Enduring Trinidad, Colorado: Visualizing Heritage on the Contemporary Landscape

This photo essay explores the urban landscape of Trinidad, Colorado, a city that prospered during the coal era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then languished for decades even as much of the rest of the state’s population boomed. For several decades, Trinidad served as one of southern Colorado’s key coal and coking centers that fueled a variety of regional industries. Its population peaked around 15,000 to 20,000 between 1910 and 1915 before ebbing to a recent estimate of 8200 people. Downtown Trinidad remains a landscape largely created more than one hundred years ago. It visually reflects an earlier era of economic prosperity that became almost frozen in time and place once that prosperity receded. Now, however, the downtown landscape is witnessing a quiet transformation as artists and entrepreneurs have repurposed the town’s brick streets and Victorian commercial buildings to serve a growing number of visitors and an amenity-based economy.