The Wide Streets of Ft. Collins

I'm sick today (think it's just a bad cold), so I've been mostly reading. Last night I had a conversation with my friend, Vive, whose friend Brittany lives in Old Town Ft. Collins. I haven't walked around there this trip, but Vive mentioned how wide the streets in Old Town are. I'd forgotten that about it from my last visit, and in my reading today--a book called Visions Along the Poudre River--I happened to find out why they are so wide. So this posting is in a way for Vive, who laughed when I told her I was keeping a blog.

Apparently, the surveyor who laid out Ft. Collins in 1872, Franklin Avery, made the streets so wide so that you could turn a team of horses hitched to a wagon around in the street without having to back up. Avery said later that he'd figured that he had all this room to spare, and there was no reason not to use it. As a result, all of the streets in Ft. Collins are at least 100 feet wide. Unfortunately the wide streets were actually kind of a pain for the townspeople because they weren't paved for another 30 years, and were often muddy. It was impossible to cross the road without getting really dirty. On the other hand, for a modern-day town, wide streets are essential (as we saw in Austin, where the streets were purposely made on the narrow side in order to discourage growth), so Avery's decision was rather visionary. Anyway, I may see Brittany while I'm here, and will go with the purpose of noting the wide streets.

On the map below, old town is the little chunk that's at an angle with the rest of the grid.