9 MAY 11-17, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Denver has a soul. It inhabits the trapezoid space that stretches from Colfax Avenue below the Auraria cam- pus all the way to Sixth Avenue, over to Speer Boulevard and along the South Platte River. Welcome to La Alma. Or should that be El Alma? Alma, which means “soul” in Span- ish, is a masculine word. But in Denver, the neighborhood became known as La Alma. “This has been brought up a lot, that it really should be called El Alma,” says Lucha Martinez de Luna, the daughter of prolifi c muralist Emanuel Martinez and founder of the Chicano/a/x Community Murals of Colorado project, which works to preserve this state’s murals and its Chicano heritage. “But I think it’s interesting that the commu- nity decided to keep it La Alma, because it speaks to something more profound.” It speaks to the heart and soul of Denver. Long before gold was found at the confl uence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, the Apache, Ute, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arap- aho camped in the area, though regular fl ooding prevented any kind of permanent settlement. That changed with the discovery of gold. As fortune seekers headed west, the Auraria Town Company formed in 1858, setting up a town that competed with the new settle- ment of Denver just across the creek. The two rivals merged in 1860, compromising to work together on what was fast becoming a boomtown. In the 1870s, A.C. Hunt, who’d served as Colorado’s fourth territorial gov- ernor, from 1867 to 1869, homesteaded what would one day become La Alma; the City of Denver purchased Hunt’s former homestead in 1885. Five years later, it was named Lincoln Park, after the late U.S. president. By then, small, squat cottages had already sprung up in the area known as Hunt’s Ad- dition, which coincides with the La Alma of today. Historic Denver refers to this as the city’s oldest residential neighborhood, though that title was once claimed by nearby Auraria, which was largely wiped off the map for the creation of an urban campus fi fty years ago. For much of its history, the neighbor- hood has been home to immigrants and the families of Denver’s manual laborers. In Hunt’s time, many of them worked at the nearby Burnham Yards, one of the country’s most signifi cant rail yards for 150 years, until Union Pacifi c shut things down in 2021 (and then sold the prop- continued on page 10 EVAN SEMÓN
