In the fall of 1988, life in Denver was anything but a Rocky Mountain high. The economy had been down so long that replacing a perfectly fine airport with a giant public-works project half an hour from downtown seemed like a swell idea. Houses were selling–when they were selling at…
Black Hawk boasts more violent crimes per capita than any other community in Colorado. But the caper the town contemplated last Saturday was completely bloodless. It set out to hijack Central City’s train. Like almost everything else that’s happened to these two adjacent mountain towns since gambling was legalized five…
Rodney Long was at the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., when the spirit “hit” him. It stayed with him on the trip back to Denver, and it’s with him still. “If you go by your heart, you go with your spirit,” he says. “You go in the right direction.”…
When Spicer Breeden crashed into Greg Lopez on March 17, two worlds collided. The ironies piled up quickly. Just a year separated Lopez and Breeden in age; the two had grown up mere miles from each other. And both men were familiar faces in Lower Downtown hangouts–although Breeden frequented the…
Colorado’s political caucuses are often dull affairs–neighborly barn-raising reminders of our state’s origins, when the real action now takes place in banks and boardrooms across town. But the gathering next Tuesday at Loveland’s Monroe Elementary promises to be a true barn-burner. That’s the caucus where Democratic precinct committeeman Tony Brown…
The story was about two people with brain injuries who met in a support group and married. The woman had been hurt in a fall, the man in a car wreck. Now they were going for a walk. They stopped to look at a crocus that had poked through the…
Ronnie Bay is no sissy. Ten years ago, when he took over the Micky Manor on North Federal Boulevard, he had to fight inch by inch, night by night, to turn the bar back into the neighborhood landmark it had been when it opened in 1930. Life in the Marines…
From inside the Terminal Bar–a classic dive immortalized on Tom Waits’s Nighthawks in the Diner–you cannot see the garish peanut-butter-and-electric-blue paint job that has earned the place such enmity. You cannot see the bricked-over windows along the Wazee Street side of the building, so very non-1888, the year the structure…
All DPS board members should stay after school and write a hundred times on the blackboard: “Why screw up a program that works?” “We’ve gone to the school board, we’ve gone to the mayor, we’ve gone to the governor,” says Lereen Castellano. “If we have to, we’ll go to the…
Surrounded by happy, if cramped, campers unrolling toilet paper over my head, I thought to myself: There has to be a better way. I had finally sunk so low as to fly out of Colorado Springs. And now I was paying the price, sheet by sheet. Not that I enjoyed…
On the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, hundreds of Denverites gathered at a luncheon honoring community leaders who have held true to King’s principles. The banquet was sponsored by Colorado’s MLK Commission, which is headed by Denver First Lady Wilma Webb, wife of one of the most prominent…
It was not looking like a very happy new year for Foxes. In the preceding months the city had come down, hard, on the nightclub at Sixth Avenue and Bryant Street. The bar’s neighbors–most of them businesses–in the largely industrial area just off Federal were complaining about garbage, about broken…
Is this a great country, or what? Although it is not the land of his birth, my companion is defending the United States and all those truths that are supposed to be self-evident with the sort of ferocity usually displayed by taxi drivers fighting over a nice, juicy fare. Which…
In the January 8 New Yorker, satirist Christopher Buckley sums up 1996 with a series of hypothetical headlines: “Colorado Militia Blows Up New Denver Airport,” reads one. “Denver Airport Bombers Are Given Ticker-Tape Parade Through Downtown: Mayor Hails `Heroes’ and Presents Them With Keys to Old Airport,” reads the next…
Defame is the name of the game. David Thomas, the district attorney of Jefferson County, wasn’t happy with Eric Dexheimer’s August story that deconstructed the Quigley-Aronson mess from an overblown scandal to an overgrown neighborhood spat. By then, of course, the case that the head of the Anti-Defamation League labeled…
My upper torso heaves with indignation. Late last month, in an effort to clean up their act before Congress does it for them, those arbiters of taste at America Online banned the word “breast.” In doing so, the country’s largest computer on-line service exhibited all the exquisite sensibilities of those…
She opened her mail the first Saturday in November, and the bottom dropped out of her world. Jo had worked hard to shore up the foundation of her life. She had followed all the orders, read all the books, done all the right things. She had fought for her family…
Are they gone yet? Have the last polar-bear-suited protesters packed up their picket signs, the last TV cameras captured that last foot of film, the last Klondike and Snow fans finally left the Denver Zoo? Good. Maybe Denver will now come out of hibernation. Maybe the town will wake up…
Now you see it, now you don’t. The hyperbolic paraboloid still stands sentinel on the 16th Street Mall, a dilapidated, Jetson-esque reminder of the days when Denver’s hopes soared as high as the structure’s I.M. Pei-designed roof. “Our mall has only two characteristics that distinguish it from Anytown, USA,” says…
Ben Dover. That was the name of the mythical airline vice-president of finance skewered in a series of limited-edition cartoons last spring in Alaska. In faxes sent to that state’s legislators, reporters and the governor’s office, yuksters poked fun at “ColoradoAir” and its attempts to extort $40 million from Alaska…
It was Wednesday, and grease was the word. That meant one thing: the Mexico City Lounge (or Cafe, depending on which sign you pay attention to), in the 2100 block of Larimer Street, where the weekly taco specials draw people from all walks of life. In this instance, the walk…
A thousand miles away in California, the O.J. Simpson jury had just started deliberating when Denver County Court Judge Larry Bohning called his court to order. From the outset, the city’s case against Arisha McRae and DeShawn White looked like anything but a grand slam. Time had not only dulled…
