Mystery Solved: Student Tunnels Under West Colfax

Photo from the Belmont Junior High School Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/BelmontJr.HighSchool)

Though the mystery is not as big as the myths of where Roger the elephant was buried, we have heard numerous stories about tunnels under West Colfax that were used by students to access Mountair High School and Belmont Junior High School. After a recent conversation about the tunnels on our Facebook Page, we reached out members of the West Colfax Community Association on Twitter to see if anyone knew about the tunnels.

We received the following email message from Kris Autobee of Red Herring Art & Supply with a history of the student tunnels:

There was/is a tunnel under West Colfax at Chase Street. This morning’s longer story is the timeless story of pedestrian safety and stormwater drainage and attracting new customers while keeping the old.

1500 Block of Chase Street was the home of the Mountair School, School District #51. As near as I can tell, it was built as a two-room school, and may well have been one of the reasons that West Colfax Avenue got wooden sidewalks between Sheridan and Depew in 1904. By 1912 the school was expanded to four rooms. As part of the area’s shocking population growth during the interwar years, the school was rebuilt and opened for the 1927-28 school year with all twelve grades. The first high school graduating class was the class of 1931. High School curriculum was removed when Jefferson High School was opened. And at the end (1979) it was Belmont Junior High.

Between population growth and the massive increase in car ownership and auto tourism, West Colfax traffic issues came to a head in the late 1920s. Pedestrian safety was such an issue that the Red Cross opened a 24-hour first aid station at West Colfax and Wadsworth in 1932. That intersection was referred to as the “busy corner” and “downtown Lakewood” in the newspaper. Everything was at that intersection – the post office, the telephone exchange, there was at least one church, feed store, grocery store, five & dime, and a couple of auto courts. A pedestrian issue we forget today, is that the post office didn’t deliver mail to addresses in the immediate area of a post office so residents walked or drove to pick up their mail. Students were walking to school a few blocks south of this corner.

Although my documentation is not as robust for the intersection of West Colfax and Sheridan, I can document the same types of businesses and about the same distance to a school, the added traffic pattern of the trolley which turned south in there, and a larger residential population.

By early 1930s, Jefferson County Commissioner John Browne was advocating loudly (his contemporaries likely used stronger language), for traffic relief on West Colfax. Two very important things happened as a result. First, John Browne managed to convince the County Commission to purchase enough right-of-way along 6th Avenue to expand it to at least four lanes. His reasoning was to draw through traffic between the mountains and points east off of West Colfax to make is safer and easier for residents to conduct their business. He is on record as saying that if they did in “now” (late 20s / early 30s) they would at the most inconvenience 50 families between Green Mountain and Denver. If they waited and population growth continued at the rate it was in the 20s, they may never be able to afford it. And boy did that gamble pay off. Browne was the smartest man in Colorado in 1937 as the Federal Government looked at Green Mountain as a possible war time production site.

The second thing the County Commission did was to pressure the Department of Highways (now CDOT) into widening West Colfax Avenue. West Colfax opened with four lanes through most of Lakewood in 1937.

In the 1920s, Lakewood’s population density was centered in today’s Northeast Lakewood/Mountair/Two Creeks neighborhoods. Post War (World War I) population growth drove the need for the addition of high school curriculum at Mountair School in 1927. Census enumeration districts were divided into smaller geographic areas before both the 1930 and 1940 Federal Census. Fire protection districts were created and merged together during this time. And the Edgewater post office increased the number of rural delivery routes into Mountair/Two Creeks neighborhoods.

Few if any parents living in School District #51 had experienced traffic like what their children experienced crossing West Colfax Avenue. Unfortunately, their novel approach to pedestrian safety – a tunnel under West Colfax at Chase Street did not include a drainage study. According to Wright Gilbreath (deceased) the tunnel opened after the Department of Highways 1937 widening of West Colfax. I suspect the tunnel was part of that project and that Mr. Gilbreath remembered the tunnel as “after” the road because school started in the fall. But I could be wrong about that.

The children’s tunnel was abandoned not long after it opened because it filled up with water every time it rained or snow melted. No surprise there.

History repeats itself as the City of Lakewood is once again looking at pedestrian safety along the same corridor of West Colfax Avenue from Sheridan Boulevard to Wadsworth Boulevard. Click here to learn more and give your input through a survey.

Now we are interested in finding out more about the tunnel, when it was closed and if there is still access to the tunnel. Let us know in the comments below if you were a student at Mountair or Belmont and remember the tunnels.

Joel Newton

Joel has been a resident of Edgewater, Colorado with his family since 2012. He is the Executive Director of local education nonprofit Edgewater Collective and Editor of the Edgewater Echo.