Durango Main Avenue San Juans Ceramic Art Tile
— the avenue the steam train wakes up.
Not only on a wall.
“Main Avenue runs the length of downtown Durango, a town the Denver & Rio Grande Railway laid out in 1880 to reach the silver country at Silverton. The Victorian storefronts are mostly still there: the Strater Hotel since 1887, the General Palmer since 1898, and the coal-fired steam train still leaves the depot at the south end of the street most mornings. The San Juan Mountains start almost immediately past the rooflines. The town moves slowly, the way a place moves when it has already had its boom.
Durango Main Avenue San Juans Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Main Avenue is the historic spine of downtown Durango, a town at 6,512 feet in La Plata County, southwestern Colorado, where the San Juan Mountains meet the high mesa country of the Four Corners. The town was platted in 1880 by William Jackson Palmer's Denver & Rio Grande Railway to serve the silver and gold mines around Silverton, forty-five miles north along the Animas River. Main Avenue runs north-south for about twelve blocks as the original commercial street, with the Animas River one block to the east. North out of town the avenue joins U.S. 550, known locally as the Million Dollar Highway, which climbs over Red Mountain Pass into the high San Juans.
The Main Avenue Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and covers about twelve blocks of late-nineteenth-century commercial architecture, most of it built in the decade after the 1880 railroad arrival. The Strater Hotel at 699 Main Avenue has stood since 1887, four stories of red brick and white sandstone trim built by Henry Strater. The General Palmer Hotel followed at 567 Main in 1898, in the Queen Anne style, named for William Jackson Palmer of the Denver & Rio Grande. Most of the storefronts between them are two- and three-story Italianate brick from the same decade. The cornices, hood moulds and cast-iron pilasters along the street are largely original.
The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad still runs coal-fired steam from the depot at the south end of Main Avenue most days from early May through late October, with a winter Polar Express service in December. The 45.2-mile route to Silverton follows the Animas River up into the San Juan National Forest and climbs about 2,800 feet. Summer tickets sell out weeks ahead; the Strater and General Palmer both face the avenue, a block from the platform. Off-season the street is quieter, with snow on the cornices and the high San Juans pale behind, and Fort Lewis College on the mesa above lit at the edges of the dusk.