The unbearable lightness of compost

When I meet Abner Sprague in the afterlife (I fear we'll both be kind of sweaty), my first question to him will be "What the hell were you thinking of with Block 10?"

This is an inside joke, and it's a shame I will have to spend so much of the next few entries bringing Estes Park residents up to speed on it, because if anyone created the perfect ambiguity (or the perfect torture, depending on how you handle cognitive dissonance), Abner did when he platted Estes Park in 1905, and introduced Block 10 to the north of downtown.

The image above is how Carl Piltz, master stonemason, solved the ambiguity Abner created at the juncture of Block 10 and Block 8.  Block 10 had lots and lots (pun intended) of problems, but how it interacted with downtown Block 8 (facing Cleave Avenue) and with Block 3 (facing West Elkhorn) were two of the most obvious.  The question for Block 8 at the time was, as it is today, "Abner, is this four-sided polygon marked "26" on your plat (and more importantly, in your mind) part of Block 8, or part of Block 10?"

[And again, on background, since this won't be an immediate concern of yours if you haven't studied the original plat, Abner somehow, either coincidentally or on purpose, crafted it so that you could answer this question either way and still potentially be considered "correct".]

What is so elegant about Carl's solution is that he essentially "unasked" the question.  He simply connected and "effaced" the problem of how Block 8 and Block 10 were supposed to behave at this weld seam, and where Lot 26 (because it is a lot, not a block) belonged.  Lot 26 was erased in the new Piltz subdivision.  Lucky for us, Carl owned property on both sides of the juncture, so he was able to vanquish the problem for future generations by erasing it, whether or not he knew at the time Lot 26 had the potential of becoming a many-headed hydra.

On the plat pictured, filed for record in October 1921, the technical language refers to Lot 26 as part of Block 8, which I would come down on the other side of, preferring it be considered part of Block 10, but at least the wording doesn't refer to it as "Block 26" (more on that later).

[If you are having trouble distinguishing between blocks and lots, just think of books and pages.  Books are made up of pages, and no one would point to a single page torn out of a book and say "Oh, look at that book on the floor, somebody lost their book."  In order to have a physical book, at least what most rational people would consider a book, it needs to be constructed a certain way and it needs to contain at least one and preferably more than one page.  I realize there are a range of sizes of books and appearances of books and types of books and now there are e-books and the definition of "book" can obviously change over time.  But if we are going to have a discussion about books, you have to admit that pages and books are not the same thing, that one is a critical component of the other.

Similarly, on a plat subdivided into blocks, each block is comprised of lots.  Blocks and lots are not the same thing.  Here's the crucial point:  Abner's plat of downtown Estes Park consisted of 10 blocks, numbered 1 to 10.  Not 28 blocks.  His blocks are all easy to identify, because he printed the numbers for them in larger, darker script on the plat, plus they seem to "make sense", because the blocks are self-contained and circumscribed by natural or man-made features like rivers or roads or property lines.]

This distinction between ten blocks and twenty-eight blocks is important, because, if you want to claim (as some do currently) that "Block 28" exists downtown, you need to show me where Abner's 1905 plat (filed for record in 1906, or the two subsequent amended plats, filed for record later in 1906 and in 1908, respectively) gave you this idea.  Here is Block 1 (pointing).  Here is Block 2 (you have to imagine we are both looking at the plat and one of us is pointing, and the other agreeing).  Here is Block 3, etc., etc.  Here is Block 10.  Where is Block 11, Block 12, Block 13, Block 14, etc., etc., and why are we (and why are you contending Abner) disregarded a well-established pattern and jumped all the way from Block 10 (seemingly the last block on the plat) to Block 28?

(to be continued)