Evan Almighty

So the Fontius building remained largely unoccupied. The Downtown Denver Partnership asked principal owner Gary Cook if it could install posters in the vacant windows advertising the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Zoo and other civic attractions, as the organization had done in many vacant storefronts downtown. While the effort would have cost him nothing, Cook refused.

Whatever their motivations, it's their right as property owners to let their land lie fallow, either by choice or by circumstance, says Downtown Denver's John Desmond. In libertarian Colorado, that idea is close to sacred, making municipal attempts at eminent domain a political gamble. Plus, he adds, there is a rationale — of sorts — for letting Block 162's properties deteriorate. "People can wait for a really large development to come in, and in the meantime the holding costs on the property are relatively low," he says. "We have relatively low property tax in Denver, and the current requirements for upkeep on buildings and parking lots are minimal." While zoning now prohibits the construction of new surface lots downtown, it also requires significant work on existing lots to include infrastructure and environmental improvements, thereby discouraging the lots' owners from doing anything at all to their property.

But letting Block 162's landowners do whatever they want isn't that simple in the heart of downtown, where one property has a direct impact on the next. "There was a tenant who was very close to signing a major deal at an adjacent property that would have netted the city, in sales taxes, between $200,000 to $250,000 a year," Desmond says. "They were ready to go in and chose not to, and cited the condition of the Fontius building and the block and the perceived safety conditions on the mall as their primary reasons."

Block 162's impact on the urban core was surely felt in the summer of 2004. Four months after announcing its intent to acquire much of the block, Lowe Enterprises called it quits. Soon after, Target pulled out, too. "We were unable to successfully complete an important part of the assemblage we were trying to put together, and as a consequence, we dropped our contract," a Lowe representative said at the time.

Most of Block 162 continued to gather dust.

Shoes. Thousands of them. Maybe millions, spread over four floors. The first floor would be the grand entryway, packed with men's shoes, women's shoes and hard-to-find sizes. The second would be the repair center, staffed with top-of-the-line cobblers, and the third would be the place for deals on factory closeouts. The fourth floor, on top of it all, would be corporate headquarters, charged with keeping track of all that fresh-smelling leather and rubber. That was the plan behind the flagship Fontius Shoe Company moving into the building on the corner of Welton and 16th in 1966.

"It was a very large operation," says Harry Fontius III. "That's what Fontius was known for: a great variety of sizes and the very best brands imaginable."

It was a reputation begun when his great-grandfather, John Jacob Fontius, traveled the Colorado gold fields selling shoes in the late nineteenth century, and nurtured as the store outgrew one downtown location after another and opened a chain of stores in the suburbs.

"It was a fun time," remembers Fontius. "When we ran a sale, my God, people would be lined up, and we would have to have police control the crowds. It was huge. It was fantastic."

But the crowds didn't last. In the 1970s and '80s, businesses large and small began moving to Cherry Creek and to the sprawling southeastern suburbs to follow their customers.

"I think real-estate values in central downtown went somewhat downhill as the Aurora Mall and Southlands Mall and some of the bigger suburban centers took over some of the shopping habits," says Fontius, who broke from the family business to pursue separate interests in 1975. "There were fewer and fewer people in office buildings. They went from hour lunch breaks to half-hour lunches. I think walking traffic deteriorated over time."

In 1986, the Fontius Shoe Company was sold to a Phoenix-based firm, and three years later, the flagship store disappeared from Denver phone books. The building became nearly empty save for Los Wigwam Weavers, a wool-necktie company that had rented space on its third floor from property owner Gary Cook. An optometrist moved into the fourth floor, and a handful of businesses rotated in and out of the smaller storefronts on 16th and Welton streets.