Lafayette

Lafayette is its own city in southeastern Boulder County, north of Denver. Erie wraps around it on the north and east, Broomfield sits to the east and south, and Louisville is its neighbor to the southwest. Public Road runs north and south through the middle of town and serves as its main street.

A farm that turned into a coal town

Coal turned up on Lafayette and Mary Miller's farm in 1884, and John H. Simpson sank the first shaft of the Simpson Mine in 1887. Lafayette Miller had died in 1878, so Mary platted the town herself in January 1888 and named it after him. Mining carried the local economy for decades. In 1927 five Lafayette-area miners were killed in the Columbine Mine massacre, near Erie, during the 1927 to 1928 coal strike. The last mine in town, the Black Diamond, closed in 1956.

Miner's cottages in Old Town, subdivisions beyond

Old Town's signature house is the miner's cottage: one story, usually under 700 square feet, with a pyramid-shaped hipped roof, tall double-hung windows and a front door that's rarely centered on the porch. Some porches carry small Neoclassical touches like columns. Only about a dozen were company-built cottages moved into town from mine camps like Simpson, Gladstone and Vulcan. On East Simpson Street, the north side of the 700 and 800 blocks holds bigger houses built for mine engineers and superintendents. If you want an original cottage, go in expecting a small house, since under 700 square feet was the norm.

Most of Lafayette is much newer than that. The city had about 9,000 people in 1980, roughly 23,000 by 2000 and just over 30,000 in 2020, so the bulk of the housing away from Old Town went up in those decades. If you'd rather have a bigger house on a newer street, that's where to look; if you want some history in the walls, stay near Simpson Street.

Public Road and Simpson Street

Downtown runs along Public Road. Festival Plaza, four connected plazas at Public Road and Chester Street, sits at the heart of it, and the city puts on a peach festival every year. Simpson Street mixes historic commercial buildings with newer townhomes. At 108 E. Simpson, the Lafayette History Museum fills the Lewis House, a miner's cottage moved in from the Gladstone Mine. It opened as a miners museum in 1976 and took its current name in 2022.

The Post, at 105 W. Emma St., is the original location of a Front Range chicken-and-beer brand that started brewing in 2014. It's one of the most popular spots in town, and the fried chicken is gluten-free. On a hill at the east edge of town, Acreage is Stem Ciders' restaurant, with mountain views, a cider garden, a deck and an outdoor area called the Back Forty.

Waneka Lake and its old granary

Waneka Lake Park covers 147 acres around a man-made reservoir, and a 1.2-mile trail circles the water. The Waneka Granary, from the 1870s, is the oldest structure in Lafayette. A power plant ran on the lake's south edge from 1905 or 1906 into the 1920s and was torn down in 1963.

Getting to Denver and around

US 287, Highway 7, Highway 42 and the Northwest Parkway all pass through or along the city, and I-25's exit 229 serves it from the east. There's no rail station in town. RTD's Lafayette Park-n-Ride, at 1080 S. Public Road, has 136 free spaces and seven bus routes. One of them, the AL, is a SkyRide route that runs straight to Denver International Airport.