The town of New Castle won the Best Place in the small community category in the 2026 Colorado Downtown Excellence Awards on April 2 after being nominated by the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado (AGNC) for its downtown improvements.

“The category was projects that transformed how people experience downtown,” said Town Administrator Dave Reynolds. “AGNC nominated New Castle because of the downtown projects we’ve worked on in the past several years, particularly our improved parks.”

New Castle’s Main Street Revitalization includes adding concrete gaming tables for ping pong, cornhole, and other street games in a pocket park, Burning Mountain Park on Main Street, and an ice skating rink that, while unfortunately wasn’t used much this past winter, has been a major success, Reynolds said.  

“The rink has been a huge hit, because it brought people to ice skate and play hockey, which then brings people to restaurants here,” Reynolds said. “We’ve been supporting our businesses better and we’ve seen good feedback from the community.”

The town has also purchased an older home on Main Street and revitalized it. Reynolds said it will be a beautiful park on Main Street in the spring. 

“We also have new restaurants on Main Street,” said Rochelle Firth, Administrative Assistant and Public Information Officer. “The Duck Blind was recently approved for outdoor seating, and we have a food truck court with two food trucks so far, one of them is the cutest horse trailer with the best pizza.”

Firth said there are currently eight food choices on Main Street to pick from, including Black Bear Bar and Grill, Lakota Lookout, and The Lazy Bear Restaurant.

“Without a doubt, if you come down on Friday or Saturday, it’s hard to find a place to park,” she said. “We want to help our businesses in any way we can.”

New Castle received a plaque for the award that was partially made by a stained glass artist in Grand Junction. 

“It’s beautiful and we’d like to thank AGNC for their financial support and nomination, the parks and public works crews for building all these projects, and our local businesses for supporting the projects and all they do to make the downtown more vibrant,” Firth said. “Because the plaque could go so many places, we’re not sure where to put it yet.”

One of the obstacles New Castle has to work around is that Main Street is also Colorado Highway 6, which is owned by the Colorado Department of Transportation. 

“We can’t do certain things to the road because it’s not ours, like stringing banners and lights across the road, or construction on it, and that mile or so in between the roundabout and downtown is mostly a private residential area ” Firth said. “But we can work on the things around the road, so we have improvements planned for our sidewalks and signage at the roundabout to draw more people downtown, to connect our outer areas to the downtown.”

Firth said it would be nice if they could put more decorations up, but it is not necessary. 

“This is our Historic Downtown District, and it’s on Route Six,” Firth said. “We don’t want to change that.”