A Neighborhood with a Quiet Story
The Rhodes neighborhood is one of those Arvada places that can be easy to overlook if you are moving quickly along busy streets. Tucked into the older residential fabric near Olde Town, the area is a compact collection of homes and streets whose history reaches back to Arvada’s early agricultural years. Its story is not one of grand civic buildings or sweeping redevelopment. Instead, Rhodes is a neighborhood shaped by land, family, transportation, and the steady growth of a small farming community into a modern Colorado city.
Today, the Rhodes area is generally associated with the historic Rhodes Subdivision, a small residential plat bounded approximately by Dover Street on the east, Allison Street on the west, and West 50th and 51st avenues to the north and south. The subdivision was laid out as eight large lots in 1891 by R. H. Rhodes, giving the neighborhood its enduring name. ([jeffco.us](https://www.jeffco.us/DocumentCenter/View/9488?utm_source=openai))
How Rhodes Got Its Name
The neighborhood’s name comes directly from R. H. Rhodes, who platted the land at a time when Arvada was still a young agricultural settlement. In the late nineteenth century, much of the area surrounding Arvada consisted of farms, orchards, irrigation ditches, and large homesteads. Residential development was beginning, but it had not yet taken the form of the closely packed subdivisions familiar today.
The original Rhodes Subdivision reflected that earlier landscape. Rather than creating dozens of narrow city lots, Rhodes divided the property into eight generous parcels. The large lots offered room for gardens, outbuildings, trees, and perhaps small-scale agricultural use. That pattern helps explain why the neighborhood still feels spacious and lightly settled compared with some later residential additions.
R. H. Rhodes was part of the broader generation of landowners and developers who recognized that Arvada’s future would be tied to both farming and transportation. The Colorado Central Railroad had reached the community in 1870, connecting Arvada with Denver and Golden. Later, an electric interurban railway further improved access to the metropolitan area. Those transportation links encouraged new residents to settle in Arvada while allowing farmers to ship produce to urban markets. ([maps.arvada.org](https://maps.arvada.org/Attachments/HistoricProperty/SurveyReport.pdf?utm_source=openai))
Arvada’s Agricultural Beginning
To understand Rhodes, it helps to picture Arvada before it became a suburban city. The community was formally named and platted in 1870, and its early economy depended heavily on agriculture. Irrigated fields produced grains, vegetables, and fruit, while local businesses supplied farmers and served travelers moving along the railroad corridor.
The Rhodes lots were created during this formative period. Even as houses appeared, the surrounding landscape remained rural. Residents would have known one another through churches, schools, farms, stores, and civic gatherings rather than through the neighborhood associations and planned amenities common today.
The streets around Rhodes also reflect Arvada’s gradual evolution. Dover, Allison, Carr, and nearby avenues developed over time as routes linking homes, farms, commercial buildings, and Olde Town. The area’s proximity to the historic town center meant residents were never far from the community’s principal businesses, post office, schools, railroad facilities, and public institutions.
Historic Homes and Architectural Character
The Rhodes neighborhood is notable less for a single landmark house than for the collection of modest homes that tell the story of everyday life in early Arvada. Historic surveys describe the subdivision as containing mainly vernacular dwellings, including hipped-roof box houses and several homes with Craftsman influences. Examples identified in the survey include properties at 5050 Carr Street, 8189 West 50th Avenue, and several addresses along Allison Street. ([jeffco.us](https://www.jeffco.us/DocumentCenter/View/9488?utm_source=openai))
These houses were practical rather than flashy. Many were built for working families, farmers, tradespeople, and small-business owners. Their simple forms, front porches, broad lots, and mature landscaping are part of what gives the neighborhood its character. A walk through the area reveals the gradual layering of architectural styles: older vernacular houses stand beside early twentieth-century improvements and later alterations made as families adapted their homes to changing needs.
That mixture is important. Historic neighborhoods do not remain frozen in one year. Windows are replaced, porches are enclosed, additions are built, and kitchens are modernized. In Rhodes, those changes show how houses remained useful across generations rather than becoming museum pieces.
Connections to Olde Town Arvada
Rhodes sits within the larger historic landscape surrounding Olde Town Arvada. The city’s historic center is bounded roughly by Ralston Road, Grandview Avenue, Yukon Street, and the Olde Wadsworth corridor. It includes commercial buildings, civic spaces, transportation landmarks, and residential districts that developed alongside one another. Olde Town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of Arvada’s strongest links to its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century past. ([arvadaco.gov](https://www.arvadaco.gov/566/Olde-Town-Arvada?utm_source=openai))
For Rhodes residents, Olde Town has traditionally been the neighborhood’s front porch. Historic streets lead toward shops, restaurants, community events, and public services. The McIlvoy House, now associated with the Arvada Historical Society, helps preserve local stories, while the Olde Town water tower and historic commercial blocks provide familiar visual reminders of Arvada’s railroad-era growth. The Arvada Library near 57th Avenue and Webster Street also occupies a meaningful civic location; the site was once home to Colorado’s first King Soopers store, opened in 1947. ([5280.com](https://5280.com/5280-neighborhood-guide-olde-town-arvada/?utm_source=openai))
Nearby Ralston Road carries another layer of history. The road follows a route through the heart of Arvada and commemorates the community’s founding stories, including the area’s early gold discovery and the well-known legend of the hackberry tree. ([arvadaco.gov](https://www.arvadaco.gov/646/Ralston-Road/ralston-road-project?utm_source=openai))
Change Through the Twentieth Century
During the first half of the twentieth century, Rhodes changed gradually. The original large lots were increasingly used for homes rather than farming, although gardens, sheds, and informal agricultural traditions remained common. As automobiles became more important, streets and roads connected residents more directly to Denver, Wheat Ridge, and other parts of Jefferson County.
After World War II, Arvada entered a period of rapid suburban growth. Farmland was converted into subdivisions, new schools and shopping centers appeared, and the city’s population expanded dramatically. By 1960, Arvada covered more than five square miles and had nearly 20,000 residents. The community was shifting from a farming center into a metropolitan suburb. ([maps.arvada.org](https://maps.arvada.org/Attachments/HistoricProperty/SurveyReport.pdf?utm_source=openai))
Rhodes did not disappear during this transition. Instead, its older homes became part of the established residential fabric that gave central Arvada a sense of continuity. While newer neighborhoods spread west and north, Rhodes retained the scale of an earlier era: smaller houses, mature trees, close access to Olde Town, and streets that still reveal the shape of the original subdivision.
Why Rhodes Still Matters
The special quality of Rhodes lies in its modesty. It does not announce its history with monumental architecture. Its heritage is found in the spacing of the lots, the age of the trees, the surviving houses, and the relationship between residential streets and Olde Town’s civic and commercial center.
A longtime resident might notice these details while walking along Allison Street or crossing West 50th Avenue: a porch that has welcomed several generations, a century-old house set farther back than its modern neighbors, or an old street alignment that hints at the former edge of a farm. These quiet reminders connect present-day Arvada to the people who cultivated the land, built the first homes, and helped establish the community.
Rhodes is special because it preserves an everyday version of Arvada’s history. It shows how a farming settlement became a town, how a town became a suburb, and how older neighborhoods can continue adapting without losing their sense of place.