"I can't see my breath yet," she says. "See?"
For the last couple of months, Lucy has slept under an I-25 overpass, though she is careful not to specify which one. She used to sleep in what she still refers to as her "normal home": the protected nooks of the 16th Street Mall. Now, when her eyes grow heavier, she knows it's time to move on — and away from the mall. That's a hard-and-fast rule for her now, she says; before it was "more like a suggestion."
Before the mall, 16th Street's top attraction was Zeckendorf Plaza and its hyperbolic paraboloid, built in 1958.
Ian Marzonie (left) and John Scheck of Kroenke with an old projector at the Paramount Theatre.
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By "before," she means before Denver's urban-camping ban took effect on May 29 and police officers began to enforce the ordinance, which effectively upgraded the city's sit-lie ordinance, making it illegal to camp on any public or private property in Denver without permission. Since then, Lucy has not attracted any police attention, which she attributes to two things: She doesn't want any, and, she says, "I don't look homeless. I keep it that way."
But she does sleep on the streets. According to the city's enforcement protocol for the new ordinance, the signs that someone is camping include sleep, shelter and food, and the decision to pass the ban — a decision that split Denver City Council — came with considerable controversy. Opponents framed the issue as a means of criminalizing extreme poverty, while supporters insisted that it would improve both local businesses and the lives of those who slept in front of them.
In the ban's early days, Mayor Michael Hancock, a staunch member of the second camp, praised its benefits, telling Westword that some of the people who formerly slept on Denver's streets and sidewalks have returned to their homes and families as a result. "For some people like me, that might be true," Lucy guesses. But for her, it's not: Instead of becoming a prodigal daughter, she has opted instead to move farther from the public eye, at least when she does anything that could be considered "camping or anything like that," she says. "I mean, I'm certainly not shopping." — Kelsey Whipple
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Inside a tiny, dimly lit room hidden in the back of the Paramount Theatre, at the corner of 16th and Glenarm, piles of dusty artifacts — ancient ticket machines, giant projectors, decades-old turntables, faded newspaper clippings — attest to the building's long tenure in the heart of downtown. "Some day, I think it'd be neat to make a museum out of this stuff," says Ian Marzonie, the Paramount's production and facility manager, standing inside what the staff calls the "Antique Room."
In a room next door, the place certainly has enough history to fill a museum.
"When you go from having [dozens of] theaters in downtown to one remaining, it's a testament to the people that looked around at that time and said, 'Hey, this is worth preserving; this is worth keeping,'" says John Scheck, who works in the booking department of Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which bought the structure in 2002.
The breathtaking, nearly 2,000-seat space was designed by architect Temple Buell, and today it retains many of the art-deco design elements that made it such a landmark when it debuted in 1930. The facade consists of pre-cast concrete blocks and glazed terra cotta moldings; the interior features large Vincent Mondo murals surrounded by ornate gold and bronze frames.
The very first film shown here was Let's Go Native, back on August 29, 1930. Marzonie has a giant scrapbook in his office that includes a newspaper ad touting the showing: "Tomorrow at 7 p.m.... A NEW ERA will dawn in the entertainment history of Denver.... Nowhere in the world is there a theatre where the miracles of science created such wonders in entertainment...voice, with lifelike realism from the living screen...symphonic colors with the mood of pictures...beauty, luxury, comfort in this most modernistic theatre."
Fast-forward half a century to a time when the Paramount — and downtown Denver itself — was at a major crossroads. The owners were looking to sell the theater, which was still showing movies, and only movies; Historic Denver, the non-profit preservationist group that had been formed a decade earlier to save the Molly Brown House, ended up buying it in 1981. Although the Paramount was already on the National Register of Historic Places, that didn't protect it from possible demolition. The Historic Denver purchase did, however, and it continued to operate the space, booking live performances as well as films.
"The intention was to preserve it as a physical landmark, but also to preserve it as a theater," says Annie Levinsky, the current executive director of Historic Denver. "It was one of the only remaining theaters in downtown."
At the same time, the development of the 16th Street Mall was under way, and the Paramount was to play a pivotal role. "The mall would take advantage of the historic buildings in the sense of creating human-scale intimate space," says Levinsky. As a result, today the Paramount "is one of the great icons of downtown Denver and one of the few that does operate in exactly the way it was intended."
Even the Wurlitzer twin-console organ, designed to accompany silent movies and one of only two of its kind remaining in the country, operates exactly the way it was originally intended. More than 1,600 pipes generate all kinds of orchestral and percussive sounds, along with a diverse array of special effects.
