How Boulder’s Art Deco era began with a courthouse fire nearly a century ago

Editor’s note: We’re thrilled to welcome Silvia Pettem to Boulder Reporting Lab. This is her first column for us. Silvia has spent decades researching and writing about Boulder County history and has authored more than 20 books. Her expertise is unmatched. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com.

In 1932, defective wiring in the clock tower of Boulder County’s Victorian-era courthouse was believed to have caused a fire that loosened a 700-pound clock and five tons of sand used as weight, sending burning debris crashing through the floors below.

Afterward, the building’s brick walls were still standing, and Boulder was faced with a choice. Should the courthouse be restored or demolished? Residents overwhelmingly clamored for a modern, clean-cut design. The new courthouse ushered in an era of Art Deco architecture in Boulder.

Similarly, the relief sculpture of a miner and a farmer over the building’s front entrance was, and still is, an important example of Art Deco art. Noted Boulder architect Glen H. Huntington included in his specifications the “cast stone panel over the front entrance,” recognizing mining and farming as the foundation of the county’s economy.

The term “Art Deco” came from the French “Arts Décoratifs,” an early 20th-century decorative arts movement that expanded to include architecture. Gone were the intricate details of the Victorian era. The new style demanded by Boulder’s residents was bold and modern.

Art Deco themes included images of industry, labor and the work ethic. Boulder’s miner and the farmer fit right in. These same occupations remained at the forefront when the present-day courthouse was completed in 1933.

The Art Deco style proved so popular in Boulder that the same architectural elements were incorporated across 14th Street from the courthouse in the construction of the Boulder Theater. Located on the site of the former Curran Opera House, it opened as a movie theater in 1936, complete with an entry marquee, a colorful tile facade and elaborate interior murals.

All across America, a multitude of Art Deco movie theaters stand as evidence of the boom in the motion picture industry.

During the theater’s remodeling, Boulder artist Earl Tryon was hired to paint traditional mountain scenes on two 25-foot circular murals. According to a newspaper article prior to the theater’s opening, the building’s owners liked Tryon’s work, but felt the murals didn’t fit the building’s new “distinctive modernistic” design.

Instead, they decided they needed murals in the Art Deco style. Tryon was hired to try again in order “to keep the entire theater at the highest point of uniform artistic thought.”

This time, the artist was asked to paint over his previous murals with a new design that featured western flowers and wind-blown trees. Although not related to labor and industry, the colorful paintings complemented the building’s exterior facade and added more Art Deco art to Boulder’s downtown.

Neither the courthouse with its relief sculpture nor the theater with its murals caused any controversy, but, in 1937, artist Marvin Martin’s relief sculpture of two figures over the entrance to the then-new Boulder High School caused an uproar.

“Minerva,” with exaggerated curves, represented the goddess of wisdom, while the muscular “Jupiter” was the god of thunder and the skies. Quickly dubbed “Minnie and Jake,” they were said to depict wisdom and strength.

Everyone agreed that the art was “modern,” but some questioned whether it was art at all. A school board member deemed the figures “hideous monstrosities” and demanded they be removed. Others called them “a comfort to all fat persons” and surmised that they were modeled after wax figures “left in the sun too long.”

The theater’s facade is getting a facelift, and the high school figures remain, as do the miner and farmer above the courthouse entrance. Next time you walk by, look up and remember the past.