Englewood's Broadway story reaches back to an early south road

Broadway reads today like a modern Denver-metro spine, a wide commercial corridor running south through one suburb after another. Its beginnings were a good deal humbler. Thomas Skerritt plowed out an early legal road heading south from Denver, and that furrow in the ground became the street now called Broadway.

A road that started as a plow line tells you something about how young this settlement once was. Englewood grew up just south of Denver, and Broadway was there close to the beginning rather than laid over the city later. That is part of why downtown and the older neighborhoods still feel so tied to the street.

It is an easy thing to forget while sitting at a red light. The corridor carrying you through the metro was once one man’s effort to open a legal route across open country, and the line he chose stuck.

The fuller version of this story sits in Englewood’s history chronology and its other heritage pages, worth a look if you want to trace how a single early road shaped where the city put itself.