Union Avenue Historic Commercial District, Pueblo

The brick canyon you're near in downtown Pueblo started as a railroad warehouse row. South Pueblo was platted in eighteen seventy-two, and by the early eighteen eighties merchants were stacking Italianate and Queen Anne commercial blocks along what they called Fifth Street, later renamed Union Avenue after the Denver and Rio Grande depot anchoring its north end. Steel money from the Colorado Fuel and Iron mills upstream filled the coffers of merchants who built these storefronts, and at its peak the district handled regional wholesale trade across southern Colorado.

A catastrophic Arkansas River flood in June of nineteen twenty-one rearranged the lower blocks but left the core intact. Listed on the National Register in nineteen eighty-two, the twenty-seven-acre district preserves about seventy contributing buildings, one of the most intact Victorian commercial streetscapes between Denver and Albuquerque.