Front Range
Alexander Film made movie ads on North Nevada
A Porch Note from Colorado Porch — plain-English local details for all 64 Colorado counties.
North Nevada Avenue reads today as a busy road lined with offices, shops, and the edges of a campus. For decades, though, it held a kind of production most people never connect with Colorado Springs at all: Alexander Film Company made short advertising films, the little reels that played in movie theaters before the feature started.
The company brought its film and aircraft operations to Colorado Springs in the late 1920s. What grew here was a large plant that handled both lines of work and put hundreds of people on the payroll, a real industrial operation rather than a sideline. So while the city has long sold itself on scenery and clean air, it also made things, and one of the things it made was the commercials a generation of moviegoers watched in the dark.
That is a quieter strand of identity than mining, tourism, or the military, the stories the region usually tells about itself. It is worth holding onto anyway. Mills and railroads are the easy shorthand for an industrial past; this was something stranger and more specific — a town in the shadow of Pikes Peak turning out theater ads for the rest of the country.
The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum keeps the company’s history, for anyone curious how a film-and-aircraft plant ended up on North Nevada in the first place.
Sources
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