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    Lakewood
    Lakewood
    Lakewood
    Ebook136 pages25 minutes

    Lakewood

    By Robert Autobee and Kristen Autobee

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    About this ebook

    Although settled in the mid-1860s, Lakewood waited to incorporate until 1969, when its population was 90,000. It was instantly the third largest city in Colorado and had it all. Lakewood even had progressive ideas for government from a nonmilitarized police department to incorporation of the patchwork of existing sewer, water, fire protection, and park districts. And if it did not exist, Lakewood's community-minded citizens created organizations, committees, and associations, like the historical society and Lakewood on Parade, to fill the need. This can-do entrepreneurial spirit makes Lakewood a livable, small-town, "All-America" city.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 16, 2015
    ISBN9781439654439
    Lakewood
    Author

    Robert Autobee

    Robert and Kristen Autobee explain how Lakewood grew through this collection of images from private collections, organizations, and the Lakewood Heritage Center. Lakewood native and author Robert Autobee has worked as a historian for both state and federal agencies. Coauthor Kristen Autobee is a former museum curator and a local historian. The Autobees are currently research associates with Morgan, Angel & Associates and are active in the Lakewood Historical Society and local preservation efforts.

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    • 5/5
      it was great. I would've liked a little more about the history of JCRS, my favorite bit of Lakewood history but, oh well. the pictures were great, and it's full of Lakewood's amazing history. there's no place like home!

    Book preview

    Lakewood - Robert Autobee

    authors.

    INTRODUCTION

    Lakewood, Colorado, was a name on a map—but not a city—for more than 80 years. From the 1889 plat of farmland named Lakewood to Jefferson City’s incorporation in 1969 to Belmar, an early-21st-century commercial development, the city’s name and identity have often been afterthoughts.

    Starting in a general location west of Sheridan Boulevard and along West Colfax Avenue, the name Lakewood traveled west by the early 20th century. Along the way, the first post office at Thirteenth Avenue and Brentwood Street, a general store at the intersection of today’s West Colfax Avenue and Carr Street, and Jefferson County’s first telephone exchange all carried the name Lakewood. By the 1930s, the county’s leading newspaper, the East Jefferson Sentinel, proclaimed the intersection West Colfax Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard downtown Lakewood. The occasional feed store and diner dotting the surrounding pastures and cottonwood groves symbolized urban Lakewood during the 1930s. Similar to other small towns, residents made a special trip to view the installation of the busy corner’s new traffic light in the early 1940s. By 1947, some 36 business between modern day Jay and Kipling Streets used Lakewood in their name. Of these, 29 were on West Colfax Avenue.

    The 1950s were good to Lakewood. The economy was booming, and many of its residents seriously considered incorporating as a city. Around West Colfax Avenue and Carr Street, 60 independent shop owners referred to their collective of freestanding buildings and small strip malls as the Heart of Lakewood. By 1960, newspaper ads for the new Westland Shopping Center displayed an ignorance of government and geography by referring to itself as downtown Jefferson County.

    By the decade’s end, a majority of residents campaigned to incorporate and finally settle the question of Where is Lakewood? In 1969, a crime wave and a boom in the construction of suburban tract homes were the reasons why people in the neighboring communities of Lakewood and Wheat Ridge seriously considered incorporating as Colorado’s largest city (in square miles). At the last minute, Wheat Ridge decided it had a more unified identity than its neighbor to the south did, and the two communities parted amicably.

    Lakewood voters went to the polls three times in 1969. As proof of a civic identity crisis, modern Lakewood incorporated as Jefferson City in June. The former Jefferson Sentinel newspaper quickly changed its masthead to the Jefferson City Sentinel, and its Letters to the Editor section was packed with comments against the choice of Jefferson City. The paper also contained reports of the city’s division into wards and new voting precincts and who was running to be the first mayor and city council. Voters returned to the polls in August and elected James Richey as their first mayor. Colorado’s constitution required cities to hold elections in November of odd-numbered years. Three months later, Jefferson City’s voters re-elected Richey and the city council and decided the first ballot issue—what will we call ourselves? The answer?—Lakewood, of course. And the newspaper that announced the results the following week?—the Lakewood Sentinel.

    Who was a typical resident of this new city? Statistics from 1970 indicate he or she was middle-to-upper-middle class; owned a home valued between $10,000 and $12,000, and of European American heritage. African Americans were virtually nonexistent in Lakewood. The State of Colorado Planning Office found that only one-tenth of one percent of the county’s population was African American. The Denver Federal Center, the city’s biggest employer, counted 500 African American employees. And, according to the Lakewood Sentinel in February 1970, only 15 lived in Jefferson County. Over the following decades, the community’s homogeneity began to fade and new ethnicities made Lakewood their home. In 2013, European Americans still comprised almost 70 percent of the population, with Hispanics totaling 22 percent, followed by Asians at 3 percent and African Americans at 1.5 percent (US Census Bureau,

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