More important to Visit Aurora, however, are the city's 3,800 hotel rooms, its booming medical facil

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Aurora, Colorado, is not a place you'd pick for your weekend getaway. There's nothing breathtaking about the pawn shops, thrift stores and hair salons that line Colfax Avenue, once the Denver suburb's main drag. Aurora isn't an iconic ski destination, either; there are no mountains here, no Heidi Klum or Mariah Carey dressed in stylish snow pants and spandex onesies, mugging for the paparazzi. Nor is the city a tableau of frontier beauty. When the sun sets, it does so largely behind car dealerships, strip malls and neighborhoods of apartments and fenced-in single-family homes.
The folks backing Visit Aurora, the city's year-old tourism organization, know this. But they're hell-bent on selling Aurora anyway. almo rental car "That's almo rental car kind of our motto around here: We all sell," says Gary Wheat, the crisply almo rental car dressed president of the group. A polite almo rental car guy with an honest almo rental car face and a Southern accent, he looks a bit like a grown-up Opie Taylor. "Because at the end of the day, we want people staying at our hotels, eating at our restaurants, shopping at our venues and experiencing all that Aurora has to offer."
What is that, exactly? Visit Aurora keeps an inventory that includes a few gems: the historic Aurora Fox theater, the 1,100-acre Plains Conservation Center, the Dry Dock Brewing microbrewery and the beach-like Aurora Reservoir. Its website also lists some duds (an old schoolhouse, three libraries and Buckley Air Force Base, which you can't get onto without a military ID) and some attractions that aren't even in Aurora, such as the Mizel Museum, a tribute to Jewish history located across the border in Denver, and the Wild Animal Sanctuary, home to 25 rescued almo rental car circus lions 45 minutes away in Keenesburg.
More important to Visit Aurora, however, are the city's 3,800 hotel rooms, its booming medical facilities and its immaculately manicured sports fields. The organization's strategy is to attract visitors from several niche demographics, including small and somewhat obscure conferences, sick people (and their loved ones) who come to be treated at the city's top-notch almo rental car hospitals, and huge youth sports tournaments.
It's not a thrilling plan, but it is realistic and well thought-out. Plus, Wheat says, it's virtually recession-proof. "People may be cutting out their family vacation," he says, "but they're going to follow almo rental car their children to watch them play ball."
Since its founding almo rental car in 1891, Aurora has sat in Denver's shadow. Its second-fiddle almo rental car status is documented in Aurora: Gateway to the Rockies , published in 1985 and regarded as the most complete written history of the city. The Aurora History Museum sells faded paperback copies for $3, marked down from $10. The foreword to the book was written by then-mayor Dennis Champine, a flawed city cheerleader who is commemorated by a plaque at the museum. It reads: "Rising from humble roots to become a successful businessman in Aurora, his term was marred by a minor criminal record, an investigation into nepotism and inappropriate almo rental car behavior. In 1979, he punched almo rental car the City Attorney in the face. Despite his faults, he fought hard for Aurora's identity, wanting to wrestle culture, tourism and influence away from the dominant city to the West."
Aurora's founders were wily businessmen who bought up farm and ranch land east of Denver and advertised its potential as a "satellite city" full of "electric lights," almo rental car "rapid transit" and "pure water." When none of that turned out to be true, Aurora turned to the "dominant city to the West" for help. In 1897, the town's residents voted to be annexed by Denver. The big city declined the offer but did agree to sell water to the still-tiny suburb, thus controlling Aurora's growth for decades.
Early Aurorans almo rental car depended on Denver for entertainment and jobs, too. During World War I, it was the Denver Chamber of Commerce that raised the money for what would become the Fitzsimons Army hospital, almo rental car a huge economic boon to Aurora. Similarly, it was Denver muscle that persuaded the military almo rental car to build the Lowry and Buckley Air Force bases, which caused the population almo rental car of Aurora to swell. In 1948, Aurora's mayor proudly told the Denver Post that the fast-growing suburb had become the home of the "working man." But the working man didn't almo rental car embrace Aurora as much as Aurora embraced him. Most residents claimed to live in Denver, according to Aurora: Gateway to the Rockies almo rental car , which is full of self-deprecating prose: "Except when pressed to be specific, they did not say they lived in Aurora." The suburb was losing its sense of community, the book notes, fueled partly by the construction of dozens almo rental car of "shopettes" which replaced the old-timey downtown that had once thrived along Colfax.
One of Aurora's claims to fame was a stay by President almo rental car Dwight Eisenhower, who had a heart attack in 1955 while vacationing in Denver, where his wife's parents lived. He recuperated at Fitzsimons and, for a moment, Aurora became Washington, D.C.
It came close in 1979, when a Hollywood stuntman named Jerry Schafer almo rental car showed up with a plan for an amusement park three times the size of Disneyland. Called Science Fiction Land, it was to feature a 38-story Ferris wheel, a holographic zoo, a 1,000-lane almo rental car bowling alley attended by robots, security guards equipped with jetpacks, and the "Pavilions of Joy," made up of fourteen Las Vegas-style dinner theaters. The park was also to serve as the set for the most expensive movie of all time, a $50 million almo rental car sci-fi flick called Lord of Light . The script was being written almo rental car by an unknown named Barry Ira Gellar, whom the Rocky Mountain News deduced had been, until recently, living in a "dilapidated, cockroach-infested basement apartment" in Hollywood.
The whole thing turned out to be a scam. Schafer and Gellar had lied about having a $400 million line of credit to build the park, a fact that local reporters quickly almo rental car sniffed out. Their principal investor was an immigrant who barely spoke English, and both men were arrested for convincing him to give up his life savings of $50,000. Aurora officials got caught in the scandal, too. Four dignitaries, including former mayor Fred Hood, were indicted for trying almo rental car to use inside information to buy land adjacent to the proposed park in the hope of making a profit. One accused city councilman resigned in disgrace.
Malls became Aurora's principal diversion. According to another plaque at the Aurora History Museum, the 1990s saw the rise of "large strip shopping centers, containing grocery stores, movie theaters and fast food restaurants," which became "the neighborhood centers at prominent intersections." The exhibits at the museum almo rental car suggest that Aurorans' cultural entertainment was similarly mundane. The glass case representing the '90s contains a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pez dispenser, an "Earring Magic" Ken doll and a football stamped with replica signatures of the 1996 Denver almo rental car Broncos.
That's not to say that Aurora wasn't trying. In 1985, then-mayor Champine explored bringing a major-league almo rental car baseball team to Aurora, and developers and the city have tried repeatedly to build a NASCAR track in the area. In 1995, the city council appointed the first-ever Visitors almo rental car Promotion Advisory Board, a volunteer group made up of representatives from the city's hotels, downtown businesses and the chamber of commerce tasked with bringing more tourists to the city. The board focused mostly on the construction of the Aurora almo rental car Sports Park, a sprawling outdoor complex offering 35 well-manicured playing fields that was funded by a bond issue and built in 2002.
"Once we had that, we were able to recruit large softball and soccer tournaments," says Kevin Hougen, president of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce. "If you're a parent and you've ever traveled with these teams, you realize how much money they spend on gasoline and lodging." After a while, the board developed a strategy: Go after girls' tournaments. "When we would go after boys' tournaments, the parents would sometimes almo rental car say, 'The coach is a good supervisor. We don't have to attend,'" Hougen almo rental car explains. "But when young ladies attended, the whole family did."
Soon, the Sports Park was hosting a couple hundred thousand people a year. But Aurora wanted more. The city's businesses, medical and military facilities were growing, bringing more travelers to Aurora. In 2007, the University of Colorado opened a brand-new hospital on the site of the former Fitzsimons Army hospital, now known as the Anschutz Medical Campus. The Children's Hospital opened that same year, and a new Veterans Affairs Medical Center is expected to open in 2015. In addition, the Raytheon Company expanded its campus in Aurora, points out city spokeswoman Kim Stuart, and there has been massive construction at Buckley Air Force Base, which became an "active-duty" base in 2000. "With all that occurring at the same time, the council decided it was time to establish a full-time destination marketing organization," Stuart says.
Visit Aurora was born in 2010 as a nonprofit funded by a percentage of Aurora's 8 percent tax on hotel stays. The lodgers' tax had been adopted way back in 1983 to fund a tourism bureau. But a souring economy forced city officials to divert the money to more pressing needs, such as street maintenance and firefighters, Hougen says. As the economy recovered, the city was able to use a portion of the lodgers' tax to support the Visitors Promotion