2020: The Year in Pictures

The Union Street Journal reflects on the year behind us

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Times Square’s ball drop event in New York City marks the beginning of 2020 at midnight on Jan. 1. This picture was taken from broadcasts of the New Years event.

Carly Philpott, Raegan Knobbe, Bre Mennenoh, and Staff

From even before the moment the ball dropped in Times Square on Jan. 1, 2020, it was clear that 2020 was going to be a bit different.

2020 began as a year much anticipated: the beginning of a new decade, an election year in the US, the summer Olympics in Tokyo, so much seemed to be happening in this one year. For many, the countdown to the ball drop in December 2019 held much more importance than in previous years. 2019 hadn’t been great, and 2020 held promise of a fresh start.

This year certainly marked a shift in our lives – but perhaps not the one we had been expecting. Wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic upended life all over the globe almost immediately. Even as millions of Americans watched the New Year events on their TVs, the coronavirus was already racing through Asia, soon spreading to Europe and the United States. Fires were destroying Australia; later, they’d do the same to the American West, including Colorado.

The expected Olympics were postponed to 2021, and the presidential election became so much more important than even anticipated, as political divides were widened and we experienced perhaps the most historic and eventful year in over half a century.

This gallery displays 2020 through our staff’s eyes. It’s pieced together using pictures that everyone in the Union Street Journal took as they lived through 2020 – pictures that are both representative of the world’s biggest news and the smaller events that took place throughout the year.

We organized it into a few shorter galleries to make it more digestable – but each individual gallery also represents one “era” of the pandemic – starting with the pre-COVID period of January and February, and going on into the first COVID spike in the spring, the next in the summer, and the last in the fall.

Introduction by Carly Philpott

January-February

March-May

June-August

September-November

December