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- Jim Burleigh
- Here is an obituary from The Telluride Daily Planet, dated 9/24/22, written by Suzanne Cheavens: "A ‘Telluride giant’ leaves his mark Jim Burleigh’s legacy includes Lawson Hill, River Trail and more: Lawson Hill. The River Trail. Manitou Lodge. The Columbia Hotel. The Telluride Sports building. The gondola. Pocket parks. What Jim Burleigh left in his wake defines what Telluride is today. Burleigh, who died Sept. 9 in San Diego at 77, was as much an architect of ideas as he was a designer of iconic structures. His legacy is indelible, his intellect keen, his wit incisive. Much as his friends and associates mourn his passing, his contributions to modern Telluride are celebrated. He is, as one friend said, “a Telluride giant.” Burleigh and his wife, Kathy Wahlstrand, came to Telluride from Berkeley in the early 1970s, young, idealistic and talented. He was, his wife said, already a man in full. “He came to town as a whole person,” Wahlstrand said. “He was already who he was.” They were, said builder, artist and a longtime Telluride Planning & Zoning Commission member, Kathy Green, “inspired by all the alternative and hippie ideas and the anti-war and anti-establishment protests. There were many like souls arriving in Telluride with the start of the new ski area. These young idealists commenced on making Telluride an alternative utopia. Jim was a planner and architectural designer and ready to reinvent Telluride.” When the job he was hired to do took longer than anticipated and the couple’s housing dried up in Berkeley, Burleigh’s creativity came to the fore. He needed housing, so he built it. The Burleigh box atop Belmont Liquors (since torn down by the current owners) was his first home. “Burleigh made an agreement with Scott Brown to build a residence on the back of Belmont Liquors, across from the Roma, next to the vacant lot that is Rustico’s outside dining, expanding on his idea that residences could be built on the back of many buildings in town,” recalled his friend and former San Miguel County Commissioner, Jim Bedford. “It was approved and he and Kathy lived there for 10-plus years.” He also built the Burleigh Building, as the brown, three-story structure at the bottom of South Spruce Street is known. It was there that Jim and Kathy raised their children, Adrian, Michael and Jane. The ground floor was the first home to Rainbow Preschool and the condos above have housed countless locals. He housed not only himself, but also designed numerous homes throughout town. Green, who with her late husband, Chuck Kroger, ran Bone Construction, was on-hand for many of these unique projects. Many of today’s residents have lived in or owned an ‘early Burleigh’ without knowing it,” Green said. “Early Burleighs have the narrowest, steepest stairs the old building codes allowed, tiny bedrooms, probably tiny, compartmentalized bathrooms. They are extremely space efficient and were inexpensive to build. Generally, they had natural wood exteriors and natural wood trim and doors inside. Yet Jim also designed some of the best, unique and still sought-after single-family houses in town.” Burleigh’s many friends readily use the word “visionary,” when recalling his contributions to Telluride’s post-mining look and feel. Sensitive and respectful to the town’s rich architectural history, Burleigh’s designs fluidly insinuated into the town’s fabric. “Telluride would not be what it is today without his brilliant and considerate sensibility,” said planner and former Telluride mayor, Amy Levek. “He shaped our understanding of design, urban function, and how to create spaces to gather and live. He was always one step ahead in planning for what we need to make a healthy, functioning community.” Former Telluride Watch publisher, Marta Tarbell, concurred. “Jim Burleigh may have done more to make modern Telluride what it is today than any other individual,” she said. “He was a Telluride character and a visionary. (He had) a brilliant sense of design, an understanding of how land use is key to a healthy community, a rare ability to think differently, and a wicked sense of humor.” Burleigh’s friend, Pamela Lifton-Zoline said his impact went beyond buildings. “Jim made Telluride more progressive, more irreverent, more beautiful, and deeper than we would have been without him,” she said. “That lives on in our streets and our spirit. We honor him if we can continue that tradition.” LAWSON HILL Now home to about 600 souls and a de facto community in and of itself, Lawson Hill is established and cherished. But its genesis was fraught with controversy — this is Telluride, after all. Bedford was serving as a county commissioner when the idea for the subdivision — one that would provide not only housing, but commercial, light industrial and the then-novel concept of live-work housing, was floated. “In late 1989 or early 1990 Burleigh came to me and said he had a client who owned a large chunk of property at the end of the Valley Floor on the other side of the highway that he wanted to develop. He wanted to do something for the community. If that were to develop, what did I think should be done there that would benefit the Telluride region,” Bedford recalled. “I said, ‘Employee housing and space for businesses that would no longer work in Telluride.’ By then there was no gas station in Telluride and Rice Lumber (now Alpine Lumber) was on its way out of town because it just didn’t fit. The land had once been part of Kirk Alexander’s sheep range when it was purchased by Hans Jones who brought in John Horn and Dirk Depagter and Burleigh to see what could be made of it. Within two years after a contentious process Lawson was approved by the county commissioners and the town. The community has provided ownership opportunity and residence for over 600 people who work in the Telluride area. It also houses many businesses that no longer fit in Telluride because of their activity, impacts or their (in)ability to pay Telluride rents. If it weren’t for Lawson Hill we wouldn’t have a lumber yard, gas station, auto repair or brewery in the Telluride region.” Lawson Hill received the Governor’s Smart Growth Award in 1993. “Today, Lawson is an essential part of our employee housing inventory and a real community of full-time residents,” Green said. “Chuck and I and two part-time resident families formed a company with Jim and Kathy. We built Society Turn Business Center. We consider it part of Lawson Hill's ‘downtown.’ Jim always wanted Lawson Hill to connect to Telluride by trolly car or horizontal gondola.” HE MADE IT SO Burleigh’s stamp is on not only the homes and buildings he designed, but in spaces that provide relief from the urban experience. Pocket parks and the River Trail — then more commonly called the River Park Trail — were a result of his steady persistence. “He has a big influence on Telluride’s built environment but also our unbuilt environment,” Green explained. “Jim planned the River Trail and worked with the Sklare and Gerdts families to create it.” Bedford said the River Trail’s creation rests solely on Burleigh’s shoulders. “David Sklare had purchased a difficult piece of property, mostly on the south side of the river … where the Manitou was to go,” Bedford recounted. “In order to get to it there needed to be a bridge and the use of some town property. So Burleigh proposed a trade with the town where the Manitou would build part of a public trail on part of David’s property that eventually became the River Park Trail. In fact, the first time I ever heard the words ‘River Park Trail, Telluride’ were from Jim Burleigh. “For the next 20 years he regularly repeated the words River Park Trail. If anything ever has been created out of a simple idea more than River Park Trail, I don’t know what that could be. By the early 90s the River Park Trail extensions were in every Town Council budget and the requirement that if you were going to develop property along the river you had to dedicate property to the River Park Trail. I have clear memories of Gary Hickcox and Dave-o Whitelaw, who back then were the parks department, dumping thousands of wheelbarrows fuel of red rock gravel up and down the trail which made the River Park Trail a reality. But the reason it’s there is because Burleigh made it so.” For Tarbell, Burleigh’s intuitive understanding of the balance of new and old is expressed best in the Telluride Sports building on the southeast corner of Colorado Avenue and South Fir Street. “Jim championed both historic preservation and the need for new buildings to actually look new, and not ape Victorian architecture,” she said. “His and Tony Herbst's design for the Telluride Sports store on Main Street remains, arguably, the best building added to the town's commercial district in the modern era, fitting in seamlessly yet refusing to pretend it is historic itself.” THE TRANSPORTATION NUT For someone who was, as Bedford characterized him, “a transportation nut,” Burleigh didn’t own a car until the mid-1990s and believed strongly that pedestrianization of Telluride a would be a vast improvement over the throngs of vehicles that clog town to this day. In the late 1970s, Town Council made him transportation/planning director. One scheme, that of closing down Main Street and allowing only pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons, never took hold. “He was one of the first people to ever propose closing off Main Street and at one time had a proposal to put parking underneath and turning Main Street into a plaza,” Bedford said. “Burleigh’s transportation ideas led to an experimental closing of Main Street and horse-drawn wagons and sleighs for which the Town Council and his supporters took a huge amount of shit. This was one of the few failed experiments that he was involved in. But, within a few years it led to the closing of North Oak, then South Oak, and eventually North and South Spruce Street.” Because Burleigh vastly preferred biking over driving, Green said those proclivities are still felt in Lawson Hill, where grumbling over parking — or lack thereof — reverberates. “I sometimes wish that Jim had been a regular vehicle driver when he designed Lawson Hill,” Green said. “Lawson would be an even better place to live and work.” Arguably, the region’s most successful transportation element is the gondola, which links the towns of Telluride and Mountain Village. Used by thousands every year, the gondola was conceived as a way to reduce traffic impacts. Burleigh had a hand in that, too. “Jim was on the team of Telluride visionaries who conceived and championed the gondola as a workable alternative to traffic congestion,” Tarbell said. “If only his notion of a car-free town with intercept parking at the entrance to the valley had been realized, Telluride would be even more sui generis than it is today.” A WICKED SENSE OF HUMOR Burleigh applied his considerable wit and sharp, observational skills to cartooning. In later years, he waded into social media, not to share memes or snap pictures of his breakfast, but to post political cartoons as the country careened on the international stage with Trump at the helm. His embrace of the political was whole. “I think one of the central things about Jim was that, like the best of the ‘60’s, he found a way to integrate radically progressive politics with a can-do, can-build it capability,” Lifton-Zoline remarked. “Something that generation (my generation) understood is that politics is in everything, and that if you don’t welcome it in the front door it comes in the back. And probably causes much more trouble.” His comic book “Jimmy's Red Hots Presents: Rocky Mountain Fever from Dynamic Downtown Telluride,” served to capture “the town’s wild 70s vibe,” Tarbell said. Locals snatched it up, hoping to see just who made the cut. “He was afraid people would hate him for including them, but it turned out that they hated him when they were not included,” Bedford said. Burleigh’s name suited him. He was burly and hirsute, and a typical look was a shirt amply unbuttoned to reveal the expanse of his broad chest and belly. He was, it would seem, impervious to the cold. Green remembers driving home from a trip in the mid-1990s. “Chuck and I had gone to California in mid-March of a drought year. We were driving home over Lizard Head Pass in mid-April. It was a howling blizzard and virtual whiteout,” she said. “Then suddenly there is an oncoming vehicle. The vehicle gets very close, and it is a convertible with the top down. Jim Burleigh driving fast, no hat, no coat, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel as always. This apparition blew past us in a swirl of snow. We started laughing so hard. We knew we were home.” Burleigh’s many friends recall him as a “funny loyal, thoughtful, creative” person whose tireless work on behalf of his community serves as his considerable legacy. Levek described him as “a quality human being and a good friend.” Green is grateful for his visionary work in shaping the community. “Thank you for creating the often invisible and unrecognized framework that makes Telluride and the Telluride region to be the incredible place that we live in today.” Link accessed 10/3/22 from: https://www.telluridenews.com/news/article_3be82076-3c15-11ed-8429-ab17408ec29e.html
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- Jim Cotter - SAWLP Board of Directors Vice-President
- James Edward Cotter (known as Jim) was born 13 March 1944 in Creston, Union County, Iowa to Edward Cotter and Elizabeth McElroy Cotter. In 1963, Jim Cotter graduated from nearby Corning High School in Corning, Iowa. He was active in sports, music and artistic endeavors. In 1967, Cotter graduated from Wayne State College, located in Wayne, Nebraska, with a degree in Education. After earning his M.A. from the University of Wyoming in 1969, Cotter founded J. Cotter Gallery, his landmark business located on Wall Street in Vail. During this time in early Vail, Cotter met fellow artists, Randy Milhoan and Dan Telleen. In 1971, the three artists established Summervail Workshop for Art and Critical Studies (popularly known as Summervail Art Workshop). Summervail Art Workshop became an internationally known art educational institute and movement. It ran between 1971 and 1984. Jim Cotter internationally exhibits his work in a wide range of galleries, museums and art exhibitions. He has two children, daughter Ramsey and son James Riley, with former wife, Linda Coats Cotter. Jim Cotter currently lives in Minturn and continues to operate J. Cotter Gallery. He is Vice-President of the Board of Directors of Summervail Art Workshop Legacy Project.
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- Jim Davidson
- "July 3, 1943 – April 21, 2013 Jim Davidson, 69, died Sunday, April 21, 2013, surrounded by his family in the home he built in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Crestone, CO. Born July 3, 1943 in Cortez, CO, Jim was raised in the Southwestern Colorado mining towns of Rico and Telluride. Jim graduated valedictorian from Telluride High School and went on to Colorado State University, completing a BS in Journalism in 1964. He then attended the New York University School of Law, where he studied for one year under the Root-Tilden Scholarship. He was a man of many talents and careers in his 69 years. His early years were spent working in ski area marketing in Steamboat, Winter Park and Telluride, but writing was his true passion; starting two newspapers, the Winter Park Manifest in 1976 and the Telluride Times Journal in 1986. After moving to Kansas with his wife Tracee in 1995, he went on to publish two books. He was awarded the Western Writers of America Spur Award for his first novel, “Mine Work” (Utah State Press, 1999). This was followed by his second novel “Postmarked Calexico” (Western Eye Press, 2011). He is survived his wife TraceeSporer of Oakley, KS as well as his two children; Eric Davidson, Winter Park, CO and Greta Bloomfield (Jonathan), Golden, CO. He is preceded in death by his parents, Margaret and Allen Davidson, and father-in-law ArloSporer." Taken from: https://www.skyhinews.com/news/obituaries/obituary-jim-davidson/ Link accessed 1/7/21.