By Warren Epstein
The aroma hits you before you see it. That sweet scent from rolling chile roasters wafts down Union Avenue during the annual Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival. Steel may power this city. Water may provide the fun. But it’s the chile pepper that feeds the soul of Puebloans and nearly all who visit.
“In Pueblo, we put green chili on our mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving,” Mayor Heather Graham says with a laugh.
With a reputation as a gritty lunch-bucket town, a steel mill still dominating its skyline, why should Pueblo — a city of about 110,000 people — be considered as a place to live, start a business or visit as a tourist?
Well, it’s a lot more than the hot chiles.
“It’s our culture,” Mayor Graham says without hesitation.
That rich culture is on full display during Pueblo’s major fairs and festivals. The Colorado State Fair and Rodeo, which runs August through Labor Day, attracts about 500,000 annually from throughout the Front Range and beyond.
Taking place in the dusty cattle-filled fairgrounds, the fair certainly stands as one of the hottest (in temperature and popularity) events in the state. When the weather starts to cool (the third weekend after Labor Day) and the farmers truck in their harvest, about 150,000 people flock to the aforementioned Chile & Frijoles Festival in downtown Pueblo.
Steel and Water
This land has been attracting diverse peoples for centuries. Even before Europeans arrived, the area now called Pueblo was a crossroads that Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Pawnee and Ute peoples frequented.
Western expansion and William Jackson Palmer’s railroad brought industry and, in 1881, the Colorado Coal & Iron Co. started feeding the steel needed for the tracks as well as providing coal to be shipped on the trains.
Immigrants from throughout Europe and Mexico flocked to Pueblo to work the steel mill. It’s telling that the mill published its original instructional manuals in 25 languages or dialects.
“We were multicultural before it was a trendy thing to be,” says Jeff Shaw, president of Pueblo’s Economic Development Corporation (PEDCO).
Steel and multiculturalism remain essential to what drives Pueblo. The other element is water.
After a devastating flood in 1921, engineers changed the path of the Arkansas River so that downtown would be safe, and in 1930, began construction on a dam, which would create Lake Pueblo.
Today, Lake Pueblo State Park is Colorado’s most-visited state park, attracting about three million visitors annually. Boaters, anglers, campers, hikers and mountain bikers flock to this huge lake, surrounded by beaches, marinas and cliffs.
The 1921 flood also prompted the creation of a massive Arkansas River levee, labeled by the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper as “the greatest engineering feat of the West.” In the 1970s, students from Southern Colorado State College (now Colorado State University-Pueblo) started sneaking out and painting graffiti on the levee walls.
Eventually, city officials embraced the sometimes artistic works of vandalism. Now, boasting work by students, community members and professional artists, the three-mile-long Levee Mural Project has been certified by Guinness as the world’s longest painting.
In November of 1995, Pueblo passed a 20-year $12.85-million bond issue that would divert some of the water from the Arkansas into an elaborate, meandering-through-downtown channel.
Although never competing with San Antonio’s (as boosters at the time dreamed), the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk Project would become an enduring, ever-expanding amenity for the community and tourists. Every day, joggers, dog walkers and families run, hike and stroll along the gentle waters or take short trips on paddle boards, tour boats, duck-shaped pedal boats or Venetian-style gondolas.
The latest phase, set to be completed next fall, will extend the channel eastward, toward Santa Fe Avenue, and include a two-story boathouse with a rooftop deck and a space to store the excursion boats, at an estimated total cost of $16 million.
“Pueblo has never been afraid to invest in itself,” Shaw says.
That’s an understatement. Pueblo offers cash incentives for industrial or high-tech companies to locate here. In addition to the new expansion of the Riverwalk, it recently developed a whitewater park on the Arkansas River.
Public safety has been one of Mayor Graham’s crusades since taking office in February 2024, hiring 30 more police officers and investing in a Real Time Crime Center, which, when completed in 2025, will feature drones as additional first responders.
A City of Artists
When Shaw talks about investment and when Mayor Graham talks about culture, it’s easy to see both in Pueblo’s thriving arts scene.
Beyond the levee, vast murals can be seen throughout the downtown.
That phenomenal city center, full of historic turn-of-the-century stone and brick buildings, is home to the city’s Creative Corridor, one of 30 designated Creative Districts in Colorado. On First Fridays, this cluster of galleries, museums and shops comes alive with music, wine receptions and special events.
In addition to works by local artists, you’ll see what is probably the coolest visual surprise of Pueblo’s historic district: Neon Alley. Glowing outlines of Batman and Robin scale a brick wall beside a floating image of Aladdin’s Lamp, joining more than 40 other luminous vintage signs. Joe Koncilja, the sign collector and restorer behind this brilliant display, calls it the “the greatest assembly of neon art west of Times Square and east of the Las Vegas Strip.”
A free shuttle, the Van Gogh, takes art lovers to some of the more distant spots from the main corridor, including the Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center, which features theatrical performances, art and dance schools and the Buell Children’s Museum, one of the state’s premier children’s facilities.
The Sangre de Cristo showcases the city’s best mainstream arts, but the Van Gogh also travels to the center of Pueblo’s counterculture.
Jeff Madeen, an artist who studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, recently gave a tour of his mural-covered Blo Back Gallery. We walked past one of Madeen’s paintings, depicting Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, part of his anatomy resembling the Amazon “smile” icon.
Another room holds multiple Madonnas constructed out of trash and found objects. Yes, this is the counterculture center.
“People from the Springs come down here regularly,” Madeen says and, gesturing to a small stage, adds: “We had a band playing last First Friday. There were over 200 people in here.”
Madeen, who also directs a local film festival, has been in a pitched battle with City Hall over a giant “ART” sign he had on his roof. He had to take it down when the City Council rejected his argument that it was a sculpture, not a sign, and thus violated a sign ordinance.
Madeen’s fight-the-man spirit doesn’t surprise Katie Magby and Christina McCann at Pueblo’s Arts Alliance, which coordinates the First Friday activities.
“Artists are more scrappy here, willing to do whatever they have to do to get out there,” Magby says.
“In July, we had an artist wearing a hot protective suit, harnessed up and suspended on the levee painting a mural,” McCann says. “And it was 120 degrees out there!”
A City with Taste
Pueblo expresses its culture in so many ways, including its culinary delights.
“Pueblo has long been this melting pot of cultures — Slovenians and Hispanics, German and Irish, Greeks and Italians … and we get to eat all their food,” says Mayor Graham, who owns and operates three restaurants.
Some Pueblo restaurants show the influence of multiple generations. Tacos Fuego, for instance, features Mexican staples handed down several generations, and then there’s a relatively new item: flama fries, topped with queso and spicy Cheetos dust (clearly there’s a younger hipster in the kitchen.)
Among the many Pueblo restaurants, you’ll also find the hot new food hall (Fuel & Iron), a few upscale restaurants and many mom-and-pop cafés. The Pass Key, now with three Pueblo locations, has been serving its signature sausage sandwiches for more than half a century.
And Pueblo stands as one of the few cities (right up there with Chicago and New York) boasting its own signature dish: the Slopper, a spicy and gut-warming open-faced cheeseburger smothered with Pueblo green chili. There are a couple of competing origin stories, but the one with the most scholarly heft has to be the one crediting Gray’s Coors Tavern, a Pueblo institution that still serves Sloppers by the bowlful, for introducing the dish in the 1950s. Several other Pueblo cafés also serve Sloppers.
Green chiles and other produce grown in the farms near Pueblo feed that dynamic restaurant scene.
“At harvest time, all our local restaurants are farm to table,” Mayor Graham says.
A Place for Heroes
The food in Pueblo reaches deep into its civic identity. Another identity began to emerge in the early ’50s: heroism.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was presenting a Medal of Honor to Raymond G. “Jerry” Murphy when he realized he’d seen the man’s hometown mentioned quite a bit in association with this honor.
“What is it … something in the water out there in Pueblo? All you guys turn out to be heroes!”
In 1993, realizing that Pueblo had four living Medal of Honor recipients, more per capita than anywhere in America, city leaders adopted the slogan “Home of Heroes.” In 2000, the city hosted the Congressional Medal of Honor Convention and unveiled four sculptures dedicated to Murphy (Marines — Korea), William J. Crawford (Army — WWII), Carl L. Sitter ( Marines — Korea), and Drew D. Dix (Army — Vietnam).
A Green Future for Pueblo?
Pueblo seems to be going green, putting a heavy emphasis on sustainability as its industry grows. Wait, isn’t this the same place where its history is built around a smoke-belching steel mill?
Yes, and most of that old mill, though no longer operating, still stands, part of it purchased by the local historical society. But there’s a state-of-the-art mill next door, EVRAZ North America, that’s considered the greenest mill on the continent. It’s powered in large part by 750,000 solar panels and produces the steel for almost half of North America’s railroad tracks.
Pueblo’s environmental ambitions became especially clear in 2017 when the City Council voted to commit the city to 100% renewable energy by 2035. That commitment extends to wind as well as solar. Pueblo boasts the world’s largest wind turbine tower-manufacturing plant at the city’s industrial park.
Shaw at PEDCO is proud of the growing green-job movement in Pueblo. But what is he most proud of?
“Our people,” he says. “We have a tremendous workforce.”
The city has blue collars, white collars and all shades in between, and they tend to be stable. Most of the workforce doesn’t migrate to other cities for jobs. Ties to family and a low cost of living keep them rooted here.
Pueblo has jobs in healthcare, education, manufacturing, high-tech sectors and retail (including retail marijuana). Shaw would like to see that retail sector expand.
He told a story about how he recently shopped at the outlet stores in Castle Rock and ran into Mayor Graham. Maybe feeling a little guilty about cheating on their own retail locations, they both started to laugh.
