The bells atop the Mission of Our Seraphic Father San Francisco de Asís, better known as Mission Dolores, have names. From north to south, they are San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin.

“These are the original bells,” Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan told a group of Catholic school fourth graders in smart tartan uniforms on a Friday morning in April. Galvan is an elfin man with a preference for Johnny Cash–black outfits who, after suffering a stroke last year, often uses a wheelchair. Seated beneath the bells, he flashed a mercurial grin: “They are old and tired. Just like me.”

The students were neither old nor tired, and they clearly anticipated ringing those bells. They were here because fourth graders in California study state history, and the missions, erected by forced Indian labor under Spanish friars before the state was a state, are a keystone of the curriculum. Field trips to missions are a part of most every California childhood.

San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin crown the oldest surviving structure in the city that grew around it. Newer buildings crumbled in the 1989 quake, and much of the city crashed and burned in the Big One in 1906. The adobe walls of Mission Dolores—which are four feet thick except along the section beneath these three bells, where they reach a full ten feet thick—stood firm. It’s cool and dark in here, even on this unseasonably sunny and glorious San Francisco morning.

One by one, the students from Good Shepherd School in nearby Pacifica step forward to yank the bell ropes. If Quasimodo had worked at Mission Dolores, his hearing would’ve remained immaculate; it’s hard to imagine anyone detecting the bells’ mild plinking even two blocks away at Dolores Park. But in 1794, when Galvan says these bells first arrived, there were no buildings, no cars, no trees, no earbuds, and no boisterous fourth graders. These bells towered over the desertic landscape and could be heard nearly four miles off at the Presidio. Their pealing carried over the shrubs and dunes and indicated a shift change—it was time for the Indians working there to tread back to the mission. They walked a winding trail largely recapitulated today by “the Wiggle,” a circuitous route taken by cyclists to bypass San Francisco’s hilliest hills. In the morning, they’d do it all again.

Now, as the children step forward to ring the bells, a man like Galvan, with the right kind of ears, can hear San Francisco’s history in their tones.

A tall South Asian girl takes a rope in hand. Plink!

The ’49ers rush west.

A stocky Latino boy ambles up. Plink!

The Great Quake and fire raze 80 percent of the city.

Plink!

Irish nationalists cruise through “Da Mish.”

Plink!

Fourth grader Andy Galvan takes a field trip to Mission Dolores.

Plink!

Lowriders cruise through La Misión.

Plink!

The dot-com boom.

Plink!

The dot-com bust.

Plink! Plink! Plink! Tech workers with a city-issued permit boot Latino pickup-soccer players off Mission Playground; a solitary sunbather graces Dolores Park on the first day of the pandemic lockdown; the city awaits potential trillion-dollar AI IPOs.

Within earshot of these bells, change has been a constant. Natural forces have compelled San Francisco to rebuild itself. Market forces have compelled it to remake itself. The city has assumed a role as a serial boomtown, a place spawned by lust for gold and sustained by lust for everything else. If you’re running from something, this is about the furthest west you can go without getting wet. But it’s also a place to run to, with big ideas, for a big job, or simply to be who you are.

And all of that history is wrapped up in the mission. “Everything in San Francisco,” Galvan says, “takes its name from this place.” Honorees awarded the key to San Francisco, he notes, were actually given a gussied-up replica of the key to the mission’s hulking front door. The history of San Francisco’s mission and the surrounding Mission District that sprouted beneath these tolling bells is the story of an American city—and, in many ways, America. The bells arrived in 1794, but the mission was founded in 1776. It is as old as the country, but it tells a different story from the one emanating from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The story of the East—the one they teach fourth graders, at least—is about religious refugees establishing a new, enlightened form of government that would stamp out the incivilities of monarchy and tyranny. This story? This is a story about seizing and repurposing resources: land, mineral, even—and especially—human. About staking one’s claim. Constant disruption. Moving fast and breaking things. Generating immense wealth and advancement, with cost a secondary concern. Which one, in 2026, feels more in line with the American character?

Truth be told, the children eagerly taking the bell ropes are probably not thinking about the iterations of America that have come and gone beneath these bells. They just seem thrilled to pull those ropes before the grown-ups think better of it and make them stop.

But Galvan thinks about these things. That’s his job.

He arrived, officially, as the curator twenty-two years ago, the first Indian to ever hold such a position at a California mission. He often jokes that he considered draping a banner on the facade of the mission, reading “UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.” This did not happen. But it didn’t need to: Whether it’s acquiring artifacts for the church museum, leading visitors through the grounds, or donning a curator’s Mickey Mouse gloves to pore over leather-and-parchment archival records—births, baptisms, marriages, burials—under lock and key on-site, Galvan’s raison d’être, he says, is “putting the Indian into the story.”

This is a part of the story the fourth graders Galvan interacts with don’t necessarily know. It’s not the only part: On one recent tour, a boy nodded at an altar and asked, “Is that Jesus up there?” Galvan took a moment with that one. “Are you asking me,” he said, forming his words slowly, “if that’s Jesus on the cross?” The church felt unusually silent for the next few moments. “Yes,” Galvan finally replied. “Yes it is.”

One day, that little boy may grow up to be president of these United States. He might already be overqualified. What else, Galvan wonders, do tomorrow’s leaders not know—what do they not even think to know?

So that’s what Galvan thinks about. He is seventy-one years old now and often finds himself resting in his wheelchair near his favorite part of the mission, the baptismal font. He sits and he thinks, back, back, back through the history echoing around him, history that belongs to the city but also belongs to him, by job and by right.

Galvan understands, as few living people can, that long ago, in this very place—in this very room—things happened that set the tone for all that would follow. The establishment of Mission Dolores and San Francisco are intertwined; through a calendrical quirk both are tied to the founding of the United States itself. To understand who we are in the present—in San Francisco, in America—you need to start with the mission’s past.

A mural commemorating the arrival of BART, the San Francisco Bay Area’s transit system, only deepened local fears that the train would be the city’s latest agent of displacement: it depicts the rails running heavy over people’s backs.

In March, a Mission District house on Hampshire Street came on the market advertising itself as potentially the oldest in San Francisco. Its owner had evicted four generations of a Salvadoran family from their residence of thirty-two years, including a bedridden ninety-four-year-old matriarch. San Francisco and its Mission District have spun many stories through the years. But this is one on heavy rotation. Other than their living in what may have been the city’s oldest home, a lawyer for the evicted family described his clients’ ordeal as typical—and even “not particularly vicious” by neighborhood standards.

It felt like the symbolic end of a mop-up action that had been happening for a long time. Latinos made up 60 percent of this neighborhood in 2000. By 2015 it was 48 percent. By 2023 it was 33 percent. Many saw it coming. In the early 1970s, when Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) was on the verge of opening, the majority-Latino district interpreted the new train system as an imposition not meant for its benefit but to expedite its displacement. The year before Mission Dolores’s bicentennial, a mural was installed several blocks south commemorating, if not celebrating, BART’s opening. The mural depicts the train rolling over the backs of brown-skinned people hoisting it like Atlas.

Not long before that, “The Good Time Manual,” a 245-page San Francisco guidebook catering to hip, young—and, likely, white—readers listed zero places of interest in the overwhelmingly Latino neighborhood. Two generations on, the Mission District is both one of the city’s coolest and hottest, and a place to which young people flock. Many have money and may, soon, have vastly more—there are more than 20 AI companies sited in the Mission alone, including some of the biggest. Like the generations of San Francisco arrivistes before them, they, too, are single-mindedly pursuing their dreams. And their fortunes.

But the Hampshire Street house had played its role in this story for far longer. It was erected as early as 1855 by the Treat brothers, hustlers of the sort who’d thrive in any iteration of San Francisco. The Treats had taken vast swaths of the Mission off the hands of its feudal Mexican land barons—who had, previously, dispossessed the Indians who Junípero Serra, the polarizing paterfamilias of the California mission system, vainly believed would inherit this earth. (Serra was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2015.)

With the family evicted, the Hampshire Street home was promptly subdivided into four luxury condominiums listed at nearly $1 million a pop. At least one of the units was soon serving tourists as an Airbnb.

Mission Dolores stands at the head of this neighborhood, and within the cool, dimly lit edifice, outside life can seem far off. But it, too, has felt these changes. It’s not so much what you see here, Galvan could tell you, as what you don’t. The parishioners are still largely immigrants and people of color. There are just so many fewer of them.

San Francisco is an entity with no shortage of process. So is the Catholic Church. For five years as the mission’s curator and for decades beforehand, Galvan had been pushing to bring greater recognition to the legions of native people buried in the mission’s cemetery.

Every plan he proposed was rebuffed, for cost or simply for ruffling feathers with his insistence on representing the Indians. In 2009, the mission hired Galvan’s cousin as an assistant curator, and the two relatives decided to expedite the proceedings. They bought planks of redwood, the region’s iconic tree, at Home Depot and carved conjoining headstones for two early Indian burials.

The marker still stands, the Indians’ names more prominent than many of the European names on the older tombstones. Galvan shows it off on every tour.

Pope John Paul II embraces Brendan O’Rourke, a four-year-old with AIDS.

The Mission Dolores basilica was completed in 1918 after its predecessor was mortally wounded in the Big One. It adjoins the Old Mission, which houses Galvan’s museum. Galvan leads visitors through the basilica too, and when he does he’ll usually stop at a pew around ten rows back. That’s the Brendan O’Rourke pew.

This is where John O’Rourke stood with his four-year-old son in his arms. And as Pope John Paul II slowly made his way forward toward the altar, he came face-to-face with the boy. The pontiff held and embraced Brendan. In a pre-Internet age, the moment went viral; San Francisco is a city that thinks highly of itself, but September 17, 1987, was a day on which it lived up to its own ideals.

Brendan O’Rourke, who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion he received as an infant, was one of more than one hundred people with AIDS or AIDS-related conditions in the church that day. President Ronald Reagan had, only months before, deigned to make a speech about AIDS after years of declining to even mention the word. But at the Mission of Our Seraphic Father San Francisco de Asís, Pope John Paul II told men and women—and children—suffering from AIDS that they had value.

“God loves you all, without distinction, without limit,” he said. “He loves those of you who are sick, those who are suffering from AIDS and AIDS-Related Complex. … He loves all with an unconditional and everlasting love.”

It was a moment Galvan witnessed with his own eyes. It was a moment when San Francisco did good for the world.

Galvan befriended the O’Rourke family. They began praying for a miracle for Brendan, praying to Junípero Serra. One year later, the O’Rourkes traveled to Rome for Serra’s beatification and took communion with the Pope. Two years after that, Brendan died. He was seven years old.

By night, future San Francisco State political-science professor Bill Issel studied the work of Randolph Bourne, an early twentieth-century essayist who had called for “trans-nationalism”: Rather than assimilating into Anglo-Saxon norms, immigrants would retain their own cultures and help form a “cosmopolitan America.”

Many years in the future, Issel would be an emeritus professor and one of the foremost historians of the city. But in 1959 he survived as a student by working a trade during the day, where he saw that trans-nationalism was, essentially, what was happening in the Mission District. The story of the American city has been told and retold in the shadow of Mission Dolores: Throughout the nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, a smorgasbord of white ethnics from Scandinavia, Germany, and Ireland arrived in generational waves. (Issel’s great-grandfather came from Germany in 1881.) They pulled shifts in the wool mills, factories, and chemical plants mushrooming in a neighborhood the Irish, in a Brooklyn-like brogue, called “Da Mish”—a neighborhood marked, to this day, as a place for work. (Whatever you think about the tech barons and workers of the present, you can’t say they aren’t pulling long hours.)

There are neighborhoods like this in every major American burg. But on the East Coast, the class and ethnic boundaries feel more static. In the serial boomtown of San Francisco, however, the character of the Mission changed with most every boom as the revolving door into American society kept revolving. In a historic time frame, if not a human one, the Mission District never stays one thing for long.

And as in other American cities, when nonwhite ethnics showed up, the whites of yore decamped. They sold their homes for prices that, today, leave their grandchildren resentful. They relocated to the placid suburbs south of San Francisco or the sandy, low-slung Outside Lands of the city’s Westside. It would be left to their descendants to embrace the allure of more centrally located urban realms like the Mission District.

In 1964, when Andy Galvan’s fourth-grade class made its pilgrimage to Mission Dolores, he found a neighborhood in the midst of transformation, from what it was to what it would be. Only five years prior, apprentice electrician Bill Issel would hear his fellow white ethnic union men offer up their own assessment as Da Mish was rapidly becoming La Misión: “The Mission is going to hell.”

Marie Bernal Buffet, the granddaughter of a Yelamu man named Pedro Alcantara, died penniless, just south of the San Francisco border. She was the last known member of the Yelamu line. “Her little home is mortgaged for $500, which has long since been expended for medicine and doctor’s bills,” reads a jarringly brief 1922 article in the San Francisco Examiner. Its headline: “LAST OF INDIANS IN S.F. IS DYING AMID POVERTY.”

San Francisco’s map was redrawn yet again when a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck in 1906. Mission Dolores, already more than a century old, survived.

The Big One struck at 5:12 a.m. on April 18. It was a 7.9 magnitude quake that destroyed nearly the entire city thanks largely to a series of fires it precipitated that burned for days. Much of the Mission District’s adjacent neighborhoods burned. Much of the Mission District did not, in large part thanks to a single, functioning fire hydrant on Church and Twentieth streets overlooking Dolores Park. Mission Dolores itself, already a relic in the early twentieth century, was preserved at the cost of dynamiting the Notre Dame Academy across the street.

Every year on April 18, city officials dutifully apply a coat of gold paint to “the Little Giant,” the heroic hydrant, a solemn predawn celebration marking the functionality of an inanimate object. It might as well also mark the commencement of another wave of change—to tech and plague add natural disaster. Families burned out of other neighborhoods crowded into the Mission, squeezing multiple generations into single domiciles, just like the family unceremoniously booted from the house on Hampton Street more than one hundred years later.

The families that scored lodging here were the lucky ones. There’s a 1906 photo on display at Mission Dolores depicting hearses lined up in front of the building like taxicabs at the airport. The funerals were coming in shifts, and the Old Mission sent off not only Catholics but Protestants and Jews as well.

It’s not something you’ll find in the church’s archives, however. They only wrote down the names of the Catholics.

“I am very old. My people were once around me like the sands of the shore … many … many. They have all passed away,” Pedro Alcantara told a federal Indian Agent in 1850, the year California became a state. (California’s first governor, in January 1851, used the occasion of his State of the State address to plainly declare: “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.”) Alcantara was one of the few Mission Dolores–born Indians to live long enough to have children of his own. “They have died like the grass,” he said of his people. “They have gone to the mountains. I do not complain, the antelope falls with the arrow.”

Mission Dolores at the turn of the 20th century.

In the years after Samuel Brannan jolted San Franciscans with his cries of “Gold! Gold from the American River!” all roads did not lead to Mission Dolores. But the best one did: the terminus of a wooden-plank road that began in the city’s Downtown put you right at Mission Dolores’s front door. San Francisco is perhaps the most successful city ever built on the extraction industry, and men with money in their pockets were soon walking the wooden planks to the Mission District in search of places to spend it.

They found them.

Only fifteen years earlier, the Mexican government had “secularized” the state’s missions, seizing the lands from the padres and sparking one of the world’s great land grabs. Huge tracts were awarded to self-made Spanish colonial soldiers—a tale of hustlers on the make that would come to typify the future Golden State. Their names still adorn Bay Area neighborhoods and cities—Castro, Noe, Bernal, Vallejo. The Indians who lived long enough to potentially reclaim their land often ended up as serfs on the ranchos of newly minted feudal barons. At the end of the plank road, the first of so many moneyed newcomers to come here found the former Mission Dolores with its structures repurposed to include a saloon. Not far off, you could find gambling, dancing, and, of course, brothels.

The riches that flowed into San Francisco from the gold country transformed a remote port with a population that could squeeze into a few train cars into an imperial city and created generational wealth for those prescient enough to sink their gold back into the earth. “This is what always happens,” says historian Gray Brechin. “If you make your initial money in mining—or in tech—if you’re smart you invest in land.” Smart people did. Smart people do. Every land-owning San Francisco business is also in the real estate business.

Gold-rush-era San Francisco became the repository of fabulous riches, while the consequences were suffered by others elsewhere. Mercury, used to isolate gold from ore, continues to ooze into northern California waters, and the toxin can even be detected in the region’s ubiquitous fog. In 1917, a U.S. Geological Survey report estimated that hydraulic mining had washed 1.5 billion cubic yards of sediment into the Sacramento River system—some eight times the soil displaced to create the Panama Canal. Today we see much the same. Anthropic and OpenAI in June filed paperwork for IPOs that will make thousands of San Franciscans unfathomably wealthy. But no one would think to locate a data center here.

“Today I buried Viridiana, one of the last adults who witnessed the founding of the mission,” wrote Padre Ramon Abella in the Mission Dolores burial register on July 22. “Everyone who saw the arrival of the missionaries … have died; and those who have been born since that time, rare are those who live.”

In the same year that the bells San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin arrived at Mission Dolores, so did the Indian named Poylemja. It was not a voluntary move: The mission required an influx of 200 new Indians a year to offset its mortality rate, and Poylemja was seized by Spanish soldiers from his home in the Miwok village of Saklan, near the present-day city of Moraga, across San Francisco Bay.

The mission brought about San Francisco’s first disruption. It established a pattern that continues today, one in which people have descended upon San Francisco to single-mindedly pursue big dreams, big fortunes, or both and, often, achieved them—but not without unleashing strange and terrible consequences in the process.

As with social media’s promise to connect the world or AI’s lure of the bounty of superintelligence, the disruption came with ostensibly noble aims. The missionaries’ goal was to convert Indians into gente de razón, “people of reason.” Poylemja was baptized in 1794. He was renamed Faustino; he married an Ohlone woman named Jobocme, who had been rechristened Obdulia after her baptism in 1802. (The spellings of their names have been revised since Galvan made the redwood grave marker.)

The way the missionaries drew it up, they would put the Indians back in charge of their own lands as civilized Catholics—and do so within just a decade. That was the intention. It didn’t work out that way, and few Indians brought into the missions would even live that long: An analysis by the Ohlone scholar Jonathan Cordero reveals that the average span between an Indian’s entry on Mission Dolores’s baptismal record and their subsequent entry in its burial record was just four and a half years.

Poylemja and Jobocme lived here, worked here, and had children here—Liberato and Roverta. And they died here: Poylemja in 1804 at age forty and Jobocme in 1807 at age forty-one. They are buried here. Andrew Galvan visits them every working day.

On April 5, searching for a site for the mission, future colonial governor Juan Bautista de Anza found himself alongside a shallow lake, which sat on around five square blocks between present-day Fifteenth and Twentieth streets and Guerrero and Howard. It was fed by a creek running down Twin Peaks and flowing along present-day Eighteenth Street. If you were to take a crowbar to the sewer covers along Eighteenth, you could hear the creek even today.

History doesn’t record de Anza asking the Indians of the nearby village of Chutchui what they called the lake and creek. It was the Friday before Palm Sunday, which in his Catholic tradition was the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. So he christened the waters as such. Sorrows. Dolores.

That summer, members of the Yelamu people witnessed foreigners erecting a pair of settlements on their lands. Along the northern tip of the sandy, windswept San Francisco peninsula, Spaniards were breaking ground on what would become the Presidio, a military garrison that today is a national park, golf course, and repository of tall trees utterly alien to San Francisco’s natural landscape. In a sheltered valley several miles off, in went Mission Dolores.

It was late June when Father Francisco Palóu held the first mass, on the feasts of saints Peter and Paul, somewhere near the present-day mission. That mass, arguably, marked the beginning of San Francisco and, one might say, the history of the western United States. It was June 29, 1776.

Five days later and very far away, a group of white men adopted the Declaration of Independence.

The Old Mission and the basilica today.

After the children finally finish pulling the bell ropes of San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin, Andrew Galvan begins talking about the area’s original inhabitants. The bones of more than five thousand of them rest underfoot not twenty-five yards off. This is, rather literally, a settled subject.

It was at this point, however, that a fourth grader tells Galvan that he’d heard it was, actually, the Vikings who “discovered” the New World. Galvan offers a wan smile. He tells the boy that he eschews the word discovered. And, as an Indian, Galvan feels that we are living in the Old World. It’s Europe that’s the New World.

When the boy presses his case, Galvan, not unkindly but firmly, cuts him off: “Don’t disagree with me.”

On the way out, they pass the baptismal font where Galvan’s great-grandnephew was recently baptized. The water from Dolores Creek, eons ago, filled the baptismal font at Mission Dolores. It no longer does, and it’s not the same font: The present edition hails from 1995, old for a Toyota Celica but not for a church relic. No matter. Galvan’s connection runs deeper: “It takes me back to the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized.”

The baptismal font of Mission Dolores is the center of Andrew Galvan’s spiritual and temporal worlds. And from here you can see everything within the adobe of Old Mission Dolores. It offers a stunning view of the church’s reredos—the massive, baroque wooden altar that arrived here from Mexico in 1797. But, Galvan says, it’s not so much what you see here as what you don’t. Behind the reredos and hidden from the general public for centuries is a mural, painted by the mission’s original inhabitants. The work of Poylemja may be on that wall.

The San Francisco skyline from Dolores Park, a beloved public space named for the same waters as the mission, which sits two blocks away.

The waters and the font have changed, but Galvan’s great-grandnephew was recently baptized in the same place as Poylemja and Jobocme. The connection runs deep: He is their direct descendant. So is Andrew Galvan. Poylemja and Jobocme were his great-great-great-great-grandparents.

There is unease and rootlessness today among arrivistes and the most long-standing San Franciscans alike. There is always a gnawing fear that unseen hands will yank a bell rope and the shifts will change and you will be forced to move on. Galvan, however, has no such anxieties. His ancestors suffered through unimaginable sorrows to bequeath him his serenity.

“I belong to this place,” Galvan says. “It does not belong to me. But I belong to it.”

These days, sitting by the font, Galvan can’t help but think about the near-concurrent birthdays of Mission Dolores and the United States of America. “It’s always there,” he says. He is careful to use the term commemorate and not celebrate when he mentions the forthcoming anniversary—the bones of too many people who lived painful and truncated lives are buried here in unmarked graves. History is complicated. But 1776 was as clear an inflection point as any, and attention must be paid. “We acknowledge there was a moment in time when it was just Indians in San Francisco,” Galvan says. “And our world changed.”

So the revolving door began. Always someone else coming in—and someone else moving out. It’s not so much what you see as what you don’t.

Some things change. Some never will. The bells at Mission Dolores are the same. Little else is.

July 4th Food Deals

This July 4th marks America’s 250th birthday! And there are lots of $2.50 deals across the Mile High City. On July 4, Good Times offers a menu of sweet treats for $2.50 each, including frozen custard, fried ice cream and more. Through July 12, Sonic is serving its America $2.50 Menu with cheeseburgers, hot dogs, onion rings and more. Dairy Queen has its Stars & Stripes Misty Slush Float for $2.50 – through July 5. And, from July 3 to 5, Carl’s Jr. is cooking up a double cheeseburger for $2.50. Not to be left out, Krispy Kreme is giving any customer who comes into a store on the 4th wearing red, white and blue a totally free Original Glazed Doughnut. For more information and additional deals, check out milehighonthecheap.com/ free-cheap-things-4th-july-denver.

Colorado Renaissance Festival – Children’s Weekend / Military Appreciation Weekend

Hear ye! Hear ye! Merriment (on a budget) awaits. The 49th annual Colorado Renaissance Festival (650 W. Perry Park Ave.) in Larkspur is back for adventure and family fun on weekends this summer. There’s plenty for families to do and see, including entertainment, an Artisan’s Marketplace and themed weekends. And, on July 4 and 5, kids (12 and under) get in for free with the purchase of an adult ticket. It’s also Military Appreciation Weekend, with all active military and veterans getting a buy-one-get-one-free ticket. The offers are only available at the box office on-site. If you’re going without children for the holiday weekend, find discounted tickets at King Soopers. The festival runs on weekends through Aug. 2. coloradorenaissance.com

Colorado Black Arts Festival

It’s the 40th year for the Colorado Black Arts Festival at the West End of Denver’s City Park – from July 10 to 12. Multiple stages will showcase local and regional talent performing jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, dance and gospel. In addition, festival-goers will find a wide variety of artwork for sale, as well as food, games and services. The Watu Sakoni (People’s Marketplace) is the place for unique gifts, crafts, woodcarvings, clothing, jewelry, oils, incense, music and books. Plus, a Children’s Pavilion will offer the younger set lots of hands-on fun with various activities and games. And the Food Court serves up affordable fare from the American South, the African continent and the Caribbean. The festival is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday and 11 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is free. colbaf.org

Erie Hot Air Balloon Festival

Look up! It’s worth getting up early for the colorful hot air balloon launch that highlights the annual Erie Hot Air Balloon Festival — from July 10 to 12. The balloons take off at 6 a.m. each morning (weather permitting) in the open field across from Erie High School, on the northwest corner of County Road 5 and Colliers Pkwy. Arrival is recommended around 5:30 a.m. New for 2026, there will be a fleet of special-shape balloons floating in the sky, including characters, creatures and colossal creations. If you’re not an early bird, there is also a Night Glow on July 11 at 8 p.m. in the same field – an opportunity to see the balloons lit up after sunset. Attendees will also enjoy food trucks, music and more. If you’re feeling adventurous, tethered balloon rides will also be available for $20 per person. erieballoonfestival.com

Cow Appreciation Day

Admittedly, some people will do anything to score free food! And, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, Chick-fil-A is bringing back one of its most popular giveaways — Cow Appreciation Day. On July 14, “moo” into any Chick-fil-A dressed as a cow (Longhorn, Dairy, Hereford…your choice!) and enjoy a free breakfast, lunch or dinner entrée from a select menu – from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Even better, children (12 and under) get a free original or grilled nuggets (5-ct.) kids’ meal with a drink, side and premium. The giveaway is only valid for customers who are physically present in the restaurant. Claim the freebie via dine-in, carry-out or drive-thru. Limit one entrée per person. chick-fil-a.com

Lavender Festival

Lavender is in the air! Back in 2015, a Lavender Garden was planted at the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield Farms (8500 W. Deer Creek Canyon Rd.) in Littleton. Now that the more than 2,000 plants have come into bloom, the Denver Botanic Gardens is hosting a Lavender Festival on July 18 and 19 — from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days. The beautiful purple blooms create the perfect backdrop for a day devoted to “all-things lavender”. Admission includes guided garden tours, a scavenger hunt, entertainment by local Colorado bands, barrel train rides, lawn games, kids craft area and more. Also, a variety of food and drink vendors will be available for sale, as well as lavender products made by local growers and artisans. Entry also includes exploration of Chatfield Farms and the gardens. Admission is $17 for adults, $15 for seniors and $9 for children ages 3 to 15. Tickets must be purchased in advance for a specific entry time. No on-site ticket sales. botanicgardens.org/events/public-events/lavender-festival

Summerfest Arts + Music Festival

It’s a festival of arts, crafts, music and more in Evergreen at Summerfest Arts + Music Festival with more than 100 artists from across the country on hand at Buchanan Park (32003 Ellingwood Trail) on July 18 and 19. Enjoy live music and entertainment, kids’ craft activities and shopping the multitude of artists’ booths. Festival hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults at the gate, with children 10 and under getting in for free. No pets, please. Shuttle parking is free at Evergreen Middle School and U.S. Bank. Plus, the RTD and Castle Court lots are within easy walking distance to the park. evergreenarts.org/summerfest

Tennyson Street Fair

Block off the weekend for summer fun! The Tennyson Street Fair is a two-day affair, set for July 17 and 18. The fair runs from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday. The neighborhood block party extends multiple blocks on Tennyson from West 41st Ave. to West 43rd Ave. and brings local businesses out into the street for a festive atmosphere. Shop from more than 200 artisans and local shops at the fair’s marketplace, selling handcrafted jewelry, rugs, spices, art, candles, skincare and more. And enjoy eats and treats from more than 15 local food trucks and pop-ups. Plus, imbibe on Tennyson-brewed craft beers and libations – while listening to Denver’s Wax Trax spinning records all day, as well as live music. Kids enjoy a free bounce house. tennysonstreetfair.com

Arapahoe County Fair

It’s time for the 2026 Arapahoe County Fair, with four days of family fun from July 23 to 26. The fair takes place at the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds (25690 Quincy Ave.) in Aurora. Fairgoers will find their entertainment dollar goes a long way because gate admission includes unlimited carnival rides and all main stage performances, rodeos, 4-H livestock shows, public competitions, mutton bustin’ and more. (Only midway arcade games and food cost extra.) See critters of all types in the livestock pavilion. And be sure to check out the Comedy Wild West Show, BMX Showcase, silent disco, Globe of Death circus act, axe throwing, Top Hogs and much more. Plus, weather permitting, a drone show is planned for Friday and Saturday night at 9:30 p.m. Single-day general admission tickets are $30 for adults. Kids under 36 inches get in for free. arapahoecountyfair.com

Buffalo Wild Days

The annual Buffalo Bill Days festival brings rootin’ tootin’ Wild West fun to Golden – from July 24 to 26. The weekend includes western-style entertainment, Best of the West Parade, arts and crafts festival, children’s activities and live concerts by local bands filling Golden’s downtown streets. Admission is free. The festival officially opens at 5 p.m. on Friday in Parfet Park (710 Tenth St.) with a performance by Jeff Goodwin and Band, followed by Hillbilly Demons at 7 p.m. Red Rock Vixens headlines Saturday night at 7 p.m. The Long Run wraps things up on Sunday starting at 2 p.m. This year’s Best of the West Parade steps off on Saturday at 10 a.m. at 9th & Washington. The hour-long parade boasts more than 70 horses, plus collectible cars, floats, fire and emergency vehicles and several local performing groups. Park for free at the Jefferson County Human Services building, (900 Jefferson County Pkwy.) and hop on the complimentary shuttle right to the entrance of the event. goldenbuffalobilldays.com

Cheesman Park Arts Fest

New York — 

The eight-story, 150-unit Elara at the Market looks like just another sleek apartment building in Seattle’s trendy Belltown neighborhood.

Blocks from Pike Place Market, the Elara opened six years ago with a lush private courtyard, a gym and wine storage lockers. The building is full of Amazon workers who pay more than $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom to live near the company’s headquarters.

But this upscale building with a rooftop deck overlooking the Puget Sound recently transformed into something more likely to conjure images of high-rise public housing in the US or Soviet-style concrete housing blocks: government-owned housing for low-and middle-income renters.

Seattle believes the affordable housing model has left a void for middle-class households that earn too much to qualify for housing lotteries, but too little to pay for a market-rate apartment. The city’s solution is to create a social-housing model inspired by Vienna, where roughly half of residents across a wide range of incomes live in government-subsidized homes.

It’s not the traditional public housing the federal government built for low-income households during the 20th century. It’s also not affordable housing, privately-owned developments built with government subsidies and tax credits in exchange for below-market rents.

The Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD), the city’s newly established public development authority, purchased the Elara for $61 million this month from a private owner.

While many cities and states are trying to climb out of the housing crisis by cutting regulations and relaxing zoning laws to entice private developers, a growing movement on the left wants the public sector to build social housing. The acquisition is the first step in Seattle’s effort to buy more than 1,000 apartments and build 600 new units of social housing for mixed-income households over the next five years.

Roughly 15 of the Elara’s units are vacant. The social developer held a lottery to fill them for people making up to 50% of area median income — $65,000 for a two-person household. It also froze rents on existing market-rate tenants for two years. Nobody’s being evicted, but as apartments turn over, they will be filled with lower and middle-income renters.

Bilal Durrani, who works as a manager at Amazon and has lived in a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment at the Elara for a year, was surprised when he received a letter in the mail from his new landlord.

He wondered if public ownership would affect his rent or change who lives in the building.

He’s glad the building’s new owner froze his rent and eliminated storage fees. He’s happy to be a guinea pig in Seattle’s experiment — at least for now — and hopeful that social housing may help people struggling to afford the city.

“People always get freaked out when the government steps in, but I’m glad the city is doing something,” he said.

‘Wasted three years and $60 million’

Social housing has won strong political support on the left in Seattle in response to soaring housing costs. The average home value doubled from 2012 to 2022 to $945,000, while rents grew 75% to roughly $1,800 a month.

Voters in 2023 approved a ballot measure establishing a public developer to construct social housing for people earning up to 120% of area median income — roughly $138,000 for a single person.

Last year, voters approved a dedicated “social housing tax” to finance the effort, levied on businesses like Amazon and Microsoft who pay employees more than $1 million in salary annually. Revenue from the tax will fund the social developer’s acquisitions and development, and rents for higher-income tenants will subsidize lower-income neighbors.

But many development experts and business advocates in Seattle have criticized the social developer’s strategy. They say it’s ineffective, led by activists without experience developing housing, and siphons off resources that could go to building housing for people with lower incomes.

The tax generated $115 million this year, and critics believe that funding should go to building new homes or preserving existing affordable apartments for lower-income renters. Dozens of nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing providers in Seattle are reporting losses and have sold off their properties, risking that they become market-rate apartments.

“I think the Seattle Social Housing Developer should develop social housing,” said Jamie Madden, an affordable housing development consultant in Seattle and the author of “Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis.” “They have wasted three years and $60 million and delivered rent control for residents who are not low income and 15 new apartments.”

Seattle’s model represents a sharp break from how the federal government has funded affordable housing in America since the 1980s: the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which awards tax credits to private companies that construct housing for lower-income residents.

Social housing advocates believe this model is broken. LIHTC funding is limited every year, and projects financed with the credits have strict income eligibility limits. Tenants with incomes above 80% of area median income typically don’t qualify. Credits also typically expire after 15 or 30 years, at which point the building’s owner can start charging market rents.

Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent suburb of Washington DC, pioneered the social housing model Seattle and other US cities are trying to replicate.

Montgomery County has used a $100 million fund to finance construction of new mixed-income, mixed-use developments. These projects do not require LIHTC credits or other affordable housing subsidies. The first building, the Laureate, opened in 2023 with a courtyard pool, theater and a gym.

“We were very inspired by them,” said Tiffani McCoy, the interim director of the Seattle Social Housing Developer.

But Seattle’s social housing push has had growing pains since it was formed in 2023. The social developer’s board has turned over and it fired its first CEO in January, installing McCoy.

The social developer wanted to acquire a high-end building in a hot neighborhood to dispel the idea that people who make less money “should only have access too lower-quality housing,” McCoy said. It was also less risky than buying a struggling property behind on millions of dollars of repairs.

But ultimately, McCoy said it’s about thinking about housing as a public good like libraries and roads.

“We don’t want to rely on the private market, which is ultimately there to create a profit off renters,” said McCoy. “We need a model in this country, like other countries across the world, that creates housing as public infrastructure.”