By Bob Loevy

There are fond memories of the old days in Colorado Springs, hiding in our older neighborhoods that date back to the late 1800s
and the first years of the 20^th Century.

These memories are the horse stables built in the backyards of the more expensive older homes. They housed the horses and carriages of the home’s well-to-do owners that carried them to their various destinations around town –- employment, shopping, visiting friends, etc.

Automobiles would not come into widespread use in Colorado Springs until around 1920 or thereabout.

Many of these former horse stables are still here, in good condition, but recycled as additional living space, backyard offices, or, in some cases, automobile garages.

In fact, the horse-and-buggy era in Colorado Springs affected the size and shape of the early building lots. The lots were designed to be long with big backyards.

That was so it was a long distance from the smelly stables (horse manure) at the back of the lots to the houses where the people were living.

The result today is the big backyards on many of our older homes that are ideal for children playing, croquet courts, badminton courts, golf practice, and other space-demanding contemporary backyard activities.

One way to identify a former horse-and-buggy stable is if there is a “hay-loading door” still in existence on the alley side of the building.

Photo by Walt Loevy

This large “hay door” is on the second story of a large former stable. This big former stable is behind a large mansion on North Cascade Avenue.

The horse feeding system worked like this. A wagon loaded with hay would come down the alley and stop at the second-floor “hay-loading door on the horse stable and open it.

Food for the horse would be unloaded from the hay wagon, pushed through the hay door, and stored on the second floor of the stable. As needed, the hay for the horse would be dropped down into a manger on the first floor for the horse to eat.

Of course, really wealthy families would have a large stable behind their equally large home with more than one horse-and-buggy there.

A number of present-day homeowners of large older homes have gone out of their way to preserve the hay doors on their former stables, no matter what the present use of the former stable is.

Some even go so far as to paint the frame of their now unused hay door a different color from the rest of the exterior alley wall on their former stable, thus making the old hay door more visible and identifiable.

Another indicator of a former horse stable is a preserved sliding door that was opened to let the horse-and-buggy out of the stable for use by the family. These sliding doors were large, obviously, because the horse-and-buggies that fit through them were large in size.

This unused remnant of a sliding stable door is on a former horse stable turned automobile garage in the backyard of a home on North Tejon Street. The door is large enough that, with the door pushed aside, a horse and possibly a small carriage could get through the opening.  The metal track,  and the wheels that ran on the track, are visible at the top of the door at the top of the photograph. The former sliding door is nailed shut and forms a wall of the garage. Photo by Walt Loevy

In some cases, when the horse stable was recycled to a new use, the sliding door was left in place and nailed shut to cheaply form part of a new wall on the building.

Often, the steel bar and rollers used to open the sliding door were left, unused but easily visible, on the outside of the building.   

It was easy to convert former horse stables into automobile garages. The major change required was to put doors big enough to let an automobile in on the alley side of the building.

Later on, sliding garage doors that stored overhead in the garage were installed, sometimes hand-operated and other times electric-powered.

In some instances, the horse-and-buggy era affected the design of wealthy homes in Colorado Springs. A door was often added on the side of the house next to an outdoor set of steps leading down to street level.

Servants would bring the horse-and-buggy up to the steps by the side door. That made it easy for the family to come out the side door, go down the steps, and get into the carriage.

This way of boarding the carriage so close to the house would be ideal in rainy or snowy weather.

Colorado Springs was a horse-and-buggy town from its founding in 1871 until, as noted above, about 1920. Look carefully, and you can find a number of visible reminders of that period of our city’s history.

* * *

In other news, Dianne Bridges is stepping down after four-and-a-half years as chair of HNP (Historic Neighborhoods Partnership), the citizens’ organization that represents the interests of older neighborhoods surrounding the downtown area.

Named chair of HNP in June of 2021, Bridges participated in many city projects that affected homeowners and neighborhoods. A few of the most significant were:

– She worked to preserve single-family and two-family zoning in Retool, a major rewriting of the Colorado Springs Uniform Development Code (UDC).

– She lobbied against carports being built in front-yard driveways in residential areas in the city.

– She participated in the Historic Resources Survey Plan, a survey of historic buildings in Colorado Springs and how best to preserve them.

– She helped in the effort to protect local neighborhoods in Colorado Springs from efforts by the state legislature in Denver to densify those neighborhoods.

She thus resisted state-mandated backyard apartments (Additional Dwelling Units – ADUs), relaxed off-street parking requirements, and replacing single-family and two-family homes with apartment buildings along bus routes.

Dianne Bridges also supported setting height limits on high-rise buildings in downtown Colorado Springs in order to preserve and protect the view of Pikes Peak.

Bob Loevy is a retired professor of political science at Colorado College who writes about Colorado and national politics.