Central City---sexy grandma cocktail waitress

Something at altitude makes everything dry and ghostlike. Preserved yet withered, and eternally cold.

Central City---the City of Central---is to Colorado what Astoria is to Oregon---the point at which civilization entered the area, and the key to understanding its history. It is the Ur-Colorado location.

As a student of America, I am a student of American history.
As a student of American history, I am a student of American financial history.
As a student of American financial history, I am a student of American railroad history.
As a student of American railroad history, I am student of the Gold Rush.

No trains here now. Just a scraped over and sorted over gulch of tailings, still denuded hillsides, and a town that sags like a necklace across from one side to another, a string of Victorian brick structures along Main like a set of new glittering teeth.

Built to survive even catastrophic fire, the buildings still stand after the long slow death of the gold industry, and then the renovation for casinos.

St. James', the first methodist church in Colorado, has Sunday School at 10:00 am. Across the street, the opera house has a resident theater company again, for part of the year. The place where Rose Haydee once danced became a casino then shut down again as the new modern casinos hotels were built down the hill at Black Hawk, along the main highway. One can see their lights down the gulch. One day the casinos that came and went on Main Street will be memorialized in plaques of their own along the sidewalk.

A couple casinos are still open here, and prospering. Looser slots still bring the tour buses up the gulch to the old town with its ancient ruins.

The come here to replant their gold---government checks and savings---like an offering to keep the font of wealth flowing down Clear Creek Canyon, washed like the original placer flakes downstream to reglitter the state capitol dome.

Mr. Jacob's store became the headquarters of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, which added the second story of the building.  In the early Twentieth Century, it became the town post office. In 1948 it became the back room of the notorious Glory Hole saloon, itself named for the mine and mill, which by then was just a memory.

Today, next door is the world's first recreational marijuana dispensary---the first license issued. The lights shine bright in the windows on otherwise dark block of at the corner of Main and Nevada.