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described in a Rocky Mountain News article from February 10, 1952, Louisville was also starting <br />to become a bedroom community for Boulder and Denver. Situated between US 287, US 36, and <br />the Boulder —Longmont Highway (SH 119), Louisville came to be known as the Golden Triangle <br />(Whissen 1982:11, 20). The Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats nuclear weapons <br />production facility opened that same year (City of Louisville 2014; Bacon 2011c:5). In 1953, <br />Louisville obtained natural gas and, in 1955, dial telephones (Avenue L Architects 2013:4-20). <br />That same year, the city's last coal mine, the New Crown, closed (Conarroe 2001). By 1960, <br />Louisville had paved most of its roads (Bacon 2008b:4). By the early 1960s, large-scale <br />employers in the area included Beech Aircraft Corporation (1955), Ball Brothers Research <br />Corporation (1957), Neodata (1963), and International Business Machines (1965), as well as the <br />National Bureau of Standards (1950) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (1962) <br />in Boulder (McWilliams and McWilliams 2000:4). Figure 6 provides an aerial view of Louisville <br />in 1958. <br />Figure 6. Louisville in 1958, view to the southwest (photo credit: LHM). <br />In the United States as a whole, before the end of WWII, two-thirds of houses were constructed <br />by their owners or by small-scale contractors who built just four or five houses per year. In <br />contrast, after WWII, two-thirds of houses were built by large-scale developers (Hayden <br />2003:132). Most commonly, developers left sewage infrastructure and trash removal to the local <br />government or the new homeowner. This resulted in the construction of up to thousands of <br />similar- or identical -looking houses built in a very short period of time, albeit with little planning <br />(Corbett et al. 2009:22). Louisville's residential development reflected this national trend on a <br />small scale. <br />18 <br />