And yet, he said this from a booth inside Alley Cat Coffee as students sipped drinks, laughed or buried their noses in laptops.

“I’ve spent so much time here,” Williams said. “If the choice was to have it close or sell it to someone random, I didn’t really have a choice, in my mind.” 

Williams, 27, calls the cafe founded by his father, Mark, his second home. He was homeschooled, and most of his lessons took place at the counter.

He said his father, Mark, talked him into taking over, but all it really took was a little reassurance.

He hesitated, he said, because he was afraid of the responsibility. Jumping into it helped, as well as making a deal with his business partner and friend, Hunter Horsfall: Horsfall could handle the bar downstairs if he managed the coffee house. They still trade off at times. He backs up Horsfall during concerts. One of his main jobs, he said, seems to be sweeping up broken glass. 

Williams said the vibe is “an alternative library,” meaning it’s one of those coffee houses where students go to study together. There is a quiet room without music for more serious students, but even there, it’s stocked with art supplies that customers donate. In the noisier section, students crowd tables with their laptops in every booth. Students are most of his business, and he’s learned to like it that way. 

“I’d love it to be busier,” Williams said. “But I don’t want to cut out students.” 

Saturdays are good, he said, and when there are midterms, he’s packed every night. Winters are generally strong. Summers are slower. 

“We have busy weekends and weekdays are pretty chill,” Williams said, “but we are trying to figure that out.” 

He handed out free chai cards on campus at the beginning of the school year. He gave most of his 1,000 away to freshmen until he found a graduate student party and dumped his last 200. He got 300 cards back, which made him happy. He doesn’t like to advertise on social media and leaves marketing to a couple of chalk messages on campus. 

“The best thing I can do is try to make it a good experience,” Williams said, “and hope they come back.” 

He knows he’s young to own his own business, but he considers that an advantage. He likes his employees: They’ve made the adjustment much easier. He’s run the place for four years now. 

“I’m only a few years older than most of my workers,” he said. “I know what they want.” 

Perhaps another country will beckon him away one day, but for now, he’s glad his father pushed him into the family business. 

“I don’t know if I’ll do this for 20 years,” Williams said. “But honestly I’m happy where I am right now.” 

What they find, though, isn’t the typical sportswear, since the majority of the sports apparel and fan gear on the shelves, racks and walls is embossed with retro logos.

“My motto is if you don’t need it, we’ve got it,” said Wayne Weldon, owner and manager of Bandwagon, 19 Old Town Square, Ste. 137. “People come in here with no intention of buying anything. A high percentage tend to buy something, since they’re so intrigued.”

Weldon opened a sports apparel store in Fort Collins in 2018, calling it Rocky Mountain Retro until 2021, when he changed the name to Bandwagon to better fit the unique nature of his offerings.

“They call it hopping on the bandwagon when you start following a team that’s hot, so it’s the perfect name for a store,” Weldon said.

Weldon started in the sports apparel business in 2010 when he opened The Vault on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, followed by stores in Mount Pleasant and Greenville. He also spent nearly 30 years managing golf courses in Myrtle Beach. 

“I just love sports and memorabilia, so it was a perfect fit,” Weldon said.

As a University of Northern Colorado graduate, Weldon felt the call of the mountains and wanted to return to Colorado, so he moved to Fort Collins but couldn’t keep The Vault name when he sold his businesses. In his Fort Collins store, he started out with the help of his girlfriend, but now has two employees, one part- and one full-time, and he’s seen his business grow every year.

“The product lines have expanded as it’s become more and more successful,” Weldon said. “We started doing jerseys, knick-knacks for teams like those coffee mugs, and the banners have been a big hit.”

Weldon sells sports apparel and fan gear from the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA and others, representing a wide range of teams from most sports divisions, plus defunct teams such as the Denver Bears. 

“We do just about all the major leagues … and about all the professional teams,” Weldon said. “Hardly any place goes that deep in teams.”

Weldon’s merchandise represents sports from 60 different colleges and universities. He has shirts, hats, jerseys, banners, knick-knacks, championship plaques and framed copies of original Super Bowl tickets.

“It’s all new merchandise made to look old,” Weldon said. “Few companies still do retro logos.”

Retro logos have character to them with more complex, intricate drawings, but now the newer logos are being simplified, he said. For example, the Hawkeyes had a detailed line drawing of a bird that has since become an abstract representation with shapes to look like a bird with a massive beak. 

“The new just doesn’t have it,” Weldon said.

Weldon also sells apparel with rock ’n roll and pop culture images, including Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Elvis and John Denver. His entire store is decorated with sports memorabilia and antiques from old Coke signs to 1950s-era TVs and radios, old games and toys, and cereal boxes depicting famous athletes, plus framed photos and newspaper clippings of sports history.

“I’m kind of a collector. I never throw anything away,” Weldon said. “I got a shrine back here: old photos, my personal memorabilia from my childhood, family items, pictures, autographs from famous people and Masters memorabilia.” 

Weldon likes being surrounded by sports and history, listening to good music all day and meeting customers, he said. 

“My typical day is interacting with the folks who come in, talking sports and possibly ordering and looking for unusual merchandise,” Weldon said. “I spend a lot of time looking for cool logo things.”

Weldon keeps those things “neat and tidy,” using cardboard squares to fold the shirts and hanging everything in an orderly fashion. 

“We get a lot of comments on how pristine the shirts and everything are folded. It’s a lot of work to keep up with,” Weldon said. “It’s a lot of shirt folding, just a lot of ordering and searching for cool products. That pretty much takes up the day.”

By the time diners have entered the eatery at 218 Walnut St., staff have already arrived by 5:30 a.m., preparing grills and getting stations set up in preparation for opening.

But even that is not the start of the day, which actually begins the night before, with bakers working overnight to prepare the Silver Grill’s iconic cinnamon rolls, typically arriving by 8:30 or so and working through the night.

The restaurant closes after lunch at 2 p.m., but the day continues.

“By the time everybody filters out and we finish cleaning up for the day, it’s around 3:30 or 4 o’clock,” said owner Alan Jantzen.

“Then our janitorial crew will come in. They will — basically from top to bottom, from front door to back door — clean the entire restaurant, and what a blessing to have them because they do an amazing job. This is a busy place, and we make a mess throughout the day.

“About the time they’re leaving, our bakers come in,” he said, “and our bakers — depending upon the day of the week, the time of the year — we’ll give them orders for what we need for cinnamon rolls, and they’ll start baking.”

Bakers work from six to 10 hours, depending on demand, which picks up during the holidays.

“About the time they’re leaving, here we are showing up for the next day’s business,” Jantzen said. “It’s a pretty interesting dynamic for a business that’s only open 7 to 2, as to what the public sees … there are not a lot of people who realize that we really operate 24 hours a day. The life of Silver Grill never stops.”

And those cinnamon rolls? Jantzen said the restaurant averages about 12,000 sold per month, including for in-restaurant diners, takeout orders, corporate orders and special requests for holidays or other functions.

“That’s just what we’ve sold,” Jantzen said. “I’m not going to tell you how many that my wife and I consume.”

Jantzen and his wife, Jackie, purchased the Silver Grill from longtime owner John Arnolfo in December 2021, drawn by the nostalgia that the restaurant evokes.

“We’re both small-town kids,” Jantzen said. “I’m from Nebraska, she’s from North Dakota, and we have a lot of fond memories going to our local diners with relatives, Grandma and Grandpa, and what that meant to us and what those places meant to our communities. So we wanted to bring that sense of our hometown here to Silver Grill. Our mission is that this feels like a hometown diner that you remember, from wherever you are from, and when you walk through our doors, it feels like you’re going back in time to recreate those memories with your family or your special group.”

Those childhood memories are pervasive throughout the Silver Grill, with generations of families having frequented the restaurant over its 90 years.

“I think it’s a very special place for a lot of people, who, for 90 years, have built memories here with families, loved ones. It’s nearly every day that somebody will stop me here in the restaurant and say, ‘My father introduced me to this place,’ or ‘My grandma introduced me to this place.’ … ‘We would eat there every morning before Dad went to work and before I went to school.’ Those extra memories just permeate throughout the entire community that we have here. It’s become one of those places that people like to come to show people from out of town.

“In this wonderful downtown that we have, this busy, bustling urban environment that we have, you can step back in time a little bit here and enjoy a bit of a reprieve from the busyness of our downtown.”

As Jantzen speaks at 10 a.m. on a Saturday in September, the restaurant buzzes with dozens of conversations, the clinking of dishes, the sound of forks and knives on plates, wait staff taking orders.

But as the hours progress, the sounds of customers will give way to the quieter sounds of the janitorial staff, and then the bakers, and eventually the daytime staff and customers, as the day begins anew.

Wilkins knows as much about the wine, coffee and, yes, chocolate from Bulgaria, Austria and Germany as the common medications that customers need to have filled. The Kruegermann red cabbage is the best she’s tasted. The German Riesling wine isn’t as sweet, and yet it’s delicious. The honey tastes better than here. There are fish rubs she loves. The sausages are very tasty. The coffee isn’t as acidic and easier on sensitive stomachs. She’s not a salad person, but she loves the dressing they carry here. They also have herring. 

“The herring smells a little,” Wilkins said, “but it’s really good.” 

This isn’t just a sales pitch. Wilkins uses and loves the products, but then again, there is a certain amount of family pride contained in what City Drug sells from Germany and the countries surrounding it. Barbara’s mother, Sylvia Wilkins, owns the store and still works the counter. She is also a refugee from Germany who came over with her husband, Charles, during World War II. When they started City Drug, Sylvia wanted to sell some products from home. Charles reluctantly agreed and gave her half a shelf. Now it’s as much of the identity of City Drug as the prescriptions: There are two whole aisles devoted to European products. 

“People want it,” Sylvia said, and that includes Americans (who especially seem to like the sausages), but many of their customers are from Germany or the area, Sylvia said. 

Barbara works Saturdays and her brother works Sunday. She doesn’t mind working weekends, especially if it’s steady but slow enough to let her catch her breath, as it was that day, she said.

Barbara takes obvious pride in what the store offers. It separates it from CVS or Rite-Aid or Walgreens, she said, even with drug stores (including the national chains) basically being small retail outlets and grocery stores. CVS won’t carry German food, she said. City Drug also offers health products that are hard to find, such as a huge selection of braces and mastectomy bras (it even has a fitting room in the back). 

The store also seems to act as a museum of sorts to drugstores of the past. It has several displays of old drug bottles her father once used and a giant jar full of pills. Barbara wants to host a game where the customers can guess how many pills are in the jar. They also have a display of rubber ducks: Those are so popular that the store put up a sign telling customers they’re not for sale. 

But it’s the overseas treats that get the store the most attention. Sylvia hoped in late September that the recently discounted prices would get her the shelf space she needs once again: Christmas is coming, and she orders a lot of special chocolate for the season. There were already some Santas displayed on a shelf. 

“Mom finds the cutest chocolate things,” Barbara said.

An eclectic mix of four businesses with no common thread — other than a desire to make ends meet and to attract a disparate group of customers that might have an interest in something other than what they came ready to buy — has gathered in a space at 155 N. College Ave.

Visitors might see a wall of comics first. Or maybe a showcase of baked goods.

Or maybe they might look to the back and see the flowers displayed in coolers, or a collection of wines to the side.

The vision: a gathering place where people can sit and read a modern comic book, wait for flowers to be arranged, sample a wine or learn how that wine might pair with a cupcake.

Each business, its own limited liability corporation, shares the space equally, pays rent and other expenses equally, and works to drum up enough business to make the collaboration viable.

So far, it’s working.

Bloom Floral Boutique, operated by Brenna Freestone-Gilbert, had a wedding to decorate last month. Turns out, Mystic Moon Bakery also does wedding planning. A marriage of another sort resulted.

“We operate a lot on handshake,” said Freestone-Gilbert. She said the partners did sign a simple, internet-derived memorandum of understanding, but since they are all in the space each day, they work through any issues in real time.

The floral shop came first. Freestone-Gilbert and her husband, Caleb Gilbert, had been living in New York until the pandemic, when they decided to move back to Colorado. Freestone-Gilbert took over the flower operation from her mother in law. 

Caleb Gilbert, a production designer with a sculpture degree, had enjoyed reading comics as a kid.

“Reading comics brought a lot of joy,” he said. He discovered that some of the modern comics from independent publishers were better than the mainstream. That doesn’t mean he avoids the Marvel and DC Comics titles such as Batman, Spiderman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Avengers and Black Panther along with other popular titles, but he likes the independents better. And he’ll occasionally design a cover for some of them. 

When not selling titles, he also serves as technical director of OpenStage & Theatre Co. Inc.

“I’ve got my creative outlet, and my nerd outlet,” he said.

The other businesses, Mystic Moon Bakery, recently relocated from Loveland to the space along North College Avenue in Fort Collins.

Blendings at the Hillside Vineyard completes the mix. It specializes in wine blends; at present it can sell for home consumption but is not able to serve at the store.

That may change as the partners work to clear regulatory hurdles. 

Still, “It’s a great solution for high rents,” Freestone-Gilbert repeated.

Take a steep flight of stairs down to a subterranean doorway, however, and it’s a different world.

Here at Pinball Jones, hallways are lined with brightly colored lights and images of the newest technology in gaming machines, their sounds blending into a delightful discordance as players rack up the points.

Pop-culture icons gaze out at the kids of all ages as they feed coins into the slots. Look, here’s Indiana Jones. Over there is Willy Wonka. Other machines sport images of Elvira and her Party Monsters, Star Wars characters, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, Spider-Man, the Simpsons and even the Sopranos. Older players recognize James Bond, Dirty Harry and the Twilight Zone.

Unless their parents tell them, youngsters might not realize that the game called “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” is a tribute to the title of Elton John’s ninth studio album, released 48 years ago. But then Mom and Dad might be reliving their own childhoods with a game of Pong, Pac-Man or even air hockey.

Or they might be in the back room, where a row of ancient classic pinball machines beckon and a bar serves up a rotating selection of 12 local brews on tap, local craft ciders and cocktails or non-alcoholic sodas.

“We try to keep as many machines from different eras on the floor as we can,” said co-owner Aidan Lancaster from behind the bar. “They’re pumpin’ ‘em out these days. Several major manufacturers make them.”

The arcade opened 12 years ago, and Lancaster has worked there for seven.

“I’d say there’s more younger people involved now than there were when I started,” he said. “A lot of that might have to do with the fact that people who played pinball when they were young now have children of their own. Their parents bring them in, and then they get into it as they get older.”

The clientele changes depending on the time of day, he said. “There are a lot more families in the afternoon, and then people out for the evening.

“Our demographic is not necessarily college kids, and that’s intentional on my part because my capacity’s not very high, so I have to make sure that the people who are in here are going to be well-behaved and spending money.”

How does he control who comes in?

“By making things more expensive,” he said. “It’s not like I have any $2 beers down here.”

However, he added, “that’s always been the demographic as long as I’ve worked here. It’s been people who live in town, people visiting from out of town. Our main demographic is 29 to 50.”

Lancaster appreciates the memories the machines generate, even though they might not mean as much to him personally.

“I kind of missed the boat,” he said. “I’m 34. I had played them before, but it wasn’t part of what I grew up doing.”

He does remember a sort of taboo that was associated with them.

“A lot of the laws surrounding pinball machines were gambling laws until only recently,” he said. “I’m from Arkansas, and they still do have really hard-core gambling laws associated with these machines.”

The popularity of visiting a pinball palace has ebbed and flowed.

“It died off in the early 2000s, a lot, and I think that was because of the rise of video games at home,” Lancaster said. “But I think people came to understand that there’s not a good digital substitute for it. If you want to play pinball, you’ve got to play it on a physical table. There’s a lot of video-game versions of pinball, but it’s all about feeling the table.”

After all, getting a feel for the table is how Tommy Walker, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” in The Who’s popular 1969 song and rock opera, became a “Pinball Wizard.” 

“It’s definitely re-entered the cultural collective consciousness,” Lancaster said. “There’s been a lot of representations of pinball in the movies and media recently. It’s been interesting to see it. I think a lot of it has to do with ‘80s nostalgia,” such as that depicted in “Stranger Things,” the science fiction horror drama television series on Netflix that is set four decades ago in small-town Indiana.

“And the music and people’s nostalgia for the ‘80s whether or not they were alive during it,” Lancaster said. “There’s definitely a subculture that is gaining more and more recognition.”

Technology has even brought the interactivity of online games to pinball arcades.

“One of the major manufacturers, Stern, has been integrating achievement and experience points, so you kind of save your character as you go through the game,” Lancaster said. “The newest game it just released is Venom, which is part of the Marvel universe. If you log in through a QR code on the game, and then you play it, the stronger your character gets. There are online leaderboards, and you get achievements, and there’s a social media aspect to it. It saves it to your own personal account, so you could play anywhere you find the machine. Typically we have a leaderboard up that shows everybody’s high scores for the month from those games.”

Just like a bowling alley, Pinball Jones also hosts leagues and tournaments. It all adds up to a fun family escape, Lancaster said.

“We’ve gotten busier and busier every year.”

That could be the motto for Vortic Watch Co., a downtown Fort Collins business for which time is of the essence. Vortic transforms vintage pocket watches into wristwatches, restores old watches as heirlooms or makes entirely new watches as Colorado Watch Co.

“It’s about time” could reflect the start of a typical day at 7 a.m., Monday through Thursday.

It could represent the first tasks of the day for some of the employees, who wind a series of 20 or so watches that are being tested for accuracy.

It could reflect times past, when a series of watchmakers led to U.S. dominance in the watch-making industry.

And it could reflect a determination to revive that industry in the U.S.

“It’s about time.”

At Vortic’s headquarters at 324 Jefferson St., employees work at various tasks during the day, winding, testing and assembling watches; running 3D printers for producing cases and other parts; fulfilling orders by placing finished watches in custom, Vortic-branded cases provided by Fort Collins-based Otter Products Inc.; scanning the web for estate auctions or other sources of vintage watches; or working on design or marketing of the company’s products.

Vortic’s story began in 2013, when Penn State University students R.T. Custer and Tyler Wolfe came up with the idea of creating a 100% American-made watch.

They quickly realized that it was easier said than done, as watch movements — the tiny, intricate mechanisms that make watches run — are no longer made in the U.S., but rather in Switzerland, Japan, China or India.

It wasn’t always that way. The U.S. once led the world in watchmaking, and many of those products from a century ago sit in dresser drawers, in antique stores or in pawn shops.

Their solution? Rebuild those old American pocket watches into wristwatches, manufacturing any needed parts using 3D metal printers, but reusing the original movements, and other parts of the original watch.

As Custer and Wolfe relocated to Fort Collins, Vortic took off, initially producing watches from a condo in Midtown, then in a space at the Innosphere incubator on East Vine Drive, then at Jessup Farm.

Demand was so good that the company in 2022 moved to its location at 324 Jefferson St., occupying 8,500 square feet, where it employs about 10 people.

Custer begins a tour of the company’s operations in a room with a framed poster on the wall depicting “The Great American Watch Companies.” The poster includes once-popular brands of pocket watches, including Illinois Watch Co., Elgin Watch Co., Rockford Watch Co., South Bend Watch Co., Hampden Watch Co., Hamilton Watch Co., Ball Watch Co., Waltham Watch Co., Seth Thomas Watch Co.

The poster provides both a history of the American watchmaking industry but also reflects an inventory of watch brands that the company seeks out through estate auctions, pawn shops and other sources.

“Those companies made about 100 million pocket watches in the U.S. between about 1850 and 1950,” Custer said. “And today, most people have no idea that we were the Switzerland of the world for that 100 years.”

Sometimes, owners of heirloom watches will bring them to Vortic for repair, seeking to have them restored after they’ve languished in drawers for decades.

But most of the watches that the company obtains are transformed into wristwatches, with the company using the U.S.-made movements, manufacturing new parts as needed, and transforming them into wristwatches that cost anywhere from $2,000 to $12,000.

The company made as many as 400 watches in one year, but that proved to strain Vortic’s resources, and the company has settled on producing 300 of those watches annually.

But time is not standing still for the company. It recently launched a new line of wristwatches under the umbrella of the Colorado Watch Co. Those watches use as much material and manufacturing in the U.S. as possible, including Colorado.

“Now, to scale the company and grow, we’re going to come out with more brands and different styles of watches and different brands over time,” Custer said, explaining the Colorado Watch Co. strategy.

The watches are aimed at a younger, active demographic and cost far less than Vortic models, beginning at about $1,000.

While watches under the Colorado Watch Co. brand can’t be touted as “Made in the USA” because of strict federal requirements for that designation, they are promoted as “Built in America.”

The Federal Trade Commission uses a vague requirement that “all or virtually all” of a product must be made domestically to qualify as “Made in the USA,” a far stricter threshold than many other countries employ. Switzerland’s “Swiss Made” label, for example, requires that at least 60% of production cost must be from that country.

Even though Colorado Watch Co. products are 87% U.S. by cost, they don’t qualify for the designation “Made in the USA” label but instead are touted as “Built in America.”

The company already has surpassed its goal on Kickstarter to launch the brand, raising more than $320,000 out of a $250,000 goal.

As orders for Colorado Watch Co. come in — including new models funded by the Kickstarter campaign — workers at Vortic undoubtedly will get even busier.

But they have time on their side.

The homey, breakfast-and-lunch restaurant is about 300 feet from the two Woodward buildings where 1,100 people are employed; it is a prime beneficiary of Woodward’s 2013 decision to build its headquarters and a manufacturing campus on the eastern flank of downtown Fort Collins.

“On every weekday, we’ll have Woodward people in here,” co-owner Gene Fiechtl said. “They are really the major contributors to our business.” 

The Back Porch Cafe’s location on Woodward’s literal doorstep is just the most visible example of how the company’s workforce bolsters the fortunes of restaurants, retail stores and property owners throughout Fort Collins’ urban core. Likewise, in symbiotic fashion, the urban attractions that the city offers have given Woodward a clear competitive advantage. 

“We looked all over Northern Colorado, and our due diligence required us to look outside the region, too,” said Tom Gendron, the former Woodward CEO who guided the building of his company’s new headquarters campus.

“We had to think, first, about what would enable us to attract and retain top talent,” he said. “We knew that our new people, those with high-level professional, technical and operational talent, would want to have all the urban amenities nearby. They would want to have great restaurants, great places to live and all the other things that downtown Fort Collins offers.” 

Woodward was formerly known as Woodward Governor Co., a company that in the 1950s manufactured controls that kept aircraft engines from revving too fast, and not much else. It opened its first Fort Collins factory almost 70 years ago and became the city’s first major industrial employer. 

Today, Woodward Inc. (Nasdaq: WWD) is a cutting-edge provider of control systems for a broad range of applications from aerospace to global shipping to energy generation, and its Northern Colorado presence has grown with its broadening range of products.

Stakes were high for both the company and the city as Woodward scouted the territory for a new headquarters site. The company in 2007 moved its headquarters from Rockford, Illinois, to its Fort Collins site at Drake Road and Lemay Avenue.

Hemmed in at that location, the company and new CEO Gendron looked abroad.

The 101-acre Link N’ Greens Golf Course (the name played off its Lincoln Avenue location) was available for $15 million, or a whopping $150,000 per acre. After a decision to put most eggs in the downtown Fort Collins basket, Woodward purchased the land in early 2013.

So began a three-year development and construction process that defined the company’s relationship with downtown, and vice versa. 

“Because Woodward chose to locate there, it gave us all the reasons to make a concerted effort for Lincoln corridor improvements,” said Matt Robenalt, executive director of the Fort Collins Downtown Development Authority. “All of the beautiful street connections that we have in place came out of that.”

Woodward was the beneficiary of DDA improvement grants that defrayed costs of campus entry features and relocation of a major Platte River Power Authority high-voltage line that bisected the property.

Fort Collins benefitted immediately from Woodward’s donation of 30 acres of land arching across the parcel’s southern tier — almost a third of the land purchased — for the development of Homestead Natural Area, tying Woodward’s campus to the Poudre River Trail and adding another direct route to Old Town’s amenities. 

Woodward also invested $2.9 million in renovating the cavernous, 150-year-old Coy-Hoffman barn on the original homestead, turning it into a unique conference and meeting space that is a favorite among the company’s employees.

No matter how much money Woodward invested in its downtown location decision a decade ago, the biggest and most enduring benefit to the city is the investment that Lincoln campus’ employees make in the district’s businesses, and in their purchases and leases of downtown residential property.

While the city of Fort Collins and Larimer County each have more downtown employees than Woodward does, the company is by far downtown’s largest private employer and is likely to remain so with expansion in the forecast. 

Gendron, who retired as Woodward chairman, CEO and president in early 2022, said the results of the company’s commitment to downtown line up exactly with his original intentions.

“We had two goals with that decision,” he said. “No. 1, we wanted to ensure that Woodward would have the talent that we needed going forward. Second, we wanted to enhance the city. I think we’ve done both of those things.”

It dates to before Old Town Square — 1971 to be exact. It’s the oldest continuously operated art cooperative in the state and among the three oldest retail cooperatives in the nation.

That’s according to Trimble Court Artisans’ long-time president, Diane Findley, who joined in 1976 when she graduated from Colorado State University and never left.

“I had just graduated, and I was wandering around Old Town looking for a free concert,” she said, describing a common ritual of college-age people. “I came across Trimble Court and fell in love,” she said. The gallery is at 118 Trimble Court.

“All these years, and free concerts are still just out the front door.”

When Trimble was founded, landlord Martha Trimble, now deceased, charged $1 a year rent in order to help get the cooperative off the ground. Landlords since that time have also been helpful, she said.

Findley is an artist who creates hand-painted greeting cards. She’s one of about 50 artists who use Trimble as their retail base of operations. While it’s rare to see the artists actually performing their talents in the space, patrons will encounter artists on every visit.

That’s because of the financial arrangement to which the artists agree, which includes a commitment to share in staffing of the store. Member artists also agree to split their sales with the cooperative: 35% is directed to the co-op and the artist keeps the rest.

Most congregate art stores charge 50% or 60%, Findley said. The reason Trimble can have a lower commission is because of the work commitment. “Someone behind the counter will be trying to work the cash register,” Findley joked.

Patrons wander through the aisles and see all manner of artwork available to buy. “Stained glass, blown glass, fused glass, jewelry, pottery — low fire and high fire —, woodworking, Colorado landscapes, crocheted wire, painted silk, collage work, fine art such as paintings and prints, metal work, handmade greeting cards…,” Findley listed as she walked through the store.

At 69, Findley isn’t the oldest member of the cooperative. “There are no age restrictions. Our youngest was nine,” she said.

Members include architects, landscapers, teachers, a bartender, a research scientist, she said. 

“This goulash of members come together and are supportive of each other. When someone sells a big item, a $500 painting, we run up the flag,” she said.

Trimble is open varying hours but generally 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. most days; it’s open longer on weekends. “It’s only closed on Christmas and sometimes half the day on the Fourth of July,” she said. Fall tends to be a slower season, so the hours might be adjusted then, too. But during the holiday season it might be open longer.

While a co-op legally, it’s hippie commune roots also come forward, at least annually. “At the end of the year, if we have any money left, we divide it up based on each artist’s sales. And we start from scratch the next year,” Findley said.

The retail outlet that once serviced pet owners and hobby ranchers across Northern Colorado has now been closed for four years. But make no mistake, the business here, though owned by a midwestern company, is still viable, servicing backyard critters to the land’s biggest feedlots across Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska and even into New Mexico, Utah and Oklahoma on occasion.

“If there’s a hungry cow, it’s gotta eat, … and we’ll feed it,” says Nara Freemyer, sales director for Ranch-Way Feeds, now a subsidiary of Hubbard Feeds of Mankato, Minnesota.

On a week-day morning, or the occasional Saturday, work starts early here, as the production crew starts at 6:30 a.m. with the fleet of semi drivers eager to get on the road before traffic hits the downtown location. In all, the feed operation has about 30 employees, though it is about eight to 12 employees understaffed, Freemyer says – and probably had about 50 employees when it still had the retail outlet.

The operation began in 1868 as a flour mill on the banks of the Poudre River and was known as the Lindell Mill. That mill was rebuilt several times before converting to feed production in 1948. The operation was sold to Hubbard in 2016.

The red buildings and dry cribs are the remnants of the original feed operations, which displays the historical marker. Since the retail outlet is gone, the few visitors at the operation are probably on a historical tour of the downtown, as the business remains the oldest downtown business still in operation.