Fairplay's main street retains much of its 19th-century character. The Hand Hotel — reportedly haunted, and willing to make a feature of it — anchors the historic stretch, which includes several shops, a few restaurants, and the Colorado Mountain Hat Company, where custom cowboy hats are made using traditional measuring techniques dating back 150 years.
The street is short and the town is small, but the combination of intact Victorian commercial buildings, the mountain backdrop, and the high-altitude light gives Front Street an authentic quality that the more developed Colorado mountain towns have mostly lost to boutique retail.