Arvada

Arvada is Colorado’s seventh-largest city, with about 122,000 residents across 39 square miles northwest of Denver. It grew from an 1870 townsite along the railroad, and the state’s earliest documented gold discovery — Lewis Ralston’s find in Ralston Creek in June 1850 — is commemorated at Gold Strike Park.

Olde Town

Olde Town Arvada, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the walkable heart of the city, with restaurants, breweries and shops in the original commercial blocks. The Olde Town Arvada station on RTD’s G Line commuter rail opened in April 2019 and is the busiest stop on the line outside Union Station, with roughly 1,300 boardings a day.

Arts and recreation

The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, dedicated in 1976, houses three theatres, about 10,000 square feet of galleries, an outdoor amphitheater and the Arvada History Museum. The Apex Park & Recreation District, founded in 1956, runs recreation centers, pools and fields across the Jefferson County side of the city. Standley Lake, a 1,200-acre reservoir completed in 1912, anchors a 3,000-acre regional park on the city’s northeast edge.

West Arvada

Leyden Rock covers about 1,500 acres with roughly 1,800 homes, 60 percent open space, 17 miles of trails and a recreation center. Candelas, also about 1,500 acres and platted in 2011, is the city’s largest master-planned community, with six villages of single-family homes, townhomes and apartments; its northern boundary borders Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

Homes and housing character

• Central Arvada (80002–80004): postwar subdivisions such as Alta Vista and Allendale with 1950s–70s brick ranches and split-levels — a housing stock Historic Denver has documented in its own pattern book.
• West Arvada (80005, 80007): 1990s through 2020s subdivisions culminating in Leyden Rock, Candelas and Trailstone.
• Townhomes and condominiums cluster around Olde Town and the G Line stations.