37 Years Ago
The May 3, 1988 Golden Transcript quoted Nils Christiansen as saying this his building at 1113 Washington Avenue might or might not be replaced. The building, which had been built in the 1860s, had been gutted by a fire on March 23rd. It was being remodeled at that time to serve as a Mexican restaurant. Mr. Christiansen planned to leave it boarded up until he decided what to do with it.
Nils Christiansen was one of Golden’s more accomplished and colorful residents. He was born and raised in the Philippines, where his father was serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. This enabled young Nils to claim dual citizenship–both Filipino and American. His father died when Nils was only two, and his mother was eventually remarried to an American missionary from Colorado. Both Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur were family friends.
Nils attended a technical school and began working at an early age, with jobs including jockey, machinist, radio operator, industrial arts teacher, and florist shop manager. While still in school, at age 15, he encountered a bully who threatened to drown him. Nils didn’t know how to swim, so he resolved to learn. A year later, he beat the bully in a swim competition. After that, he continued competitive swimming.
At age 22 he decided to visit Colorado and try to get a scholarship to attend the School of Mines. He found that scholarship money was unavailable, so he got a job with the Public Works Administration. With that salary, he rented a house and took in roommates, cooking and cleaning for them. Before long he was able to buy the house and enroll part-time.
In 1936 he returned to the Philippines to join their Olympic swim team. With them, he traveled to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics and made it to the semi-finals. While there, he encountered Adolph Hitler. Nils took a photograph of Hitler. One of Hitler’s guards grabbed the camera and tossed it in the pool. The next day, the camera was returned without the film but with a note that said “Compliments of the Füehrer.”
After his Berlin experience, he returned to Golden and enrolled full-time at Mines. While attending school, he worked part time as a swim instructor at the Golden Plunge pool (now located under the Buffalo Rose Events Center).
Nils graduated from Mines in 2-1/2 years with degrees in both mining and metallurgy. He then worked for DuPont and Remington Arms. During World War II, he worked in Oakridge on the atomic bomb project. He retired at age 44 and devoted himself to property management and inventing.
He owned a wide variety of properties in Golden, including commercial buildings downtown, the old North School, and several rental homes. He owned an entire block at the southwest corner of 19th and Illinois. He and his wife raised five children there. He continued to train in his backyard pool and kept a large junkyard/inventing lab on the property.
While still an undergraduate at Mines, he began working on adobe. When the 1970s energy crisis came along, he returned to adobe technology. He designed machinery to produce adobe bricks and developed different soil-sand ratios to make bricks for a variety of applications. In 1975 he made 10,000 adobe blocks for the National Park Service to use in the restoration of Bent’s Fort.
In 1977, he built an adobe home on his property at 19th and Illinois. It was designed to be highly energy efficient, heated largely by solar collectors. The home was of great interest to the staff at the Solar Energy Research Institute (later rebranded as NREL) and in its first year it was toured by more than 2000 people. In 1978, he built a second adobe house on the property.
In 1985, he proposed building four mixed use buildings for low income residents with commercial offices along 19th and apartments behind them. They would be constructed of an adobe-like substance. Nearby residents objected, saying they wanted the neighborhood to keep its residential aspect. The City rejected his plan. Christiansen sued the City, but lost.
Returning to our original subject–the building at 1113 Washington that burned in March of 1988–Nils Christiansen never had to decide whether to rebuild on that spot, because he died in July of that year at age 75.
The School of Mines acquired the Christiansen property and both his residence and the adobe homes he built have been demolished.
The Christiansen home and adobe rental homes are gone now. The School of Mines is building a new residence hall where they once stood.
