The Valley Virginian. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1865-1895, 1884-01-03
.i Especial Correspondence VIRGINIAN.I
LETTERS FROM. COLORADO.
NUMBER FIVE.
MODES OF LIVING.

The rental of a Colorado Sprin gs house
is out of all proportion to the original in
vestment. You may buy lot for $1,000,
put $4,000 house upon it, furnish 1t at
cost Of $1,000, and rent it for $50 or $40
T per month. These rent figures might be
placed higher. Therefore the best policy
is to build or buy your house. An unfur-
nished house may be rented from twenty
dollars a month and upwards. But if you
elect to be a sojourner, there are boarding
houses whose scale of rates is about the
same as in eastern places of resort, and
there is the great Colorado institution
the lodging house Furnished rooms, y
Rooms for Rent" Is the sign on almost
every other house,-a flaming green OF or
ange placard, surprising to the stranger
The tiniestI cottage will rent its best
rooms, the family presumably occupying a
tent in the yard, and bonanza kings"
sometimes contrive to find stray corners
for dodgers in their palatial abodes. These.
rooms may be rented from the very lowest
figures to $50 piece a month-the price
brought by the best. The steady sun
shine weather offers no bar to going out
for table board" This is to be obtained
at numerous boarding houses OF restaur-
ants at prices ranging from $4.00to 5000 a
week. The hotels of Colorado Springs
have always, and perhaps not unjustly,
been held in ill-repute.
The Antlers, $3.50, 900 hotel, and worz
thy the pretty city and its six thousand
inhabitants, was recently completed to
supply a longfelt need. Looking down
Pixies Peak avenue to the west. the hotel
is thrown up against background of
mountains, and it is the first object which
greets the admiring tourist as he steps ON
the railway platform at Colorado Springs.
Imagine the quaintest house in an old
Flemish town, enlarged and beautified,
and you gain some idea of the Antlers.-
1t is four stories and half high, with
picturesque confusion Of round towers and
gables, built of lilac-grey Castle Rock
stone, quarry-faced, and trimmed with
Manitou stone. The upper story is of
wood, composed altogether of wave Shin
giles. painted light olive green. The Queen
Anne balustrades. verandas, and balconie S
and all the lighter woodwork are of dark
olive, picked out with red. The hotel has
seyenty-f1ve sleeping rooms, billiard room,
40 by 40 it., parlors, office, children's play
room, card room SC. On each floor, saw
ing the first, there are four bathrooms
1t is steam-heated from top to bottom,
supplied with two great boilers from
Davis, Creswell & Co., Denver. Many of
the rooms in addition have open fire-places.
The new hotel has complete system of
fire escapes. Elevators and annunciators
are provided among other modern luxuries,
and the woodwork is of ash and oak, and
is painted olive or red. The building is
sumptuously filled up with Wilton carpets
on the first floor and Brussels above. The
parlor suite is furnished with pieces of
Chippendale design, upholstered in En-
glish tapestry, brown, gilt and blue. The
furniture is upholstered in plush, raw-silk
| tapestry or embossed velvet, with bedroom
sets of cherry, mahogany, light-wood, or
brass, hammered copper OF brass and beat
en- steel combined. Colored glass, quelle
OF Russian, and pretty china brighten the
carefully set tables in the dining-room
Two competent French chefs de cuisine
have charge of the culinary department
DR.. S. Z. Solly of Colorado Springs has
had personal superintendent of the sani-
tary appointments of the Antlers and the
ventilation and drainage are systematical-
ly and carefully arranged upon an original
and notwithstanding plan.
The windows of the hotel are large and
square. and frame a panorama of beauty
in each direction. The western piazzas
and windows look out upon the Expert
mental Garden, where the first colonists
| tried experimenting with mother earth
now to be turned into park. Terms at
the Antlers are $500 to $4.00 per diem
MANITOU.
Off to Manitou this bright morning, not
by the narrow-gauge train, whose course
| in and out of the foothills is marked by a
thin curl of smoke, but with carriage and
pair bowling over the broad road facing
westward, where wondrous gigantic rocks
and ridgessof tilted strata give one Curl
ously mixed impression of the green-gray
palisades of the Hudson running riot to
meet the red obelisks of Luxon and
Phebes. Above the rocks are the foot
hills, bristling with thorny spikes of..y.cca,
or Spanish bayonet,' converting every
knoll into guarded fort, and at this sea-
son each sheaf of spears encirles a tall
shaft of greenish white or whitish-mauve
cups--the yucca blossom, most majestic
flower of the plains. The great lilac ane-
mones shut their petals within their furry
calices and went to sleep month ago, but
| if you brave the spears among the foot
hills, there will be plumes of the loco,
white and purple, and stems of gilia, coral
or white, or rose, or the feathery, tremu-
| lous stars of the white mentezelia.
| Brown. bright-eyed lizards called ''swifts, .
dart in and out among the short, succu-
lent grasses, and possibly you could find
a sluggish Texas or horned toad. Above
| the foothills are the sombre mountains,
and above them the silent, powdered
summit of Pixies Peak, cast up against the
stainless blue. The telephone and tele-
graph wires have kept pace with you all
along this Manitou road in Colorado nat
ural sabIimity and modern progress go