The handsome Rossonian Hotel sits empty at the center of Five Points, a symbol of the neighborhood’s long-ago heyday and its ongoing struggle to come back to life. Although the City of Denver has sunk nearly $2 million into fixing up the historic building, hoping to spur its redevelopment, it…
In jazz, your sound is everything. It’s your identity, your symbol of maturity. It defines your artistry. There’s no quicker put-down than “he hasn’t found his own sound yet”: It means you’re not really worthy of being talked about at all. Now consider Argentine tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri. He has…
Every February, Rocky Mountain Wa Shonaji invites a well-known quilter to give a lecture in Denver. This year, the group (whose name means “people who sew” in Swahili) selected Raymond Dobard, a respected quilter and art-history professor from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Two years ago, Dobard, who gave his…
The Black American West Museum and Heritage Center won’t be open during Black History Month. The venerable institution has been forced to close its doors for all of February, and possibly longer, because it doesn’t have enough money to continue operating. “That’s very, very unfortunate,” says museum boardmember Ottawa Harris…
Janice and Jhenita Whitfield were crossing the Western Slope, en route from San Diego to Denver, when they were pulled over for Driving While Black. Jhenita had been living in California with her sister, an operations technician with the Navy, for seven months. Now, on this cold spring morning in…
Monica Janzen first felt the lump in her breast eight years ago, when she was thirty. It was small, and her doctors said it was nothing. In fact, a month later it went away, and so she got on with her life as a computer consultant. She continued moonlighting as…
Colorado will lose one of only two black-studies majors next spring when the African American Studies (AAS) degree at Denver’s Metropolitan State College is eliminated. The move is a blow to the school, which prides itself on its commitment to diversity, as well as to the faculty and students involved…
The sale earlier this month of El Jebel Shrine Temple, at 1770 Sherman Street, the former home of the Eulipions theater organization, may finally have ended one act in a bitter dispute between two rival Eulipions factions, but the story is far from over. In October, a real estate company…
Next week, residents of the Rocky Mountain Warehouse Lofts may finally get a good night’s sleep. On Tuesday, November 14, the F-Stop nightclub will close its doors for the last time. No more boisterous crowds hanging out at 2 a.m. on the 1800 block of Wazee Street. No more monster…
Denver is becoming home to a peculiar literary subset: black doctors who moonlight as mystery writers. In 1996, author Robert Greer, a professor of pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, published the first of three Denver-based mysteries featuring bounty hunter CJ Floyd. Now, local surgeon Pius Kamau…
Lucy Walker, the 74-year-old founder of EDEN Theatrical Workshop, sits sipping her coffee with measured grace. At this breakfast banquet extolling the benefits of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, which apportions sales-tax money to arts and cultural organizations throughout the Denver metro area, arts enthusiasts offer skits, fancy slide…
A few weeks ago, Don Gilmore, a member of Friends of Eulipions, walked past the Eulipions theater group’s former home in the massive El Jebel Shrine Temple, at 1770 Sherman Street, and glanced through one of the windows. He saw nothing. The offices had been cleared out; costumes, props and…
Mingus Big Band, Saturday, September 30, at the Boulder Theater, is an ideal jazz band for the new millennium. It swings with the class of the Duke Ellington-era crews without sounding quaint. It blisters through the avant garde without going off the deep end. It melds sophisticated ensemble work with…
In its short history, the City Park West Gazette has published articles condemning the temporary closing of a local liquor store due to suspension of its license, the housing crisis at East Village and what it calls Mayor Wellington Webb’s policy of “economic cleansing.” But the little monthly paper, which…
There’s nothing like wandering through a building that’s still under construction, with its three-dimensional skeleton of wood, plumbing and electrical conduits and smell of new lumber. This month, the Denver Foundation for Architecture offers a chance to experience what only contractors and construction workers usually see, in a special tour…
As soon as Charmaine Barros enters her daughter’s vacant East Village apartment, in the shadows of downtown Denver, the smell of decay overwhelms her. She futilely opens the windows and the patio door leading to the second-floor balcony. Her daughter moved from the federally subsidized apartment a month ago, though…
When Mary Jo Barber took a list of client names home from her job managing Hawley Printing Services, a tiny Wheat Ridge printing press, she thought she was doing the out-of-state owners a favor — balancing the books and helping Leslie and James Cowley complete the sale of their company…
Motorcycles were built to roam the big, beautiful landscapes of the West. Despite the cycle’s mythical status, however, our part of the country has only two museums dedicated to two-wheeled wonders. One of these is located, appropriately, in Sturgis, South Dakota. The other is the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Museum in…
Give the city of Denver credit for trying. After failing for ten years to build a golf course at Green Valley Ranch, it’s pondering a new course on a rugged but bare stretch of land off of Peña Boulevard near Denver International Airport. The only catch is that the Green…
Two months ago, Karen Romeo wandered the aisles of New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall. It was a big event, but she didn’t expect to get emotional. She’d been a professional violinist and had seen her share of world-class stages. The day, she figured, would be more for the kids…
Cliff Fleetwood speaks a lot about “we,” as in, “Getting people to volunteer, getting people to hold office, that’s what we want.” He talks at length about consolidating black voter turnout and moving the black community “to the center of American politics.” And he plans to raise money this summer…
It’s Sunday, August 11, 1996. Somewhere on the 17000 block of East Dickenson Place, an alarm is going off, which is not uncommon. It could be a car alarm or maybe a home alarm, but Nsikak Ekiko says it’s not coming from her house or her garage. Her neighbors think…
