IS IT BOULDER ... OR THE SPRINGS?

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Apr 27, 2004 by DAVE PHILIPPS THE GAZETTE

A guy walked into a bar in a Front Range Colorado town -- no, this is not a joke -- with rain dripping off his shaved head and tattoos draped down his arms like sleeves.

He smiled and said, "I love this rain. It really brings out the smell of the flowers in the afternoon."

In another Front Range town, a pro-war, gun advocate county commissioner was putting the finishing touches on an article for Soldier of Fortune magazine.

One of these towns was Boulder. The other was Colorado Springs. Conventional wisdom would plant the flower-sniffing nature boy in Boulder and the gun-toting hawk in the Springs.

Try again, though. The flower lover was at Tony's on Tejon Street.

"The stereotype misleads," chuckled Paul Danish, a two-term Boulder County commissioner and gun rights editor for Solder of Fortune magazine.

Boulder has a reputation as Colorado's most liberal city: home of "Mork and Mindy," a Buddhist credit union and "smartinis," a mix of organic orange juice and Chinese herbal elixir.

Colorado Springs is its philosophical flipside: epicenter of the Christian Right, home of the Ronald Reagan Highway and anti-tax advocate Douglas Bruce.

For decades, they've been the Venus and Mars of Colorado, but as the cities grow, their polar reputations are starting to align.

"These towns are much more complex than we make them out to be. They have a whole spectrum of opinion, and they are changing," said Danish, who supported invading Iraq even though the city of Boulder officially opposed it.

"The truth is, our hippiness is dying of old age. We keep it around for fun. This is actually one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the state," he said.

Both towns grew by leaps and bounds in the last decade, and the influence of their main employers, the University of Colorado in Boulder and the military installations in Colorado Springs, is being diluted.

From certain angles, the two communities look about the same. Both have a thriving tech sector. Both have trails filled with fitness nuts. And, well, both have sex scandals at their largest hometown colleges. Even their core beliefs aren't so different.

"They are both trying to save the world. They just have different ideas about how to do it," said Bronson Hilliard, editor of the Colorado Daily, Boulder's scrappy tabloid. His take on the subject: Organizations in Boulder are trying to rescue the environment, while those in Colorado Springs are trying to rescue our souls.

SIMILAR STREETSCAPES

The towns also increasingly have similar streetscapes. Borders, Starbucks, Chipotle, Target, R.E.I., Whole Foods, Soundtrack, Kinko's and other chains have popped up in both towns. Drop a person on Academy Boulevard or Boulder's 28th Street, and -- with the roaring traffic and mountains slightly obscured by smog -- it might take him several minutes to figure out where he is.

Some Boulder small-business owners have reacted to the homogenization of their town with a bumper sticker campaign urging their customers to "Keep Boulder Weird." It may be a tough task, though.

Yes, Boulderites can get a degree in Wilderness Therapy from Naropa University and use the bike lane at the bank, but the town's getting too expensive to be truly bohemian.

The median price for a single-family house in the Boulder city limits is $420,000 -- more than twice the median price in Colorado Springs and far more than your average beatnik, commune-with-the- animals free spirit can scrape together.

The VW buses are sputtering to more affordable places such as Fort Collins, Lafayette, and yes, even Colorado Springs, and being replaced by Audis and BMWs.

Piles and piles of money aside, Hilliard said Boulder was never the groovy utopia it's often been caricatured as.

"True, we have Naropa. You guys have Focus on the Family. We have a smoking ban, you have cops tear-gassing war protesters. But we also have a hidden population -- conservatives, the poor and immigrants -- that people never talk about," Hilliard said.

Likewise, he said, Colorado Springs has overlooked outposts of progressives huddled around Colorado College and in Manitou Springs.

"I always thought the rest of the Springs must look at those areas like Cuba looks at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. It's this little patch of land occupied by hostile foreigners," he said.

STEREOTYPES PERSIST

Though some people see the communities becoming more alike, those pesky stereotypes persist.

Carla Larson, who was browsing through a Christian store in the Springs with her husband and daughter, said she hadn't been to Boulder since she was a girl, but would live there "only if God led us there. I'd hate to raise kids there."

"It's just too liberal," she said. "They have a large gay community. We're starting to get one too, but not like that. Even when I was a kid, I'd go there and see the girls in their halter tops. It was just..." The thought screwed her face into a grim look of disapproval and she shook her head.

In Boulder, Corinne Brown, financial director of a local Buddhist center, used the same dour facial expression when she said she couldn't remember the last time she visited Colorado Springs.