Hello again from Black Hawk

Hello again from Black Hawk

Wednesday Morning   January 23, 2013   (Second travelogue of this trip).

Yesterday, I took a fairly long walk into the more historic part of Black Hawk.  My first goal was to document the AMERISTAR casino and hotel:

As you can see from the photo, a large amount of rock removal was necessary to give a sufficient footprint for the huge building complex.  Many of the other new casinos had huge amounts of “mountain” blasted away to make building them possible.  There appears to be a very large amount stabilization done after the rock removal throughout the newer casino area.

As I wondered into the older part of town, I was pleasantly surprised that they have documented the towns history reasonable well.  There are several markers that have good detail and photos of some of the major events in the town's history.   There are many buildings from the 1860s-70s documented with metal plaques such as the one shown below:

The Jenkins McKay hardware store documented in the plaque is shown in the photo below:

Perhaps you can see in the photo that the building has been converted into a casino.  That is the case of many of the original buildings.  Many have new buildings built around the original building.  The new building has a similar style to the original building. 

The oldest building I found is the Rohling Inn:

This building was built in 1864 and served for many years as a dry goods store.  Note the newer building on the left with a somewhat old style theme.

The last building I am going to highlight is really two buildings:

The plaque for the two buildings simply lists their address:  141 Gregory.  The buildings were built in the 1870s.  You can see that the recently built building on the left was designed to have a similar exterior look.

I had mentioned that Pat was ahead of the game.  Well, that did not last long.  She will play again today before we leave.  Hopefully the machines will be kinder to her.

That is all for now.