Cranes score the skylines of Denver, wedging in block-sized apartment complexes and office towers.

New retail developments sprawl across the eastern corridor of Colorado Springs, filling out the amenities for a slew of new neighborhoods.

Hotels, student housing and a three-building Google campus squeeze into Boulder, stirring a debate about how to slow commercial growth.

But not all economic recoveries are created equal.

In Pueblo, the bounce back from the Great Recession has been tepid.

Pueblo’s employment flat-lined in 2015, and the region’s jobless rate remains the highest among Colorado metro areas.

Still, optimism is high that the city and county of Pueblo are in the throes of a renaissance.

The sun-drenched city that straddles the Arkansas River is attempting a reinvention from a steel town into a hub for advanced industries, a cultural oasis for artists and a tourist destination.

“There’s a reason people like to vacation in towns like Taos and Santa Fe. We’re tapping into that and, at the same time, we are going after very advanced industries,” Pueblo County Commissioner Sal Pace said. “It’s going to be a younger, more vibrant, hip community than the Pueblo that your grandparents knew.”

A hard-forged strategy to broaden industry in the Steel City is materializing.

Major deals have been announced in recent months: A new R&D office for United Launch Alliance; an $82 million expansion of United Technologies Aerospace Systems’ jet braking operations; Whole Foods tossing out New Mexico Hatch chiles in favor of Pueblo County-grown peppers; a multi-state effort to keep the Southwest Chief train rolling; the establishment of the state’s largest solar farm; and, just a few weeks ago, landing the nation’s largest hemp oil processing facility.

And as a quiet complement, a bundle of new businesses, a burgeoning arts scene, a multimillion-dollar Riverwalk along the Arkansas, and several infill developments are aimed at reviving the historic heart of the city.

“I want people to remember what LoDo looked like 20 years ago and think of the bones in that part of Denver,” Pace said. “We have those same bones here in Pueblo.”

A long crawl back

It took time for Pueblo to get to this point, and Pace and others know that it’ll take plenty more to set the foundation of a sustainable economy.

“Pueblo was solidly a steel town,” Pace said. “Folks who didn’t work at the steel mill worked for companies that supplied the steel mill or had tangential relationships. And when the steel mill went down, it impacted everybody.”

Colorado Fuel & Iron, a sprawling steelyard that once employed more than 20,000 workers, tumbled into bankruptcy following the U.S. steel market’s crash in 1982. There were big layoffs at the plant, and Pueblo hurtled into a deep downturn.

“Believe you me, you think the business I would be in would be profitable,” said Joseph Clementi, 80, a Pueblo native who ran a secondhand shop in Pueblo during the early ’80s. “And when it crashed, there was no money to be had.”

After emerging from Chapter 11, the Pueblo mill eventually landed under the ownership of London-based Evraz and remains operational.

The already depressed economy was further hobbled by the Great Recession.

As the deep financial downturn pushed Colorado’s jobless rate to 9.1 percent in March 2010, Pueblo’s unemployment rate was in the double digits for years, hitting a high of 11.5 percent in January 2013, long after the recession was considered over.

Pueblo’s jobless rate has settled at just above 5 percent today, but still is the highest among Colorado’s six other large metro areas — and it has remained the highest for 53 consecutive months.

There were 60,600 “covered” jobs, excluding sole proprietors, in Pueblo County in January, and after dipping for much of 2015, the tally inched back up to 60,900 jobs in October, according to seasonally adjusted U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This compares with 60,000 at the same time in 2014 and 58,600 in 2013.

“It looks like (Pueblo is) stable, but saying it’s stable is a positive spin,” said Brian Lewandowski, assistant director of the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. “Really what they need is growth. It’s better than it was a year ago. It’s better than it was two years ago. They are definitely higher than they were before the recession, but that momentum has stalled.”

Home prices remain 2.2 percent below their peak in the first quarter of 2007, he said.

Wages are growing and in fact are doing so at one of the highest rates for Colorado metropolitan areas, but the pay in Pueblo is modest, he said.

Pueblo’s average wage last year of $38,901 was 26.2 percent below the state average of $52,724. The next closest was Grand Junction, with $40,575.

“You can take a look at that and say, ‘That’s a terrible metric for Pueblo,’ or you can say, ‘Well, that’s an opportunity,’ ” Lewandowski said.

Pueblo’s economy does appear to be making some headway.

Employment data released last week put Pueblo at a 2.3 percent annual growth rate through October. The statewide average for the same period is 2.1 percent, according to Colorado Department of Labor and Employment estimates.

A steel heart

The city with a small-town charm also operates on a small-town pace: Downtown shuts down early, traffic runs through at a crawl and the locals greet each other with congenial queries about their loved ones.

Heritage and culture are thick here. Families run back generations — sometimes seven or eight deep — and across many ethnicities.

Historically, Pueblo was a trading post, a hub of commerce, home to the largest steel manufacturer and the backbone of the Industrial Revolution in the West. The promise of steel and CF&I lured immigrants to the area, creating one of the most ethnically diverse cities not on a shoreline.

“It’s always been a frontier,” said Gregory Howell, owner of the Kadoya Gallery in downtown Pueblo.

At one point, more than 40 languages were spoken in the steel mill and more than two-dozen foreign language newspapers were published in the city, said Tim Hawkins, executive director of the Steelworks Center of the West, which holds a treasure trove of archives and artifacts from Pueblo’s industrial past and the days when CF&I employed more than 20,000 people.

Under Evraz, the mill operates at a much smaller scale. About 1,150 workers clock into the 2,004-acre property, where a fiery furnace melts more than 1.25 million tons of recycled scrap metal annually to make more than 300 different grades of steel. About 592,000 tons — or roughly 2,500 miles — of rail is manufactured there annually, including the track that soon will carry trains from Denver Union Station to the airport.

Sales of products, including seamless pipe for the oil industry and rebar, reached $987 million in 2014, said Jerry Reed, Evraz North America executive vice president in the Long Products division.

“As the largest producer of rail by volume in North America, we intend to continue to grow in this market with our highly engineered premium rail portfolio,” Reed said via e-mail.

Evraz contributed to the unemployment rolls earlier this year, when it temporarily shut down its seamless pipe mill. About 55 employees remain furloughed, though another 145 have been brought back.

Pueblo today also struggles with some big-city problems.

Crime rates have improved but still outpace those of comparably sized Colorado cities, certain buildings remain dilapidated after more than 30 years, vacancies riddle prime commercial property and some residents struggle with underemployment and poverty.

Pueblo has made strides in those areas, but the city still suffers from a long-standing perception problem, said Chris Markuson, the economic development director for Pueblo County.

“We’re awful at marketing the assets of our community,” he said.

And Pueblo’s not getting any help from Interstate 25, he said.

The north-south artery rushes potential visitors up and around the city, speeding them past exits located on curves and presenting an unsightly view of rafters, smokestacks, and towering hotel and fast-food roadside signs.

“It’s our front door,” he said. “It looks terrible.”

But that, too, is changing.

More than $100 million is being invested in upgrading Pueblo’s neighboring highway systems. Included in that is a four-phase overhaul of I-25.

Building businesses

And hundreds of millions of dollars more are being spent ensuring that front door leads somewhere.

Thirty years after residents voted to tax themselves for the good of the city’s future, Pueblo has a coveted cache for economic development incentives.

Pueblo officials complement that money with data — using location-based analytics to discover and develop markets for businesses of all sizes, said Markuson, whose title is director of economic development and geographic information services.

“Maps are everything,” he said. “Every bit of data uses geographic content.”

Wielding tools usually available only to Fortune 500 firms, Markuson delves into demographic data at a ZIP code level to help Pueblo businesses discover ideal customers. His office then bundles that information with marketing plans to help local businesses identify — and fill — niches in their fields.

Markuson’s data helped Solar Roast Coffee place its solar-powered roasted beans in coffee shops across the U.S.

The humble downtown coffee shop now ships to more than 350 retail locations— from The Woolley Market in Sedro-Woolley, Wash., to Rebecca’s Natural Food in Charlottesville, Va.

The wholesale expansion — and cheap rent — helped Solar Roast expand its footprint downtown.

A little Googling brought Solar Roast to Pueblo in 2007.

Brothers Mike and David Hartkop were looking for a sunnier operations base than their homestate of Oregon to launch a solar-powered coffee roasting company.

“And this town called Pueblo, Colorado, popped up,” Mike said.

A quick road trip proved fruitful. The city had character and a quaint downtown and it was “sunny as all get-out,” he said.

Mulling the decision over a couple of beers at the Shamrock Brewing Co. — itself, a relative newcomer — the brothers Hartkop heard that a storefront down the street had come available.

“We took that as a sign,” Mike said.

Today, Solar Roast’s cafe, roastery and distribution operations occupy 4,400 square feet on the street level of a 120-year-old brick building off West Third and North Main streets. An array of solar panels sits on the building’s roof, harnessing energy to power Helios 3, the latest iteration of a roaster that began with scribbles on a napkin and was brought to life using materials including a satellite dish and mom’s broccoli steamer.

Identity crisis

Downtown Pueblo’s newest tourism attraction highlights one of the oldest features in the city.

The 32-acre Historic Arkansas Riverwalk wraps sidewalks, gathering spaces and bronze statues around a calm and meandering portion of the Arkansas River.

As residents strolled with their dogs, employees unchained the gondola for its daily duties, and parents watched their children play in the fountains, Ruthann Brettell and her friend Judith Berkhouse paused on a bench shaded by the bridge above.

Brettell grew up in Pueblo and now lives a couple dozen miles up I-25 in El Paso County. Every once in a while, Brettell makes the drive to her hometown for a quick visit.

For this “once-in-a-while” trek, she had company in Berkhouse, who was celebrating her 81st birthday.

“I really think this is wonderful,” Brettell said, looking at the Riverwalk. “I think it’s going to help them tremendously … at least I hope so.”

When she was working and planning large conferences for the Colorado Springs-based American Numismatic Association, Brettell found it be difficult to lure people to Pueblo from Colorado Springs and Denver. Some felt the Steel City’s image and offerings were unrefined.

“Pee-yew-blo,” she said, scrunching her face to emphasize how others would mock the city for the heavy manufacturing smell at the time. “It’s a shame.”

Pueblo has to overcome its image problem, said Colorado Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, a former Colorado State University-Pueblo president .

The big tourism draws — the Colorado State Fair and Lake Pueblo — don’t necessarily pull people into the heart of town.

“The thing that draws more people to Pueblo than anything else is Lake Pueblo, but people don’t need to go through the city to get to Lake Pueblo, so they don’t see the historic downtown,” Garcia said.

“They don’t see the well-established neighborhoods along the river. They don’t see all the great cultural amenities that are there — like the public library, one of the most unique libraries in the county. I think people just don’t have a good sense of what Pueblo is, and they have an image that’s generally 40 years out of date.”

As more people flood to Colorado and are priced out of cities such as Denver, they may be more inclined to look south, he said.

But the city will need to have the cultural amenities, the creative industries and good-paying jobs to make those folks stay, he said.

For Pueblo, it’s a fine balance of staying true to its salt-of-the-earth soul and being open to future industries.

“If you talk to some folks in Pueblo, they’re proud of their history and their traditions and some of them don’t really want to see a change. They long for the old days of the steel mill employing 25,000 people, and that’s not going to happen,” Garcia said.

“So we’ve got to find other things that will employ those folks, and we’ve got to prepare those folks, and their kids, for the kind of jobs like ULA will have available, and that just requires upskilling the population.”

Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or @aliciawallace

Where the growth will come from

City and county of Pueblo officials have identified six industry segments they think are key to the region’s economic recovery: manufacturing, agriculture, renewable energy, transportation, medical/R&D and creative.

Manufacturing —Building on the legacy of steelworks at the Evraz plant with segments such as additive manufacturing, 3-D printing and advanced manufacturing.

Agriculture —Taking advantage of the sunny skies and favorable weather to help flourishing markets in chile peppers and cannabis.

Renewable energy —Building off large operations that include Vestas and SunEdison and landing complementary companies at the refurbished chemical depot.

Transportation — Doubling down on rail through initiatives such as the Southwest Chief and a rail engineering center at the Black Iron Building mixed-use project now under development.

Medical/R&D — Expanding the largest employment sector by attracting pharmaceutical companies, including cannabis and hemp research and development.

Creative — Further developing an arts cluster that now includes legacy players, such as Latka Studios, and spirited new arrivals that have graced downtown buildings and the Pueblo Levee with huge murals.

Read more about the industry segments and the companies that have seeded them here.