If you’ve ever decided to hike one of Colorado’s 14,000 foot mountains during a weekend in July – especially if you set out for a peak located within or close to the Front Range – then you know it can seem like half of Colorado’s residents are out on the…
On Thursday, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for the 37th annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. Among them is an animated short, produced by StoryCorps, about the 2009 Denver police beating of local activist Alex Landau. Using Landau’s own narration, the video describes how…
It’s rare that Westword reprints a feature story from another publication. But this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning article, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” was so good that we had to share it with our readers. As a joint project of ProPublica and the Marshall Project, much of the article recounts the…
At the second public meeting held to discuss the city’s proposed affordable housing plan, the cafeteria at North High School was packed with over one hundred community members. Among them were various organizations, grouped together by their matching T-shirts to make their presence known. They included Denver Homeless Out Loud,…
Venues and live shows often serve as the laboratory of music, opportunities for artists to probe and prod the merits of new songs and measure their effects upon a test group: the audience. Small venues have always been great for this role, because musicians can focus in on a limited…
On the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the delegation from Colorado earned the reputation as upstarts when they walked out of the Quicken Loans Arena en masse following a failed attempt to force a vote that would have changed convention rules and challenged Donald Trump’s bid…
“Kick them off the stage!” “Just get them out of here!” Those were the directives that Tim Sadler, a college student who interns as a sound engineer at the Seventh Circle Music Collective, received over the phone from his boss. Sadler didn’t have to be told twice. The band he…
Beginning at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, police started arriving at Confluence Park at the intersection of 15th and Little Raven streets to enforce curfew rules that ban individuals from sleeping in Denver parks overnight. According to videos live-streamed from the Facebook page of Denver Homeless Out Loud, there were…
Jose Cruz-Hernandez knew very little about where he was, aside from the fact that he was in a city named Aurora. He’d never been to the state of Colorado before, and yet suddenly he found himself blinking into the bright Colorado sunshine for the first time, the Rocky Mountains posing…
Just over a week ago, Denver officials admitted they used tens of thousands of dollars from a private donation fund connected with Denver’s Road Home to help pay for street sweeps that dismantled homeless encampments in early March. Calling it an “accounting error,” Mayor Michael Hancock said that the funds would…
In the weeks following the controversial March 8 and 9 street sweeps that dismantled homeless encampments along Park Avenue West, Westword learned via Colorado Open Records Act requests that the city had spent months preparing a revised “public encumbrance removal procedure” that dictated how the city would confiscate, and then…
This past Sunday, visitors to La Raza Park in the north Denver neighborhood of Sunnyside were met with an unusual sight: a wall of “Fix ’N’ Flip” and real-estate investment signs surrounded by placards that proclaimed, “Warning! Gentrification in process.” The installation, which was set up on one side of…
Last month we reported that four female pilots, with help from the ACLU, had filed discrimination claims against Frontier Airlines with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The pilots charge that Frontier Airlines has unfair practices regarding pregnancy and does not provide adequate accommodations to female pilots who are breastfeeding. Now, the…
Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration has faced tough criticism in recent months over how Denver is approaching the issue of homelessness. Many advocates have condemned crowded shelters and enforcement actions, like the controversial street sweeps that made headlines during March and April of this year, charging that the city would do…
When Allison moved here ten years ago, she frequently visited bars in lower downtown. But now Allison, who took Westword on a tour of LoDo one recent Friday night for this week’s cover story, “From LoDo to BroDo,” prefers to escape the bros and go to bars in other neighborhoods,…
The dance floor at Lodo’s Bar and Grill is ready to pop. At 9 p.m. on a Friday night, the place feels like a party’s about to break out, and the DJ clearly senses it, raising his fist and yelling, “Yeahhhhh! Where my Bieber fans at?” But not everyone is…
The Flaming Lips is rehearsing with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and they’re having trouble getting in sync. It takes a few attempts to realize the problem: The violin section is missing three measures from its sheet music. “Don’t worry! We will reprint it before tomorrow,” conductor André de Ridder assures the…
Transitioning back to society after ten and a half years in federal lockup was no walk in the park for Ronald Cosby, who’s now one of the most respected and important figures in Aurora’s hip-hop community. Better known by his nickname, “the Hood Father,” Cosby remembers leaving prison in 2008…
For months, Denver has been engaged in a sustained crackdown on homeless encampments. Since the sweeps began along Park Avenue West on March 8, homeless individuals have described being chased around the city by police officers, who cite Denver’s urban-camping-ban ordinance when prohibiting them from sleeping under cover anywhere in…
As I watched Paul Simon perform at Bellco Theater on Friday, I kept wondering: “Does he still enjoy doing this?” Which isn’t to say that the 74-year-old singer/songwriter wasn’t trying to put on a good show (or one worthy of Bellco’s minimum ticket price of $64.50). If anything, Simon seemed…
At the Performing Arts Complex on Thursday, Mayor Michael Hancock announced a new city campaign called “Denveright” that aims to incorporate Denver citizens’ feedback in revising four master city plans – Blueprint Denver, a Parks and Recreation “Game Plan,” Denver Moves: Transit, and Denver Moves: Pedestrians and trails. Together, the…
Late last month, Denver announced a plan to spend $150 million over the next ten years to construct 6,000 affordable housing units. The announcement was made at a packed community meeting at East High School on April 26, where Mayor Michael Hancock and other Denver officials described the ins-and-outs of…
