CENTRAL CITY — Bob Powe likes to sit on his front porch in the mornings, coffee in hand, and watch from his house on Casey Street as the sun slowly skirts the ridgeline across Gregory Gulch.
The warmth from the sky, Powe said, is vital in this Gilpin County town that’s perched at 8,500 feet, and where during the fall and winter the sun sits low on the horizon and shades Central City for part of the day.
Now, he said, that view and the precious few hours of sunshine are at risk. In Gregory Gulch below Powe’s Victorian Gothic home, a developer has proposed a 27-story hotel tower with 600 rooms and a 100,000-square-foot casino, along with other components of a large resort plan. If built, the tower threatens to cast his 1865 house largely in the shadows for months at a time.
“This house depends on the sun to heat it up,” said the 74-year-old contractor, who has lived on this street cut out of the hillside since he was an infant. “After 160 years, they’re trying to take away my sunshine.”
The hotel tower is part of the Gregory Gulch Gaming Resort project pitched by Raleigh, N.C.-based G3 Gaming. The project — featuring 1,000 slot machines and 50 table games, gift shops and restaurants, workforce housing and around 2,000 parking spaces — has drawn opposition for weeks as neighbors decry its potential impact on this historic mining town.
But at the same time, some city leaders see in the project the chance to compete more strongly against Black Hawk, its appreciably busier neighboring casino town, which has drawn greater investment in the decades since Colorado authorized gaming in both.
For neighbors like Powe, the new tower will destroy the view of the mountainside across the gulch, with which he has a “spiritual connection.” He has posted “No Tower” and “Not Black Hawk” signs around his home, calling them his “paper swords” in his fight against the project.
“You’ll be able to look right into the hotel windows and they’ll be able to look right at me,” Powe said of guests. “This will destroy my privacy, the view and the sunshine.”
The project, which would be built down the valley from the city’s historic center, is expected to go before the City Council on Nov. 4 for a presentation and dialogue. It’s not yet clear if the night will also feature an up-or-down vote on the resort.
If built, the resort would have the most rooms of any hotel in the two towns. G3 is seeking a variance to allow it to build above the city’s 53-foot height limit. It’s the proposed 345-foot tower at the center of the project that is provoking the strongest reaction in this town of 650.
Only the Ameristar Black Hawk casino, at 34 stories, would be taller.
Last month, the Central City Planning Commission unanimously recommended that the City Council turn down the project. That vote, however, was made with the recognition that a rejection would come with consequences.
Commissioner Dena Hunter laid out the city’s quagmire starkly during the Sept. 3 meeting.
“The tower is the huge elephant in this room,” she said, adding in the next breath: “My concern is, at this point in time, Central City is dying. It’s dying out there. This could be a saving grace.”
Money vs. history
The Gregory Gulch Gaming Resort could bring substantial fiscal relief to Central City, one of three economically beleaguered Colorado mining towns that voters approved for gambling 35 years ago.
The mountain town received just over $1 million in state gaming tax revenue in the 2025 fiscal year — a far cry from the $12.2 million Black Hawk pulled in during the same time.
According to city documents, tax revenues from the new hotel project could net Central City $8 million annually, though it was not clear how much of that total would come strictly from gaming.
That’s real money to Jenny Earnest, a five-year resident of Central City and owner of Office Rebel, a company that provides administrative services to businesses in Colorado’s mountain towns.
Not only would the cash bulk up the city’s coffers for municipal needs and wants, it would provide a critical financial boost to the city’s “historical assets that are crumbling right now,” she said.
“We have to weigh the downsides with the upsides,” Earnest said. “We’ve lost a significant portion of our historic assets in the last 20 years, and we don’t have the money to save them.”
Central City was founded in 1859, the same year prospector John H. Gregory discovered gold dust in the gulch that now bears his name. The population quickly grew to 15,000 and the area became known as “The Richest Square Mile on Earth.”
Theaters, hotels and churches sprouted up, but the gold didn’t last. People drifted away and Central City fell on tough times. The Urban Land Institute in 2019 released a study that concluded that around 40% of downtown spaces were vacant, visitation was stagnant and debt from building the Central City Parkway — an alternative access road from Interstate 70 that avoids taking travelers through Black Hawk first — continued to stress the city’s finances.
Amid those pressures, there is the challenge and cost of maintaining 150-year-old buildings in Central City. Take the Belvidere Theater, built in 1875. It hosted dances, plays, music, and movies for miners and their families. It also survived a fire that burned in the ceiling in the 1970s. It’s estimated that it will cost Central City $9 million to restore the building, which it is in the midst of doing.
Colorado State University’s Office of Engagement and Extension documented the condition of nine other Central City historic buildings, including the 1872 Teller House and the Central City Opera House, built in 1878.
“That’s what our town is all about — our history,” Earnest said.
Peter Droege understands the importance of preserving the historic facets of Central City. After all, he’s the president of the Belvidere Theater Foundation.
But having a gleaming colossus at the entrance to Central City may be too big a tradeoff to make, he said.
“I support economic development as long as it conforms to the historic nature of the town,” he said. “The idea of having a 300-foot-plus tower in the middle of a historic district — my immediate reaction is that it is not a fit.”
Droege, 64, grew up in Central City and owns a claim in the nearby, and now defunct, Topeka gold mine. The original deed to his 1880s-era house, a former dynamite bunker for mining operations, was held by none other than John Gregory — the same man who put Central City on the map.
“Central City just has a historic quality that not many other communities in the country have — where you drive into it and it feels like you are stepping back in time,” Droege said.
G3 Gaming hired Denver-based Obermeier Sheykhet Architecture to draw up the plans for Gregory Gulch Gaming Resort. The design firm’s president, Aleksandr Sheykhet, is also working on an update to Central City’s comprehensive plan, which has some in town wondering about a potential conflict of interest.
Neither Sheykhet nor G3’s CEO, David Johnston, would answer questions submitted by The Denver Post. But Sammie Mason, a spokeswoman for the project, said G3 has every intention of respecting the mining town’s rich history.
“Rather than replicating or mimicking historic buildings, the project aims to incorporate architectural elements that complement the city’s character while meeting modern standards,” she wrote in an email.
G3, Mason said, already held two public meetings on the project in July.
“The fiscal impact and tax revenue generated by a development of this magnitude could provide meaningful, long-term benefits — funding improvements to roads, utilities and other essential infrastructure while also supporting historic preservation efforts,” she said. “These are investments the city urgently needs but cannot currently afford without a catalyst for new growth.”
Town ‘is hurting for money’
Anne Powe, Bob Powe’s daughter, lives not far away from her father in Gilpin County. She often visits and wants his house to stay in the family.
But she’s not certain that will happen if the Gregory Gulch project goes forward.
“The fact that you’ll be sitting on the porch and staring into hotel rooms is not what I envisioned for the girls,” she said of her two young daughters. “It definitely is going to impact the house.”
Bob Powe worries, too, about the noise and commotion that standing up a project of this scale will generate over the several years it takes to build. What if the project is halted in the middle of construction because of financial constraints or dried-up funding?
“One of my fears is they get the tower halfway up and then it fails,” he said of the project.
Powe has suggested that the developers scale down the hotel tower’s height, but he knows that subsidence and stability problems — from decades of mining in the gulch — make it challenging to orient the project more horizontally.
His daughter hopes G3 Gaming will alter its design to mitigate its impacts on longtime residents. But she is far from certain that will happen, given Central City’s fiscal situation — and the lure of what brought prospectors to these parts more than 160 years ago.
“They’re coming in knowing this town is hurting for money,” she said. “They are going to be able to set the rules and walk all over us.”
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