The New Sheridan Hotel
Near Telluride, Colorado
The brick building on Colorado Avenue with the elegant bar is the New Sheridan Hotel, and it has watched over this town since the silver days. The first Sheridan Hotel went up in eighteen ninety one, but fire, the constant enemy of wooden mining towns, destroyed it in eighteen ninety three. The owners rebuilt in brick, and in eighteen ninety five the New Sheridan opened its doors.
In its heyday it was said to rival Denver's celebrated Brown Palace for fine dining and service, an astonishing claim for a remote mining camp at the end of a canyon. It was here, in front of this hotel, that William Jennings Bryan is said to have addressed a crowd in nineteen oh three. Next door, the Sheridan Opera House was built in nineteen fourteen, a small jewel of a theater connected to the hotel so that touring stars could walk straight from their rooms to the stage.
Over the years its boards hosted famous performers and traveling speakers. When Telluride reinvented itself as a festival town, this same opera house became the birthplace of the Telluride Film Festival. Few buildings anywhere have carried a town so gracefully from one century into the next.
