A fun discovery for Colorado Springs history nerds

On Sunday, Pat and I went downtown to grab a cup of coffee. We parked our car on Bijou Street between Tejon and Nevada, in front of the old Colburn Motor Tours building. It's now almost completely renovated, but the original sign was revealed at the beginning of the process, which you can read about in THIS blog post from January of last year. Anyway, something about the sign caught my eye, so I approached to see it a little better, and what I saw made me really excited: it was signed by E.W. Arveson! What's the big deal, you ask? I'll tell you what! If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may remember a few posts I've made about Rose Arveson, the so-called Miracle Rose Lady, most recently in THIS post from last March. Rose's husband, Edward Wallace Arveson, was a sign painter in Colorado Springs for many decades, starting around the 1920s. He was obviously the one who painted this sign! A few months ago, the Gazette's Bill Vogrin found another sign downtown by Mr. Arveson and wrote about it on his popular blog, Side Streets. If you compare the sign in Bill's photo to the Colburn sign, clearly it was created by the same artist. They're even the same shade of yellow with bold black lettering. Although it was a little creepy seeing his signature (basically I think everything about the Arveson family is creepy), I think it's pretty cool that I found another one of Edward's "masterpieces", right under our noses!