Where the Wilding Things Are

In addition to the stolen shoes, at least three mobile phones were ripped out of people's hands in the confusion, according to police reports. "I was in front of Market 41 waiting for friends when my friend got in a confrontation with someone else. I got in the middle and got pepper sprayed. I could not see," reads the witness statement of a 22-year-old Aurora man whose phone was ripped off. "There were a lot of people coming up to me and trying to help me not go into the street, and after fifteen minutes I realized one of them had stolen my phone."

On the corner next to the shoeless theft victim, a burrito vender wrapped a bandanna soaked in water around his mouth and nose to guard against the residual mace and pepper spray in the air. He then continued to dispense foil-wrapped snacks from a plastic cooler. A drunken man with swollen red eyes leaned against a blue Sheriff's Department van, yelling nonsense. Inside the van, two female deputies wearing latex gloves laughed at him. In the distance, the sax player jammed on the James Bond theme.

And then -- pop, pop, pop. A series of sharp percussive explosions cut through the crowd chatter. Startled drivers gunned their engines and pedestrians dove for cover, believing that bullets were flying. But as the explosions continued, picking up in pace, people came up from their crouches, laughing, relieved and realizing that it was just a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Witnesses to gun battles often report that at first they believed the gunshots were firecrackers. But in LoDo, the clubgoers mistake firecrackers for gunshots.

"You hear that sound at Let Out -- I'm sorry, you better duck," said Erin Kyosho, who had just exited Rise, a huge techno club at 19th and Blake. "There are retards everywhere, and their aim is not good." Kyosho used to be a cocktail server in the VIP room at Rise; she quit in part because she became afraid to walk to her car after Let Out.

"I lived on the streets in LoDo seven or eight years ago, when I was fifteen, sixteen, and I had no problems at all. But there wasn't such an idiot-per-capita scene back then. It doesn't feel safe here anymore. It's not like there are muggers everywhere, just more like too many people who are stupid and wasted, and too many of them have guns."

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According to police records, there have been more than twenty reports of shots fired downtown during Let Out in the past two years, and three shooting deaths. The first fatality occurred during a gun battle in September 2002, when a 25-year-old man was killed in a parking lot near Larimer Square. The most recent death occurred January 14, when a man was shot to death in a vehicle on Blake between 21st and 22nd streets, just after last call.

Most of the shots are fired in the air -- more macho posturing, say club owners, and a lot of it by interlopers who come to LoDo to make trouble and don't even patronize the clubs whose business they threaten with their antics.

"If you stay to last call, and you go walking up and down Market or Blake, it's pretty ominous," says Mike Bertinelli, owner of Bash, an eighteen-and-over club at 19th and Blake. "But a lot of it is these guys who don't even have ten dollars in their pocket to spend in the clubs, who are just waiting around to see what's going to happen, and if nothing happens, they incite it."

Kostas Kouremenos, entertainment director for Lotus, an electronic dance music club located in Union Station on the periphery of the hot zone, believes a lot of the troublemakers are drawn to LoDo by clubs that are banging hardcore hip-hop. "I don't want to be racist about it, but 95 percent of the trouble I see is because of the hip-hop issue," he says.

Four years ago, there was only one club in lower downtown that catered to a hip-hop crowd. F-Stop, located in the 1800 block of Wazee, shut down in November 2000 under intense pressure from loft dwellers complaining about noise.

But these days, a lot of LoDo clubs spin hip-hop at least one night a week. And the flavor of this hip-hop is heavier on the thug-oriented, "Get Rich or Die Trying" side than the cerebral, conscious hip-hop favored by the more peaceful, backpack set. There is a good reason for this: The crowd that responds to aggressive hip-hop spends a lot more on drinks than the backpackers.

"It's all in how you market your club," says Kouremenos. "If you market your club to troublemakers, you're going to bring trouble, and trouble is bad for everyone's business."

Not that business in LoDo is all that bad.