House Cleaning & Deep Cleaning in Bessemer, Pueblo, CO

Bessemer is the south-central side of Pueblo, and it holds the oldest housing stock in this market: about 25,800 people in 12,549 housing units across ZIP 81004, at 47.4 percent Hispanic and household incomes below the county median. It is also not an invented district. Bessemer was an incorporated town in its own right -- established in 1886, named for the Bessemer steel process, and annexed into Pueblo in 1894 after eight years as a municipality. Mesa Junction, immediately north of it, was the separate town of South Pueblo, incorporated in 1873 and consolidated in 1886. Locals still use both names, and city and county documents still use Minnequa as Bessemer's alias, which is why Bessemer Park is now Minnequa Park.

This is the steel neighborhood. The Colorado Fuel and Iron works on the south side was for nearly a century the largest employer in the state of Colorado and still runs today as Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel; the Steelworks Center of the West occupies CF&I's restored main office, dispensary and tunnel gatehouse and is one of the best reasons to walk this part of town. The mill drew Swedish and Austrian families in the late 1800s and Italian, Mexican and Slavic families after the turn of the century, and more than 40 languages were spoken inside it. Interstate 25 was cut through the neighborhood in the 1950s and took several streets with it. Pueblo Community College, another federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, sits in this ZIP, as do Lake Minnequa, the Northern Avenue business district, Aberdeen, and Mesa Junction's three-block retail strip along Abriendo, Colorado and Broadway avenues -- one of the oldest business districts in Colorado, named for the streetcar interchange that created it. Central High School was founded here in 1882.

What all of that leaves behind is a housing stock that cleans differently from anything else in this county, and it is the reason this page exists. Pre-1950 brick and frame houses mean original trim, baseboards and door casings, tile floors and grout, radiator recesses, plaster walls, smaller rooms with more edges per square foot, and bathroom fixtures that have been holding mineral deposits since before anybody living in the house was born. A clean here is not faster because the house is smaller. It takes longer per square foot, not less, and we would rather quote that honestly than promise the same time as a 1990s build and short one of them.

Renovation is the other constant. Older houses in this part of the city get worked on continually, and construction and plaster dust does not leave when the crew does -- it settles into vents, tracks, cabinet tops and carpet for months and reappears every time the furnace runs. That is a deep clean, not a maintenance visit, and saying so up front saves everybody a disappointing Tuesday.