Written by Miles Hubble, as part of the Roaring Fork Research Fellowship for the Aspen Historical Society in 2025, the paper provides insights into the history of Aspen’s economy in the 1980s.

Introduction:

It was 1981, and Stanley Natal was livid. Natal, a self-identified “collective farmer” born in 1918, had lived to see the Pitkin County in which he had lived his entire life become nigh unrecognizable. In a letter to the editor of the Aspen Times, written in his trademark clipped style – it is difficult to discern whether this was a result of character limits, idiosyncrasy, illiteracy, or some combination thereof – Natal complained of “deflated prices,” unmaintained rural roads, unfair zoning laws, and, most of all, “governmental intervention.” Pitkin County, dominated economically and politically by the regional capital of Aspen, was, to the assessment of Natal and others like him, being overrun by settler-tourists who had flocked there in the 1970s. The “local natives” of Pitkin were “going-going gone.” If too many of them left, Natal insisted, it would mean “world famine.”
Natal’s concerns, which he would express in regular columns until his suicide in 1998, represented more than his own views or those of his immediate community. They gestured beyond the Pitkin County limits to a nation and a world in flux, to a world in which family farms, mountain villages, and conferences on world order coexisted with an uncanny snugness. In invoking “world famine,” Natal linked Aspen’s plight to the precarity of the human race as a whole. What was coming for the county in which Natal had lived his entire life was also coming for the world. By the close of the 1980s, Aspen would be transformed into a truly global village.
Writing in 1964, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” to describe how the world’s civilization was becoming inextricably linked across national and cultural boundaries. “Our speedup today,” he wrote, “is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion between space and functions.”2 What intrigued McLuhan was the extent to which, as the Earth shrank in the face of ever-rapidly advancing media technology, margins and centers came to merge as the planet itself began to resemble and function like a single village. But there is a complementary reading of his insight that is more pertinent to Aspen. In the 1980s, Aspen’s cultural footprint began to expand beyond its cozy borders to encompass the movers and shakers of American and global taste, finance, real estate, sport, and media. This was an explosion of the margin into the center, presaging a newly networked society with Aspen often at the forefront of many innovations and national trends. In this way, we can characterize ‘80s Aspen as a village gone global, the inversion of McLuhan’s’ globe shrunk down to village level’.
In what follows, I will describe how Aspen, over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, came to inhabit the role of a global village with all its concomitant promises and contradictions. Surveying real estate and architecture, economic shifts brought about by the Reagan administration, the withering away of ranching, the blossoming of the queer and drug cultures, and environmental and technological change, I will demonstrate how Aspen – as village, as idea – weathered the turbulence of momentous historical change as it sought to balance tradition and innovation, small-town values with global aspirations. Corollary to this, I will attempt to disentangle the multiple “Aspens” at work in any narrative of Aspen’s rise and decline. Such effort is necessary for any coherent understanding of Aspen as a locale of multiplicities and contradictions. I will close with suggestions for further research on areas not covered by this study.