Wallach discovered. Crawford is supporting a mix of public and private efforts to raise $18 million to restore the architecturally unique, 700-seat theater, which was built in 1908 and rivals New York’s Carnegie Hall in its splendor and historic significance, city boosters have said.
“Trinidad is very much at a tipping point, because it’s got so many innate attributes,” Crawford said this week. “Outdoor recreation is going to be a huge thing with Fishers Peak (a newly opened, 19,200-acre state park), and there’s the architectural history, creative community, the new hospitality businesses, housing, and all the big galleries people are looking at opening up.”
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It’s never been a secret that Trinidad is a treasure trove of Colorado history (much of it grim) and architectural splendor (much of it dimmed). But its geographic isolation and lack of consistent jobs have stalled efforts to revitalize it over the years, despite state-funded artistic programs and ambitious, homegrown cultural programming such the ArtoCade parade from Rodney Wood — another major artist who helped pave the way for the current investment boom.
Still, concern over the short-term nature of its legal-marijuana boom since 2014 has hastened efforts to transform it into a destination that tourists spend more than a couple of nights in. The promise of hip nightlife and revived pedestrian traffic at formerly shuttered storefronts such as the Trinidad Lounge, which Wallach and Magnuson plan to reopen at 421 N. Commercial St. in January, is real, Wallach said.
An improbably preserved, nautical/Southwest-themed time capsule of retro kitsch, the Lounge is just one of the Denver-rooted businesses taking shape there. Norris will open a new Mutiny location, at 135 E. Main St., he announced online last month, in a building owned by Khalatbari. That 15,000-square-foot structure also will host a new location of Khalatbari’s own Sexy Pizza chain, an unnamed Denver brewery, and an economic incubator space.
It’s just one of several civic-improvement plans Khalatbari is getting behind, with the help of city council members such as Karen Griego, and leaders such as Karl Gabrielson, general manager of the Downtown Trinidad Redevelopment Group, and Phil Long Automotive Group CEO Jay Cimino. Another central, historic location that Khalatbari hopes to buy soon (but won’t disclose publicly yet) will host a cycling-and-fishing shop in partnership with successful mountain-town retailers.
All are simply trying to enhance what’s already there, not change it, said Khalatbari, whose efforts have met some resistance in the form of social media posts and flyers plastered around town. They sarcastically accuse him — and, to some extent, his loose coalition of Denver partners — of communist political aims.
In September, a Facebook group titled Communists 4 Trinidad CO invited local residents to a “Communist parade and picnic” pinned to the church Khalatbari had purchased, at 801 San Pedro St., and a comedy event that Wallace (now Trinidad’s economic development coordinator) had organized the same day at nearby Fort Wooten, Westword reported.
“Around the same time, Wallace says, fake fliers for the comedy show with Soviet graphics were distributed around town, leading Fort Wooten to eventually cancel the event,” the alt-weekly wrote.
Khalatbari, whose life came under the microscope during his Denver mayoral run in 2018, understands the reluctance to embrace outsiders, given previous promises about revitalization in Trinidad. While he and his former Denver compatriots report mostly welcoming reactions, they’re coming to understand that the town has “an old guard of 10 to 20 families that tend to give the unofficial OK on everything,” as he put it.
“I have zero interest in ever entering the political sphere as a candidate or public servant at this point,” Khalatbari said. “I don’t have the stomach for it after Denver. My skill set and temperament are better suited to the private side.”
With the help of economic development coordinator and buddy Wallace, Khalatbari has talked a growing list of friends into staying at his new residence/de facto hostel while he sells them on the beauty of relocating. Hundreds of new jobs may be on tap thanks to a forthcoming coal-mining operation, and with Crawford involved, national attention is bound to turn toward Trinidad’s art and architecture scene.
“One of the things we always say in the preservation industry is that poverty can be preservation’s best friend,” Crawford said. “When things get cranking, (cities) start tearing everything down. But Trinidad has so many dozens of important buildings that are entirely intact, and people for generations have been dedicated to not letting the town get Disney-fied.”
Wallace is one of those people these days. Shortly after moving to Trinidad, he marshaled the Colorado comedy scene for the Southwest Chief Bicycle & Comedy Festival. Instead of importing an outside theme, he used the fact that Trinidad is the halfway point between Chicago and Los Angeles on the still-running Southwest Chief passenger rail line to mount a walkable, multi-venue comedy festival in downtown Trinidad in 2019 (and yes, it was reachable by train from those major cities).
“It’s a strange time to move here, or be doing things like this anywhere,” said Trinidad Lounge partner Magnuson. “But we’re not coming here to compete with businesses that have struggled so hard and are still struggling. Our priority is to get the lounge up and running. But on down the road? Maybe we could help fill in some of those empty storefronts. There are so many beautiful spaces here with so much potential.”
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