Welcome to West Main Street. This is where the action once was, the major clustering of gambling halls, saloons, bordellos, and cribs. Every four years, for about a century, promises were made to clean up West Main, but after elections, it was back to what passed for normal. Notably, included in this section of the tour, you’ll see yet another building listed in the National Registry of Historic Places, an imaginative redevelopment of a burned-out building, a handsome monument to the coal mining industry, a small jewel of a building authentically restored, an ornate and once magnificent theatre, City Hall with its eclectic architectural details, and a classic Carnegie Library.
Walk on the south side of the street of the first block along the boardwalk in front of the historic, but vacant Trinidad Opera House. For a description of the Opera House, listen to the account in the Intersection of Main and Commercial Streets audio tour. Just beyond the Opera House, you will come to Alley A, the only named alley in the city. Had you crossed here in the 1880s or early 90s, you would have passed under an elevated railway. It must have been the country’s longest tipple for a coal mine. The Rifenburg Mine, about 2.5 miles south of town, loaded its coal cars and sent them running by gravity all the way through town, right down Alley A, over Main Street, past the second story windows of the hotel, careening by the newly built Catholic Church, and on down to the Santa Fe Railroad’s coal bins just the other side of the river. Mules pulled the cars slowly back up and it was a favorite sport of young boys to sneak rides to where the tracks settled to the ground south of town and they could safely jump off. The tracks were taken down in the 1890s but Alley A remains.
