Say good-bye to the classic motel signs that line the now infamous strip of East Colfax (profiled in the May 17 feature “East Colfax Motel Hell”, which once signified a wealthy gateway to the west but now stand like billboards for homelessness, drugs and prostitution. Come September 30, the East…

Denver parking scofflaws are about to get a little poorer; city parking ticket fines will rise from $20 to $25 on October 1. Kind of makes you wistful for those heady days of yesteryear, when a fresh-faced kid with a beer-making degree was swept into the mayor’s office thanks to…

Day One: New Socks Day Two: White Elephants Day Three: Burger King on Colfax and Kalamath “When is dinner going to be ready?” “When you cook it.” In the dorms at The Campus Village at Auraria, on the forth floor of the east wing, there is a common area that…

The One Book, One Denver reading program may have overlooked the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road – even though the work has numerous Denver references – and chosen local author Nick Arvin’s Articles of War for this year’s selection, but Book Forum magazine didn’t forget the big…

It’ll be at least another year before Fredrick Abram sees freedom. The 31-year-old Denver native grew up gangsta. He was one of the first Tre Tre Crips back in the 1990s and is now serving his second stint in prison for putting in work. Abram’s older brother was Crips (before…

The ever-thinning Rocky Mountain News and CBS 4 News are going into hype overdrive over “What If? Colorado,” the ghastly, state-funded reality show being staged here (http://www.whatifcolorado.com) in an effort to boost our general awareness of disaster preparedness issues. The campaign, launched by the Colorado Office of Emergency Preparedness, also…

Tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the Tattered Cover at 2526 East Colfax Avenue, Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank will read from Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, a economic deconstruction, travelogue and tell-all on the wealth boom currently hitting the…

Day One: New Socks Day Two: White Elephants A woman with brown stains on her teeth stands behind an electronic cash register in her navy blue regalia, a “have it your way” pin buttoned on her left breast. I tell her that there are nine of us together and I…

Before 2006, juveniles charged as adults and convicted of first degree murder in Colorado faced one sentence: Mandatory life without parole. Last summer, the state legislature showed some mercy by changing the law to allow “juvie lifers” to at least be eligible for parole after forty years. But the law…

Day One: New Socks Two weeks into the three-week summer program, I get a call from one of my creative writing students. She’s running late and she needs directions. “I just got off the train at Colfax, which way do I go?” I instruct her to walk southeast. She doesn’t…

Jonathan can’t fold his socks into pairs. He can match one with its partner, but he physically can’t unite the sock mates into a ball of cotton. “Will you show me that again?” I pick up two white crew socks, one in each hand, line then up straight and tuck…

Everyone complains that the Emmy Awards—heck, most Award shows—are staid, over-long affairs that just don’t earn their three-plus hour block of prime time anymore. Viewers (not to mention reviewers) look for anything that’s remarkable—whose dress sucked (Hayden Panettiere), who made the best unscripted quip (Elaine Stritch), and who brought the…

Hotel Colonial Grenada, Nicaragua Subject: The Nicaraguan Pistol Team “Do you want to shoot an AK-47?” I was perusing the racks of brochures in the hotel lobby here in Grenada, about 45 k’s south of Managua, when the man asked me this question. He was obviously a “Nica”—a local—but his…