On a grassy hill overlooking Pikes Peak, free from sprawling strip malls, pavement and city bustle, exists a remnant of Colorado Springs history many might not know about.

A winding road, snaking a mile east of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Mountain Lion Fieldhouse, brings you to the 34-acre UCCS Heller Center for Arts & Humanities.

Several structures peek out from behind the lush greenery and wild prairie, including a pretty, pristine white adobe ranch house and, further back, a guest house and solarium, both built in the Pueblo Revival architectural style, a popular style out of Santa Fe , N.M., that took hold of the Southwest from 1910 to 1940.

This was once home to the prominent mid-20th-century couple Larry and Dorothy Heller — he an acclaimed artist and she one of the first women to work for the Colorado Springs Police Department. It’s where they once stored his-and-hers racing MG TD motorcars and threw parties for the upper crust of Springs society.

Today, the Heller Center continues the couple’s legacy in the arts and social sciences through almost year-round activities and events, including salons, artist residencies, visiting authors, Heller fellows, exhibits, classes and outdoor movie screenings in the summer. Events are free and open to the public. Go online to heller.uccs.edu.

It’s one of only seven humanities centers in the Mountain West region, and the only one south of Denver. And its mission is also the most broadly defined, says Heller Center director Kimbra Smith.

“Having a place where we can bring together artists and scholars and the community in ways that enrich everybody’s lives is the goal,” said Smith, a UCCS anthropology professor. “We would like to grow it into something that can help people become not just engaged with one another but to understand that humanistic questions are actually fun things to explore and enrich all of our lives.”

Who were the Hellers?

Larry was a prominent painter, sculptor and ceramicist who studied under famous illustrator Boardman Robinson at the epochal Broadmoor Art Academy, now the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.

After serving in WWII from 1943-1945, where he created propaganda art posters as a military artist for the U.S. Army Air Corps in Texas, he returned to the Springs, and worked at the renowned Alexander Film Co. as a set designer, actor and director.

Twenty pieces of Larry’s work dot the walls of the main building, including some WWII posters, as well as a self-portrait of him in his 30s and a portrait of Dorothy, titled “Dot as the Queen of Hearts,” painted for her around the time she turned 50. The two paintings face each other on opposite ends of the building.

The university’s collection of Larry’s work features more than 50 paintings, 400-500 works on paper, 50 or so ceramic pieces and 60 sculptures, one of which is Pancho, a large rendering of Larry’s horse that greets visitors.

“He had a romanticized view of the West with a cinematic flair,” said Heller Center assistant director and curator Rhonda Goodman-Gaghan. “A lot of his work looks like set designs. He liked to tell a story through his work, and sometimes you don’t know what the story is, but you can tell he loved living in Colorado.”

Dorothy was also no slouch. She took a job with CSPD in 1914 as the city’s fifth social investigator, taking on cases of domestic and child abuse and juvenile delinquency. Though she was essentially an officer, she was never allowed to take the oath of an officer, and retired a year before the city began allowing women to become members of the police force in 1966.

“By all accounts, they were a happy couple,” Goodman-Gaghan said. “He was the fun-loving jokester, and when anybody wanted to know if he was serious or not, they called Dorothy.”

Heller history

Larry’s family moved from the East Coast to the Pikes Peak region in the early to mid-1910s, possibly fleeing the Spanish flu, Goodman-Gaghan says. He graduated from Colorado Springs High School, now Palmer High School, and Williams College in Massachusetts in 1927.

As a young man, he tried his luck living in Paris and New York City, but it was the beginning of the Great Depression and work was meager, so he returned to the Springs.

A 25-year-old Dorothy moved by herself from Indiana to the Springs in 1930 to work with the local YWCA’s teenage girls club. Four years later, she took the job with the CSPD, making $100 a month, a good wage in those days.

Before the two met, Larry and his friend, the watercolorist Laurence Field, who also studied under Robinson at the BAA, bought the Heller property together as a way to be in nature and away from the hubbub of the BAA scene in the middle of the city.

In 1934, the two men designed, built and lived in the greenhouse and the house behind it, which is now the solarium and guest house. Eventually, they built the main house with a studio and garage, though the university razed the studio and garage in 2009 when it refit the buildings.

“He built it here because it had a view of Eagle Rock that was up there and a view of Pikes Peak,” Goodman-Gaghan said. “Apparently, if you stand in a certain direction, the rocks look like the form of an eagle.”

“Or if you go up on top of it and look down, it kind of looks like spread wings,” Smith said.

Another small gallery was built to the east of the main home in the early 1980s, shortly before Larry died in 1983. It’s now used for art exhibits and other events.

The Hellers met in 1934, perhaps at a dance, Goodman-Gaghan speculates, and married in 1936. By 1940, Field had sold off his share of the property to Larry, leaving the couple to entertain their contemporaries at memorable parties and share their passions, which included riding horses, playing golf and racing cars, a popular activity among the upper crust from about the 1940s to the ’50s until it was outlawed.

Larry’s car, a 1950 MG TD, was donated to the university in 2017, though isn’t stored at the Heller Center. Nobody knows what happened to Dorothy’s MG TD.

“All these counties in Colorado had their own races, and we’ve done a few exhibits of all the medals and trophies they won,” Goodman-Gaghan said. “She raced in the women’s division, and he raced in the men’s division.”

Later years

Tucked into the bluffs and crisscrossed with public hiking trails, you can almost pretend the city doesn’t exist back in this secluded nature preserve.

That’s thanks to Dorothy, who, in the decade before she died in 1999, donated the property to the University of Colorado Board of Regents, which made it state property and untouchable by the city, which wanted to declare eminent domain to build a road from Nevada Avenue to Austin Bluffs Parkway. But Dorothy and a neighbor, who also donated her land near Nevada Avenue to the Regents, prevailed.

According to Dorothy’s bequest, the university isn’t allowed to develop more than 25% of the square footage than was there when she died, which leaves most of the acreage intact.

“Dorothy wanted her home to be somewhat of a lab, as the sciences have labs, for the arts and humanities,” Goodman-Gaghan said. “And we toss in social sciences because that was so much a bedrock of her work.”