Colfax Avenue

A slice of Americana. Anyone who has ever spent time in Denver has a Colfax Avenue story.

As perhaps the nation’s longest commercial street, Colfax is jammed with history, freaks, neon and occasional peril as it cuts through Golden, Denver, Lakewood, Aurora and beyond.

Barber, 49, has spent the last 14 years chronicling the history of Colfax, collecting thousands of artifacts, including a stegosaurus footprint dating back 150 million years to the Jurassic period.

He’s now moving it all from his basement into the new Colfax Museum, a celebration of the road that runs 53.3 miles from the Denver metro area clear through Bennett on Colorado’s eastern plains. It’s actually part of U.S. 40, which once stretched from Atlantic City, N.J., to San Francisco but now ends in Utah.