John’s Village Madeline Ostdick

John’s Village

A Comprehensive Local History Of An American Mountain Town By Madeline Ostdick

No one else saw the town as correctly as she did, she was now sure, A modern American fairy tale. . .

A Colorado Mountain Town

Nestled high up in the heart of the Sawatch mountains of Colorado sits a small town, which at one time sat, largely untouched by time, until 1956, when it was pulled, quite against its will, into the modern era. It was pulled because it was “discovered,” as much as a town can be discovered when it has existed for decades to the people who already reside there (an inherently American story). Like most of the great American monuments, it established itself as a day trip on a much larger journey, a footnote in a guidebook. For many who knew of the town or passed through its unpaved streets, that’s all it ever really amounted to – just a blurb in a hardcover motorist’s book. But to the people who built it, it represented the manifestation of a collective spirit that blanketed the town as easily as its regular snowfall, touching every crevice, blessing every brick.

Initially erected in the late 19th century to provide the most threadbare of accommodations to miners – who plundered the nearby mountains for gold and silver – the settlement all but disappeared, as poor-quality ore drove the industry from the area in the first decades of the twentieth century, despite its placement on the Denver, South Park, and Pacific Railroad lines. The makeshift structures fell apart in the harsh winter elements and the town’s numbers dwindled. The country sank into The Great Depression and any construction, mining, and logging jobs that could be found in the area evaporated. In 1935, as part of his Second New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration, an agency dedicated to the creation of public works projects – largely related to public infrastructure – that would require the employment of millions of out-of-work laborers. At its peak, it employed three million men and women, ultimately leading to the creation of 40,000 new and 85,000 improved buildings nationwide. Its long reach would extend up the mountainside of Colorado where the former mining town sat, all but smudged out of existence.

Underwood Lodge

The Underwood Lodge

Against all odds, the perverse little tribute to that most American ideal – Plunder –received a second life, deviating drastically from its origins. Under the WPA, the town received funding to build a humble mountain lodge, dubbed the Underwood Lodge, after its architect, who also designed several lodges within the national park system. The idea was to create a recreational facility that could be used by the community –infrastructure developments undertaken under the umbrella of the agency included such things (like tennis courts, parks, community centers, auditoriums, zoos, and botanical gardens) that a harsher society might deem inessential and let fall to waste. The humble mountain lodge would provide an opportunity for winter sports like tobogganing and skiing and drive tourism to the starved region (at least in theory), and construction on it promptly began in 1936. Laborers flocked to the area with the promise of steady, paid work, bringing craftsmen and artisans – and experts in a wide range of additional fields – to build and furnish these spaces. Writers further employed under the Federal Writers’ Project, a subsect of the WPA, carefully documented the construction of the building, and by extension, the area’s transformation from Ghost Town to nascent ski village. Many of these workers, displaced from urban centers and disillusioned with city dwelling, did not leave when work was complete, captivated by what they created.

In evocation of the American Arts and Craft style of the late 19th and early 20th century, which lauded the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts, the Lodge was designed with a keen understanding of the importance of individual craftsmanship, which many with left-leaning philosophical values felt had been warped by industrialization, with mechanization creating a dehumanizing distance between designer and manufacturer. Many of these craftsmen were young women, who were taught the decorative arts in urban center training programs and schools. Laborers –skilled and unskilled – took up residence in a nearby tented city and rotated shifts to provide work. At one time, a hundred construction workers were onsite, including many Italian immigrants, who worked on similar projects in the area.

Reporting on construction of the Lodge, the Federal Writers Project noted:

All classes, from the most elementary hand labor, through the various degrees of skill to the technically trained, were employed. Pick and shovel wielders, stonecutters, plumbers, carpenters, steam-fitters, painters, wood-carvers, cabinet-makers, metal workers, leather-toolers, seamstresses, weavers, architects, authors, artists, actors, musicians, and landscape planners, each contributed to the project, and each, in his way, was conscious of the ideal toward which all bent their energies.1

Using boulders for stone masonry and heavy timber from the surrounding area, the artisans found creative ways to keep expenses low, ensuring that the bulk of costs went towards labor (about 80 percent of it did). Abandoned cedar utility posts were

1 Text taken from the Works Progress Administration’s report on the construction of the Timberline Lodge, built on to the south side of Mount Hood in Clackamas County, Oregon, 1937. United States. Works Progress Administration. Oregon., Federal Writers' Project (Or.). (1937). The Builders of Timberline Lodge. Portland, Or.: Works Progress Administration.

obtained for $2.10 each, carved, and transformed to depict area wildlife. Crafty hands converted strips of old camp blankets from the Civilian Conservation Corps (one of the most popular New Deal Programs, which created manual labor jobs related to conservation and the development of natural resources in rural lands and raised awareness for the protection of said resources). Tire chains became fireplace screens; railroad tracks were raised and molded into andirons and other impressive wrought iron pieces that wove throughout public areas of the lodge; oxen yoke was wrenched into light fixtures. Artwork commissioned by state WPA artists – in the forms of murals, paintings, and various carvings – filled the walls of the lodge. A central sixsided stone chimney – stretching upward with three openings on the ground floor and three on the first floor – served as the Lodge’s primary feature, carefully carved with symbolic forms inspired by local indigenous peoples.

“Each workman on [the Lodge] gained proficiency in manual arts,” The Federal Writers Project concluded. “He was a better workman, a better citizen, progressing by infinitely-slow steps to the degree above him.”2

To the casual observer, the Underwood Lodge – sitting atop the mountain at an elevation of 6,000 feet – might not have impressed. It wasn’t particularly distinctive, or grand, in keeping with the Arts and Crafts decorative influence. At a daunting three stories, it was the tallest of the initial town constructions, with sloped tiled roofing and windows punctuated with wooden shutters carved from local Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees. A simple, white-stone auxiliary building accompanied, providing excess rooms with lower prices and inferior views. These buildings would steadfastly remain throughout the town’s multiple lives, even as waves of modernism and abstract style – reflective of the emerging industrial world – swept popular imagination and rendered the artisanal style of the Lodge obsolete, gauche, and out of touch. Truly, by the time the Lodge was completed, it already belonged to another time.

President Roosevelt visited and dedicated the Lodge upon its completion in 1937, calling it “Simply grand.” Eleanor Roosevelt, accompanying him, praised the innovative use of local materials by the WPA laborers, lingering at the fireplace and gently tracing its elegant lines and imposing multi sided façade with gloved fingers. The couple enjoyed a celebratory lunch of welsh rarebit, roasted turnips, and huckleberry pie, before motoring off, leaving the Lodge – and the town – on its own. Beginnings

At the time, funds may have been simultaneously funneled into the construction of a proper town hall— erected, somewhat bizarrely, as a plantation-style house, a tribute to some renegade planner’s preoccupation with Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchells’ epic novel of Civil War excess, popular at the time. Understandably, this upset a few of the workers in residence, many of whom disliked the architecture on an aesthetic level, finding it fussy and unnecessarily ornate. Others — conscientious types — just hated the evocation of an Antebellum style they associated with unpleasant, lingering ideals like racial subjugation. Regardless, most agreed that – practically speaking – the half-crescent veranda atop the structure seemed a particularly unusual choice, given the frigid temperatures of the Colorado mountain environment and the

2 See The Builders of Timberline Lodge (1937)

Town Hall

slick, dangerous ice that formed along its surface. In later years, as the town’s eventual transformation into kitsch Christmas Curio reached full frenzy, townspeople began placing plastic pink lawn flamingos — festooned with Christmas wreaths — on the otherwise unused partial balcony. The invading agents loomed large over the town. “The only pinkos Uncle Sam would actually want around here!”(as the local adage went).

By complete accident, an additional building was erected as the local library at the far edge of the town’s upper cliff. The two-story, red brick structure sat elegantly on two slender white columns, leading up to a simple white stone pediment that caught and kept snowfall to later launch at unsuspecting visitors. The picturesque construction, which also served as a makeshift museum, housed the records of the WPA, as well as documentation of FDR’s dedication of the Lodge. A draughtsman made a sketching of the town in these early days, which for many years was the only visual reference to its development, as few photos were taken and even fewer survive. The framed sketch hung above the librarian’s bench, which would serve as a makeshift desk for much longer than comfortably possible. Slowly, the library accumulated the local deeds and banal scribblings that constitute a town’s history, turning it, accidentally, into a fully functioning archive. The town failed to inform the record custodians, who adapted by happenstance.

John’s Village

Upon completion of the Underwood Lodge, the town (which prior records designated “Miner’s Crossing”), was renamed John’s Village. No one knows the exact origin of the titular John: some think it may have been a hastily designated copy of Johnstown to the north, which received some local notoriety in the summer of 1924, when a meteorite fall rained a broken-up asteroid onto a stunned outdoor funeral party. Others have suggested it was an ironic nod to John D. Rockefeller, that great tyrant of American Industry, who died on the day of the town’s completion in May 1937. Over the years, the area was locally referred to as the Little Village — a testament to its wholesale refusal to expand in intent or stature. With the mining industry fully removed from the area, miners largely withdrew from the settlement, leaving behind the eclectic mix of artisans and tradesmen who fell in love with the idyllic village and its quiet serenity. Many found further employment with other WPA projects in the region. Others took odd, scarce jobs to stay afloat, sometimes relying on bartering and piecemeal community groups to keep fed and out of the snow. Many turned to the fledgling tourist industry that the new lodge promised, which created work opportunities both vital and…cosmetic.

Construction of the town followed along two mountainside cliffs, which were separated by a narrow, hidden path: the upper level – where the Lodge and much of the town’s initial development sat – held the municipal buildings and a few houses that doubled as local businesses. A credit union – the only financial institution in the town – sat in a red brick structure capped by a copper Mansard roof that weathered into a verdigris green patina under the harsh onslaught of high mountain winds. The lower level of town stood underdeveloped for much of the town’s early years, situated around a snowy lakebed that revealed a tight, circular panel for ice skating accessed by a snow-capped footbridge.

Eventually, as is the fashion, churches sprang up, beginning with the Grace Episcopal Church. Eventually, a Catholic parish, St. Francis of Assisi, sprang up beside it in protest. Both of these faith institutions were really nothing more than humble parish halls, with simple spires and quiet, haunting reverence and – despite the heretical leanings of many of the progressives in residence – religion flourished, especially at Christmastime. Somewhere along the way, someone developed a sense of humor about the whole thing, erecting eerie, permanent scarecrow tributes to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carolin the fledgling graveyard that abutted the churches, to the vocal disapproval of the more conservative sects, who saw the scene – as they did most things – as provocative.

The train connected the town to larger bastions of civilization and proved invaluable as times quickly changed for its residents. With the closure of many WPA departments upon America’s entry into World War II, the Army became the main employer in the area, and the train carted locals to Colorado Springs Army Base, located two hours east. With the country mobilized for war, the town’s plans to become a great ski mecca became fairly short lived, though they did their part to serve as a getaway for those on leave from the base and a calming respite for the townsfolk that muddled through. Things would pick up, somewhat, after the armistice, but it was not exactly an organic process.

As part of the War Effort, a large billboard was erected on Main Street, encouraging women to take on war work and other civilian jobs. Years after the War ended, the billboard stood unchanged, fading; apparently left behind by a Government that forgot the town existed. The billboard would join the menagerie of objects seemingly unstuck in time: buildings, décor, and any number of other flourishes were dropped into the town without regard to what came before, then left behind past their own time. The resulting visual served as more of a snapshot of the first half of the American 20th century than an incorporated entity where people might live and work. In the years to come, visiting families would pose cheekily in front of the billboard, as housewives strong-armed wayward children and clucked at the memory of their factory jobs and the demands of Wartime sacrifice. The Revitalized American Ghost Town

In 1950, an intrepid writer – and avowed red diaper baby – Madeline Coughlin, who grew up with stories of socialist summer camps nestled in the peaks of central Colorado, traveled to John’s Village as part of a LIFE Magazine story on Revitalized American Ghost Towns. Photos captured a town in transition: the bustling winter scene contrasted with more pastoral sights of poultry shacks, butter churners, horsedrawn carriages, and peacocked train porters white-knuckling pocket watches. Certain elements, such as a team of actors that led traditional English fox hunts for visiting tourists, barely made sense. Vacationing families in vibrant knitwear clashed with weathered women in shawls and older silhouettes bundled up in horse drawn carriages; the post-War promise clashed with the austerity of the town’s origins. In some ways, the town felt frozen in the Great Depression, when that first breath of a second life brought it careening back from the abyss, cementing it in time with clean, purposeful lines and just a few flashes of Art Deco Artifice. Newsboy caps and spats were a likelier sight than bobby socks and crew cuts.

LIFE’s startling photos, and accompanying text, which told of the pre-War promise of carefree Mountain Living, captured the attention of German émigré filmmaker Franklin Voss, who used the town as the backdrop for his 1956 holiday melodrama It Must Be This. In a fitting tribute to the progressives that paved the way before him, the director satirized the stifling values of bourgeois American society through highly stylized melodrama, mocking the boozed-up, wealthy jet set that flocked to John’s Village “for a gas.” However, all mainstream audiences saw in It Must Be Thiswas a picturesque holiday getaway teeming with traditional Christmas cheer.

“See it! Believe it! Achieve it!” cried cross-promotional vacation ads of the era. “Shangri-La in Sun-Soaked Summits!”

The fairly healthy returns of It Must Be Thisbrought renewed interest in the area and single handedly cemented the town’s affiliation with Christmas. It Must Be This was not necessarily a Christmas film, but a particularly arresting shot of the film’s aging female protagonist sobbing under the town’s communal Christmas tree linked the two in popular imagination. Tourists finally flocked to the Lodge, which adjusted rapidly to growing demand. Skiing rose in popularity across the nation, and the new Magic Mile chairlift – quickly installed up the mountain – groaned with the weight of such sudden expectation. It was shortly accompanied by a humble skate shop on the south shelf. A gondola lift, lurching between peaks backdropped by sweeping vistas, followed after

one especially lucrative year. Soon, against the will of anyone who felt differently, Christmas became the town’s main selling point. In post-War America, Madeline Coughlin would reflect on a later visit, a town unconnected to any particular industry needed a selling point. It became its justification for existence.

Christmas possessed the town. Garland lights shot up between buildings, bathing the town in a hazy, multicolored glow at nightfall, the lights refracting off the trampled snowy terrain and enveloping its inhabitants in perpetual stage lights. The town simply twinkled. Taking in its glow could be like staring into the heart of a gem – or a chintzy dime store ornament, depending on who you asked. Coughlin found that the sight of the town lit up to kaleidoscope effect was both strikingly beautiful – and somewhat unnerving. “Is this village real?” she asked. “Did I dream it? Wasit dreamt up by the people who inhabit it?”

The people here, she concluded, were as fascinating as the town itself: full of a kind of restless energy that transformed everything they did into a sort of visual theater. At the time of Coughlin’s visit, Marie Harris, who would go on to become Mayor of John’s Village for a spell, and her beau, Thomas J. Blaz, could often be found haunting the communal pond. In her article, Coughlin described the pair as possessing a great poise, despite the confined space of the ice, gliding along it in clean strokes with precision and grace. A clique of young people could often be found down there on the ice, splitting hot sweet potatoes on half-frozen wooden bunches and bemoaning the eccentricities of the town’s older characters.

“When,” Marie would emphasize to the gathered peanut gallery; not if, when, “I get out of here, I will never suffer another fool.” Her best friend, Margaret Arden, generally kept close, quietly offering the kind of unwavering support that can only come from growing up with someone and unconsciously molding to the ways they change. Margaret was a subject of great interest herself: her tireless fight to preserve and maintain the town’s fledgling archives outlasted the most ambivalent citizen, until they simply handed her the entire operation. The town, in its simple ignorance, could never have understood the value of the historical repository she built; a beast of burden born of great love.

“When,” Marie would emphasize while down there on the ice, and some part of Margaret rang out in harmony, “I leavehere…”

“Yes,” Margaret would respond with a good-natured eye roll, “Whenyou leave here . . . ”

“When weleave here,” Thomas would interrupt, pointedly, frowning.

“Yes, when we leave here,” Marie would clarify, mid-sweet potato, gesturing to the gathered party with an eye roll of her own, “None of uswill suffer fools.”

Margaret did leave, first, carrying the town and its impact on her life on her back like a hermit crab, using it to ground her and her ideals. Years later, she began her academic dissertation, which would go on to become a classic historical non-fiction book in certain circles: “I am the product of an American aberration.” She became a revered historian, recognized as such by absurdly legitimate institutions, just as Marie became a great teacher – and a great wife – in their years away from the village. The rest of their life stories were not reported in LIFE magazine, and they slipped into the kind of quiet personal success and general anonymity taken for granted by fools.

The Second Life and the Second Shelf

Investment into the town, fueled by people more than happy to capitalize on middling box office success, brought massive, and sometimes baffling, improvements, mostly to the lower level. A multi-story cineplex, constructed as a facsimile of Radio City Music Hall by an enthusiast with unexplained finances, was constructed in the center of this development, thrilling those in the town who secretly loved and fed the eclectic image of John’s Village – and infuriating the Protestants. Uncanny statues of scantily clad, high-kicking Rockettes – frozen in unwavering enthusiasm under the

harsh glare of the flashing cineplex lights – further divided the town. But lacking much of a very formal governing process – and left to the whim of tourism money – the town allowed the statues to stand, unchallenged, each year from November 1-February 28. Only when townsfolk began the long process of removing the hanging Christmas lights that wound throughout the town would the cineplex manager begrudgingly tuck the frozen beauties back into storage with great care and ceremony.

During the holidays, the cineplex programmed Christmas movies, proudly reshowing a never-returned print of White Christmas, a 1954 technicolor musical starring Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and Danny Kaye that was presented in daunting VistaVision. “Crazy Bill,” the cineplex manager and projectionist, would personally introduce the film as the story of a “winter wonderland, much like our own.” From the projection booth, he watched each screening with near religious devotion, dead to the outside world and indifferent to its machinations. At the climax of the movie, when a coat of artificially produced snow finally blankets the Vermont Inn soundstage, he cried. Why he cried, he could never really say, and he never met director Franklin Voss, who could have told him. White Christmassoon became the only Christmas movie programmed during the holidays. Between screenings, Crazy Bill would advertise out front, wearing a sandwich board sign – as if the town did not know what could possibly be playing. Other holiday films were certainly requested (“Can we at least get It Happened on 5th Avenue?” Carol, the aging classical Marxist in charge of ski rentals, would annually grouse). They never materialized. During the summer, the cinematic pickings were even leaner: mostly Ma and Pa Kettle, Tab Hunter, and Jerry Lewis. As far as anyone knew, no real-life Rockettes ever stepped inside the theater.

A unionized toy store rose up in height to meet the cineplex, also selling sundries and various clothing to meet the varied needs of the town people, who often rode East on the train to larger towns to find their necessities, sometimes traveling as far as Denver. A lean “Santa” statue of traditional Russian depiction loomed on the roof at Christmastime, angering the Protestants. The origin of the Ded Morozstatue remains somewhat vague, but the popular thinking was that it was the result of some local émigrés’ love of “Grandfather Frost,” a legendary figure with roots in Slavic pagan mythology. Ded Moroz – or Morozko, as he was known centuries ago – began life as a powerful, cruel god who froze people at will. He warmed under the influence of Orthodox tradition, transforming into a wise old man who brings presents to well behaved children. Though deemed “bourgeois and religious,” along with most Christmas traditions, after the Russian Revolution, Grandfather Frost nevertheless became a beloved staple of Soviet life – now visiting during the secular New Year holiday – and was reinstated as an acceptable tradition by party recommendation in Pravdain 1935. Draped in his fur coat and valenkiand riding in his troika pulled by three white horses to and from his little log cabin in Veliky Ustyug, the image of Ded Moroz brought joy to the émigrés of the Little Village – and like it or not, the whole town would consequently sit in his great shadow.

The townspeople bustled through these spaces, as consistent in their behavior as the unchanging structures that dwarfed them. Joe, the head and sole courier for the toy shop, made deliveries around town by foot, carrying presents through the snowy banks

to the chastisement of Greta, the aging parish secretary, who solemnly passed out alms outside the cineplex, pleading her case for eternal salvation from under the marquee. Rosemary, who ran the town’s spartan schoolhouse, moonlighted during holiday breaks at the town “visitor center.” As the town could easily be traversed in the course of one afternoon, the visitor center didn’t really need to be anything more than a kiosk, which was actually repurposed stagecraft from the school’s production of The Iceman Cometh, put on in the main hall of the Underwood Lodge.

The school itself came about as something of an afterthought, when the townspeople suddenly realized that their young charges would need a basic formal education to function in any meaningful way. The simple structure, white as snow, kept 20-student classes in cramped rooms that stifled in the spring and ran frigid in winter. Miss Clavel, the eldest of the teachers, would simply drag her students out in double file lines when it got too cold, attempting moving history lessons occasionally shouted out over the howls of errant fox hunt hounds.

A local sextet was engaged during the winter months to play traditional hymns for gawking tourists on the lower level. The players’ origins aren’t well known, but at least a few in rotation fled coastal entertainment industry blacklists and dodged questions about it. Phillipe, a concert pianist with fragile bones, traveled to John’s Village just before the War, hearing of it from friends in the Federal Theater Project. He conducted this small band of musicians between shifts at the Lodge, where he played Cole Porter standards in the lobby and thought of his unfinished symphony, itching just beneath his fingers.

The nondescript diner, which held the dubious distinction of separating the hostile spaces of the cineplex and church corners, gained an equally nondescript name –Shelly’s Diner – sometime during the revitalization of downtown. Shelly Medley, a former chorine who may or may not have bounced on a certain Kansas City button man, lorded over the counter and the burners of the diner, happy to head the only formal eatery in town.

Expansion of the diner led to the construction of an adjacent café and bakery, as well as a traveling cart that made the chilly trips down to the ice rink to dole out pastries to lanky teenagers and young adults, who increasingly competed over that same narrow patch of ice that allowed little more than constant circulation. “Uncle Felix,” whose real name was Ted, ran the cart, slipping spare pastries to the economically challenged with a wink. “No head for numbers,” he’d say later, soothingly, to Shelly, who pretended to disapprove. There were several quiet acts of grace like that in the village: church doors that never shut; informal childcare offered as necessity arose out of people’s homes, businesses, and backyards; unworn clothing that wound up in the hands of those that needed it; and shovelers that appeared out of nowhere outside the homes of the elderly after the worst snowstorms. No one commented on these things because they weren’t remarkable to anyone. It was just what needed to be done.

Eventually, enough grease fires at the diner encouraged the village to construct a formal fire station. The stark red building employed only four men, who often walked across the way to the diner to put out the manageable fires. Other incidents hardly warranted the use of the firetruck, which sat largely for show in the hangar; the firemen chatting easily with passing bodies and encouraging photo ops with the firehouse dalmatian, Red Rover. (“Red rover, red rover, let J. Edgar Hoover just try to come over,” had been a common summer camp refrain). Chinese New Year

Immigration brought other changes to the sleepy town. Despite its consecration on generally antiracist ideals, the town sat largely homogenous for much of its early life, despite workers of all races coming to work on the railroad lines and in the mines. The history of Chinese immigrant communities in Colorado had been a fraught one, defined by white supremacist anxieties and race riots. At the end of the 19th century, this proved especially true in Denver, where a dedicated Chinatown rose up (and subsequently fell). Newspapers printed that the Chinese were descendants of the Mongol Empire; not so subtly hinting at their supposed inherent desire to conquer new territories, which set certain tensions.

In 1880, a drunken brawl in Denver’s Chinatown – started by two white men –escalated to a full-scale riot that ended with most of the buildings destroyed and the brutalization of nearly every Chinese resident, including one hanging. By the turn of the century, Denver’s ethnic population shrunk dramatically, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, erected in 1882 and limiting immigration, was not repealed until 1943. These attitudes filtered through the smaller Colorado hubs, following any attempts at non-homogenized settlements. Though progressives of the Little Village lauded lofty ideals, many in the little village nevertheless harbored discriminatory attitudes, particularly toward Chinese laborers, which many viewed as a threat to their jobs.

The second World War – in which China was an American ally – reopened Chinese immigration to the states, though racism towards Chinese Americans would not wane. Ironically, the Red Scare – and the general fear of Communist China – that kept other parts of the United States gripped in fear and hatred towards Chinese Americans would help bind them to the citizens of the Little Village. While other areas of the country - and in Colorado - rejected Chinese immigrants that came in the post-War, second wave, the town developed its own significant Chinese-American community. Stalwarts of the Little Village understood discrimination based on political ideology at least (in fact, many left-inclined individuals fled to the town during the McCarthy era) and found it easier than others to co-exist. It still took tireless work to peacefully integrate the communities – as it did to desegregate in the second half of the century. After all, this is an American story—and one that is still very much being written

Members of the burgeoning Chinese-American community brought along their cultural traditions and Lunar New Year parades soon became a staple – filling in the void left by the end of the Holiday Season. Typically, in the course of these celebrations, a traditional dragon dance would manifest, winding through the snowy banks. Experienced dancers gripped poles hoisting up a fearsome, multi-colored dragon, whose head twitched in time to the accompanying drum. Traditionally, the purpose of the dragon dance is to bring luck to a community; the more the dragon danced, the more luck it brought.

“We could use the luck,” Margaret Arden would shout over the pounding drum, taking in the bright streak of the dragon as it passed the pond to the cheers of those assembled. “There’s not much else holding this place together.”

“I didn’t even know this was a town,” Thomas J. Blaz would joke back with a grin. “If you didn’t constantly drag me into that damn archive, I’m not sure that I would have realized it.”

Change

In later years, the town’s accumulation of tonally strange objects increased its uncanniness, just as rapid turnover of Lodge ownership and legal questions regarding the government’s ownership of the land challenged its stability as a ski lodge. With the expansion of affordable international travel and the rise of luxury ski destinations like Aspen, the town fell out of favor, soon facing economic woes that shrank its profile even further.

An impounded pink Cadillac, awarded to a traveling Mary Kay saleswoman in the 70s whose inflated sales caught up to her, sat, abandoned, inexplicably, in front of the town hall. Townsfolk noticed the similarities in color between the car and the garish pink flamingos and let it sit, decorating it like Santa’s sled in the winter months. After all, nothing happened by mandate in John’s Village: pink Cadillacs showed up outside city hall as modern art, and the townsfolk adjusted accordingly.

An installation of Radio City Musical Hall ensconced in a giant snow globe, for example, was erected in celebration of the cineplex’s five-year anniversary. It would stand in silent salute for many more anniversaries.

In fatter years, the Lodge had purchased a sparkling glass Christmas tree to stand at the base of the ski slope, figuring that it would require less maintenance than nurturing

and trimming a traditional tree each year – and would be a conversation piece for those well-coiffed metropolitans passing through the town, lovers of all things that sparkle. Consequently, Vincent, the manager, spent most of the Lodge’s landscaping budget guarding it from the whims of local teens and loose-stooled birds. A proper looming pine – the centerpiece of It Must Be This– had been installed in front of the town hall; a seasonal pine on the second shelf came later. Smaller friends would follow. The glass tree seemed even more surreal by comparison.

In 1978, a stalled red Volkswagen van joined the town patchwork thanks to some traveling Deadheads, who, on a return trip from attending the August 1978 show in Denver, stopped through the town. The car stalled, the Deadheads hitched their way back out, then failed to return for the vehicle. A mechanic revived it, slapped some wreaths on its roof, and gave it a new purpose: delivering Christmas trees to homes throughout the Village. However, the car frequently became stuck in the deep snowbanks of the lower shelf, so it really became more of a community pantry: if the only commodity being swapped and shared were pine trees, strapped to the top. An unexplained Coca Cola delivery truck served a similar function – there was no distribution route that would warrant an official truck to regularly service the town –but somehow a Coca Cola delivery truck became a neighborhood staple, and it never ran out of Coca Cola. Whether this was the result of Christmas magic or community efforts hardly felt worth interrogating to residents. Besides, no one in town would ever willingly admit to supporting the Coca Cola corporation – although a few worked at the regional distribution plant in Colorado Springs.

Despite the town’s contained nature – or because of it, perhaps – reality eventually caught up to it. The older eccentrics carried on with the frugality and drive of their youth - always doing too much for too many people, but younger people moved on and moved out, and the town suffered for it. Ironically, many of the younger citizens flocked to coastal areas where ideas nurtured in the Village were also taking root. Practices like food programs, communal living, and alternative systems of care flourished in hip, young spaces in other parts of the country, while in other parts of the country, a backlash to this wave of progressive ideas was cresting, primed to swallow such efforts whole. The nation was changing, quickly, and there soon ceased to be much of a space for something like John’s Village, except as a roadside attraction favored by cinema fans and amateur historians. The Colorado Springs Army Base had changed names around the time of the Vietnam War and still actively trained servicemen – but there was no combined spirit to unite the town once more. With residents largely ideologically opposed to the war and otherwise out of touch with cultural tastes, the town found itself displaced in time once again.

The Underwood Lodge received one last gasp of notoriety when it served as the exterior shots of a haunted abandoned mountain hotel in iconoclastic director Arthur Schnitzler’s 1980 art horror film The Stanley Hotel, based on a popular novel at the time. By that time, the town had practically been reclaimed by its Ghost Town origins, sitting largely unchanged and haunted by its briefly prosperous past. The gondola creaked, empty, in the harsh winds. The porters were long gone, the churches barely maintained regular services, the visitor’s center was now a storage shed, and Ded Moroz’s twinkling visage had been weathered down into placid indifference. The Stanley Hotel, a critical failure with fairly modest box office returns, failed to

accomplish what It Must Be Thishad for the town almost thirty years prior. With the exception of a few wayward long hairs, who came to gawk at the strange, now severe Lodge, there wasn’t a revitalization of tourism to the town. In fact, the notoriety of the movie – which would take on a complex afterlife of its own, becoming the subject of conspiracies and theories on secret symbolism – made many afraidof the Lodge. The film’s eventual cult following would later inspire fans to seek out the Lodge – but by the end of the century, it had closed, and the town’s spark went with it. Afterlife

The town never could make up its mind about what it was. In the lean years – and there were many more lean than lucrative ones for many that resided there – the thing that kept villagers going; that ephemeral, profound “thing,” that tick of the clock, was the idea of John’s Village itself, and the ideal it represented in the local imagination. Out of the profound chasm of unfettered greed came something of a pauper’s prayer: a vision of a world governed by silly values like equality and humanity, built by the hands of laborers who were conscious of the ideal toward which all bent their energies. Even as the town transformed itself into a postcard of cornfed bliss, it couldn’t shake the otherworldliness, the gorgeous uncanniness of a space founded by artists and craftsmen, left to the whim of eccentrics at odds with all sense of propriety. It explained why the nylon-sporting families simply passed through, while the extraterrestrials stayed put.

Madeline Coughlin’s granddaughter, a diarist, pored over her grandmother’s articles on the town – saved by her father – which she meticulously kept in leather bound scrapbooks that detailed her illustrious career. Cold cynicism staked the granddaughter’s heart at some point between childhood and adulthood. She became possessed by a bitterness befitting a person who feels as if they are witnessing the end of history. She rolled her eyes at the village; pleaded indifference to her father’s pleas to interrogate the village, rejecting the kind of sincere emotions that would require such inquiry into such childish things. He begged her, as a writer, to open it up and see its strong story. She didn’t feel like a writer, and she certainly didn’t feel like a child that would still care about such things.

It would take her too long to realize that she was wrong. Not because her cynicism wasn’t well earned; or because she didn’t have just cause to scoff at older traditions of a country that disappointed her at every turn. But she failed to see the beautiful potential of the desolate country town, and the quiet nest it built in her imagination. In her youth, she saw a silly, fanciful tourist village, rather than the shades of gray that wisdom and experience would eventually color in for her. Seeing it as an adult wouldn’t cheapen the village, or even change it so very much. Instead, it would reveal new depths, in its quiet elegance. She could see the utopian ideals flitting below the surface of it, as well as the possibility that the town might represent something significant within her own heart.

As a child, she obsessed over photos of the village, ghosting chubby fingers over cryptic snapshots, subconsciously filling in the gaps of the people captured there. “That’s me,” she’d exclaim as a child, pointing to a lone figure skater, “And that’s Tanner,” she’d point to an unnamed woman pushing a baby carriage. Those categorizations fell to shallow impulses: that one is pretty, that one looks kind. As an

adult, she’d survey the documents more ambiguously, wondering when exactly the figures started to loom so large as actual people in her imagination. She recognized her desire to categorize, narrate each and every frozen moment, as if she could gain control, as a juvenile impulse that never really left her. She supposed that some might consider that the act of writing; she mostly felt embarrassed by it. No small part of her wondered too, painfully, in taking in the village, if something she had meant to be a part of had passed her by.

She would see her father in the village too, even though he never visited it in his lifetime. Throughout her childhood, when she couldn’t sleep, he sat by her side, recalling tales of a mountain village largely untouched by the modern world, beholden to the erratic cycles of cultural regeneration. She saw it as though he had designed the town itself, pulling buildings to his whim, until the ice rink abutted the toy store, and the poultry stand dwelled in the shadow of the fake plantation house. It shifted and contorted in her mind’s eye, until she was moving the pieces herself, for coherence sake, of course. Even more outrageously, she would see the town as a composite of all of its eras: so that the impounded pink Cadillac existed in the same space as the fussy porters and the portly man selling Christmas geese, and everything that the town ever was hung simultaneously in some cosmic plane untouched by reality, accessible if she closed her eyes. No one else saw the town as correctly as she did, she was now sure. A modern American fairy tale: not of untold riches – of princesses and hidden mountain gold – but of egalitarianism (or something closer to it than she could find in her own world). Of a more equitable world, in which the rich shared with the wanting. A town that, lacking even much of a bank, gave itself up to fantasy. She could give herself up to that fantasy too. And carry it on her back with her.