Fort Collins Old Town Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— — the brick downtown Disney's Main Street leaned on.
Not only on a wall.
“Fort Collins built a downtown of red brick in the 1880s and kept it. The square at College and Linden still has the Avery Block, the Linden Hotel, and the summer trolley that runs along Mountain Avenue. The story locals tell, which turns out to be true, is that Disney art director Harper Goff grew up here and carried these streets into the Main Street, USA he drew for Disneyland in the 1950s. The mountains lift to the west. A small downtown the Rockies look down on.
Fort Collins Old Town Front Range 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.
Fort Collins sits at the northern end of Colorado's Front Range, about 65 miles north of Denver in Larimer County, with the city centered near 5,003 feet elevation along the Cache la Poudre River. The Old Town Historic District, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, occupies roughly fifteen blocks at the original 1864 fort site, anchored by the triangular plaza where College Avenue meets Linden Street. The Mummy Range and Horsetooth Mountain rise to the west; Rocky Mountain National Park is about an hour by car. Colorado State University, the city's largest employer and a land-grant institution founded in 1870, sits a few blocks south of the historic district.
The brick buildings that fill Old Town date mainly from the 1880s through the early 1900s, after the railroad reached Fort Collins and the original wooden fort structures gave way to permanent commercial blocks. The Avery Block (1897), the Linden Hotel (1882), and the row of two- and three-story brick fronts along Linden Street form the surviving spine of the district. Harper Goff, an art director who grew up in Fort Collins in the 1910s and 1920s, did early concept drawings for Main Street, USA at Disneyland. Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri was the primary inspiration, but Goff is widely credited with carrying Old Town's proportions and brick character into the design.
From the square the Front Range fills the western horizon, with Horsetooth Rock the closest recognizable silhouette at approximately 7,260 feet. In late afternoon through the seasons, alpenglow catches the higher peaks for the eight or ten minutes between when the valley falls into shade and the high snow loses the last of the sun. Winter air at this latitude and elevation runs notably clear; on a January afternoon the snow on the foothills behind the brick blocks of Linden Street reads almost blue. Fort Collins is often cited as having around 300 days of sunshine a year. A great deal of that arrives angled hard from the west.