Historical Commission Agenda and Packet 2016 03 02

Home Browse Search

Historical Report 817 Main Street, Louisville, Colorado According to the Boulder County Assessor's website, the property at 817 Main Street is owned by BLT Enterprises LLC and occupies the south 5 feet of Lot 10 & the north 20 feet of Lot 11, Block 5, in Original Louisville. Until the late 1930s, the address for this location was 320 Main. This building, which is over 100 years old, represents a vibrant and important part of Louisville's history. It served the community as a movie theater (and, at times, a live theater) for nearly seventy years. This long run even extended into the late 1970s, which was a time when most small town movie theaters in the United States had disappeared. This theater (first called the Isis, then the Rex) brought popular movie culture to Louisville. As noted in a 1995 article in the Boulder Daily Camera, "The Rex was a large part of Louisville history because it was one of the central meeting grounds for much of the century." For many decades, it was the only theater in town. The history of the Rex is also significant for its strong representation of Louisville history and demographics. From 1927 to 1972, members of Louisville's Italian community owned and operated the theater. In addition, a number of its owners were coal miners either prior to or at the same time as their ownership of the theatre. Following this long history as a movie theater, the building came to have a role as part of Louisville's history as a restaurant town by being the location of a popular Mexican Restaurant, Senor T's, for about thirty years. The Development of Original Louisville Online property records for Boulder County show that Louis Nawatny, who platted Original Louisville in 1878 and named it after himself, transferred part of Lot 10 and all of Lot 11 to Charles Weil in 1880. Due to the fact that this parcel includes parts of lots rather than entire lots and due to the limitations of doing research in the online property records, which do not describe which part of a divided was being transferred from owner to owner, the earliest section of the chain of ownership could not be completed. It is possible that eventually, research of documents at the Boulder County Recorder's Office itself will be able to fully reveal this chain. Based on the online records, early owners of the property appear to have included such prominent Louisville residents as Joseph Youk, David and/or Jane Carlton, Martin Zurich, and attorney J. Vaughan Sickman. Whatever the particular identities of the early owners, there is no question that the 800 block of Main Street (then called Second Street) was developed early in Louisville's history. The earliest Sanborn Fire Insurance Map for Louisville, for 1893, shows that every lot of the west side of the 800 block of Main Street was already developed with at least one building, all of them dwellings. A dwelling is shown straddling Lots 10 and 11,