Following the Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl win last month, Denver’s movers and shakers tripped over themselves in a rush to endorse a new taxpayer-financed stadium for the team. Mayor Wellington Webb, Governor Roy Romer and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce all gave high-profile endorsements to the stadium proposal, even…
Dottie Lamm, currently a candidate for the U.S. Senate, is known throughout Colorado because of her husband. That may be her biggest blessing–or her biggest curse. The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Dottie Lamm seems likely to face incumbent Republican senator (and turncoat Democrat) Ben Nighthorse Campbell in November. That…
The bitter feud over the $1 billion estate of cable-television magnate Bob Magness came to an end last week as all parties involved reached an out-of-court settlement. The multiple lawsuits enmeshing Magness’s sons, Kim and Gary, his widow, Sharon, University of Denver chancellor Daniel Ritchie, and Tele-Communications Inc. and its…
To the customers of utilities like US West have the right to know how well the company is serving the public? And with the local telephone market starting to open up to competition, should consumers have access to the service records of all local telephone providers? These questions have come…
There are many things Californians love about Colorado–the mountains, the skiing, affordable real estate. But while Californians have to visit or move here to sample those delights, there’s one Colorado pleasure they may soon be able to enjoy without ever leaving home. Colorado’s relatively cheap power supply, a by-product of…
The pain-ridden journey of a disabled construction worker who took four people hostage last year at Focus on the Family’s headquarters in Colorado Springs came to an end last week. An El Paso County jury convicted Kerry Dore on thirteen felony counts, including first-degree kidnapping. Dore now faces a mandatory…
Downtown is on the verge of losing the historic Denver Post building, at 15th and California streets, to make way for a “temporary” parking lot. Preservationists are hoping to find a way to save the building, but they may have little chance of doing so. Developer Bruce Berger says he…
For years, a half-dozen concrete bridges have spanned the streets of downtown Denver, the legacy of an ill-conceived 1960s urban-renewal project aimed at taking pedestrians off the sidewalk. Now the little-used “skybridges” are starting to come down, closing a chapter on one of downtown’s more bizarre redevelopment efforts. Two of…
The former Bonfils Theatre was once one of Denver’s cultural jewels, a community playhouse that brought thousands of people a year to East Colfax Avenue to watch everything from fairy tales to Shakespeare. For the past decade, however, the 1953 building, which was renamed the Lowenstein Theater in 1985, has…
Charles “Binx” Rugg looks out his living-room window in the town of Eldora and can see all the places that have shaped his life. Next door is the small, one-story wooden house where he was born 78 years ago. On the other side of the narrow valley are the stables…
What, if anything, should the city of Denver do to prevent the construction of ugly buildings? With Denver’s construction boom showing no sign of letting up, neighborhood activists and some property owners are advocating the creation of design review boards with the power to dictate the design of new buildings…
Kneeling in prayer at Denver’s Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Kerry Dore lit six candles–one for each of his four children, one for his ex-wife, and one for himself. He had already purchased a pistol and bullets, and he felt that God was guiding him during his final hours on…
Prisoner No. 21-052-013 walks stiffly into a small meeting room at the federal prison in Jefferson County. John Gable’s jet-black hair is slicked back and neatly combed, belying his 69 years. He has the solid build and resolute gaze of a Kansas farmer, the life he was born to, but…
As recently as last spring, it looked like the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation was on a roll that would never stop. The nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, which controls one third of the hospitals in metro Denver, was racking up record profits and acquiring community hospitals at a feverish pace. Now…
Arnold Schwarzenegger smiled for the photographers on a chilly day in March 1995, strolling down Wazee Street with a retinue of overawed city bureaucrats, retail CEOs, neighborhood potentates and bodyguards. The beaming actor told reporters that he thought lower downtown was “fantastic” and that he wanted to do a project…
A maverick Denver labor leader has launched a campaign to topple the president of the state AFL-CIO, calling for dramatic change to turn around Colorado’s sleepy labor movement. The dispute over leadership of the state labor federation has also become an issue in Colorado politics, and the chairman of the…
For Kay Howe, the remote Lisbon Valley in southeast Utah is a place to escape to. Just across the state line from Colorado, the uninhabited valley offers sweeping views of two states. “When you’re up on top of Three Step Mesa, you have a knockout view of the La Sal…
A maverick member of the board that oversees the metro sewage system has managed to shake up that once-sleepy body with charges of a conspiracy to run radioactive waste through Denver-area sewers. Some say boardmember Adrienne Anderson is a paranoid nut, while others cast her as an environmental crusader. The…
When the Colorado Convention Center was dedicated on a spring day in 1990, the promises flew as fast and furious as a March snowstorm. Politicians who had spent years campaigning for the new center didn’t disguise their delight with the opening of the tenth largest convention center in the United…
In 1975, Colorado’s brash young governor said no to the highway lobby. Newly elected on an environmental platform, Dick Lamm vowed to “drive a silver spike” through plans for a southwest suburban beltway linking I-70 and I-25. Lamm said the highway would foster suburban sprawl and gridlock and that the…
A neighborhood feud over the proposed rezoning of East Colfax Avenue has wound up in court, with two of Colfax’s best-known businesspeople trading accusations of slander and suppression of free speech. While that dispute plays out in Denver District Court, the larger question of the future of one of Denver’s…
Buying a box of crackers at a supermarket in Grand Junction would ordinarily be uneventful. But these days even a humble cracker is the stuff of controversy, as the City Market checkout clerk is happy to explain. “I never got sick from eating them,” she reassures an anxious customer. “The…
