Longmont, Colorado
Created | Updated Apr 13, 2014
Longmont was founded in 1870 by a group from Chicago who imaginatively named themselves the Chicago-Colorado Colony. It is named in honor of Long's Peak, which is the most recognisable mountain as viewed from Longmont. It was once a small farming community that was home to the (at the time) world's largest canning factory. This building is now home to about 200 apartments known collectively as The Cannery.
Starting out as an agricultural community situated very close to Boulder and Denver has created a fairly unique community. About 20 years ago Longmont had about 15,000 citizens. These people were either lower class farmers and illegal immigrants, or upper class engineers for the newly built IBM facility near Boulder, or Storage Technologies on the outskirts of town. There was never any really discernable middle class, which made for some interesting problems.
Depending on which side of the tracks you were from, you would go to either a school that had a massive amount of funding, or one that had next to nothing. The west side of town has always had the better parks, better roads, and better housing. Even today, the middle class is almost nowhere to be found.
About 1994, the Colorado economy began to boom, leading to a sudden surge of people relocating from all across the nation. Longmont has grown to about 85,000 people in the last six years alone. Needless to say, the city planners were grossly unprepared for this massive explosion, and the city is quite an odd mish-mash of poorly designed suburban streets that appear to have been thrown together at random.
Having no real downtown or highrises, Longmont has been described as being a suburb of Nowhere. It is about 20 miles NE of Boulder and 50 miles N of Denver making it a vast sprawl of suburbia that truly is in the middle of nowhere. Since it is nothing more than suburbs, there is not much in the way of entertainment in the city. One must travel to Denver or Boulder to find a concert, a club, a theater, or a decent restaraunt. There is a fairly large mall and a movie theater on the outskirts, but nothing else. A common remark made by young adults is that "the only thing to do in Longmont is drink and smoke pot." This is of course an overstatement, but is fairly close.
Another activity that many youths in Longmont appearantly enjoy is cruising. This seems to involve driving aimlessly up and down Main St on Friday and Saturday nights from about 6:00 PM untill 2:00 AM. The two main groups of people that do this are those who listen to country, and those who listen to rap. The two groups don't get along well, and are invariably drinking, which leads to alot of yelling and posturing, but not much violence. Main St is actually the second most cruised street in the U.S., next to Sunset Strip, Las Vegas.
Many people say the best thing about Longmont,is it's proximity to the Rocky Mountains. One only has to drive west for about 20 minutes to be on a twisting mountain road, and about 40 minutes to be at the trail head for several "fourteeners", or mountains over 14,000 feet above sea level. Longmont itself is over 6,000 feet high in places, and for the most part, the air is clean and clear. Well, there is quite a stench near the Longmont Foods "Turkey Plant", where they slaughter countless turkeys monthly, and burn the feathers on a weekly basis.
Starting out as an agricultural community situated very close to Boulder and Denver has created a fairly unique community. About 20 years ago Longmont had about 15,000 citizens. These people were either lower class farmers and illegal immigrants, or upper class engineers for the newly built IBM facility near Boulder, or Storage Technologies on the outskirts of town. There was never any really discernable middle class, which made for some interesting problems.
Depending on which side of the tracks you were from, you would go to either a school that had a massive amount of funding, or one that had next to nothing. The west side of town has always had the better parks, better roads, and better housing. Even today, the middle class is almost nowhere to be found.
About 1994, the Colorado economy began to boom, leading to a sudden surge of people relocating from all across the nation. Longmont has grown to about 85,000 people in the last six years alone. Needless to say, the city planners were grossly unprepared for this massive explosion, and the city is quite an odd mish-mash of poorly designed suburban streets that appear to have been thrown together at random.
Having no real downtown or highrises, Longmont has been described as being a suburb of Nowhere. It is about 20 miles NE of Boulder and 50 miles N of Denver making it a vast sprawl of suburbia that truly is in the middle of nowhere. Since it is nothing more than suburbs, there is not much in the way of entertainment in the city. One must travel to Denver or Boulder to find a concert, a club, a theater, or a decent restaraunt. There is a fairly large mall and a movie theater on the outskirts, but nothing else. A common remark made by young adults is that "the only thing to do in Longmont is drink and smoke pot." This is of course an overstatement, but is fairly close.
Another activity that many youths in Longmont appearantly enjoy is cruising. This seems to involve driving aimlessly up and down Main St on Friday and Saturday nights from about 6:00 PM untill 2:00 AM. The two main groups of people that do this are those who listen to country, and those who listen to rap. The two groups don't get along well, and are invariably drinking, which leads to alot of yelling and posturing, but not much violence. Main St is actually the second most cruised street in the U.S., next to Sunset Strip, Las Vegas.
Many people say the best thing about Longmont,is it's proximity to the Rocky Mountains. One only has to drive west for about 20 minutes to be on a twisting mountain road, and about 40 minutes to be at the trail head for several "fourteeners", or mountains over 14,000 feet above sea level. Longmont itself is over 6,000 feet high in places, and for the most part, the air is clean and clear. Well, there is quite a stench near the Longmont Foods "Turkey Plant", where they slaughter countless turkeys monthly, and burn the feathers on a weekly basis.
