Last April, Melissa Smith paid $300,000 for a condo in Denver’s booming Uptown neighborhood. She wishes she hadn’t. The garage of the just-finished building at 1767 Pearl Street is already leaking, the hardwood floors inside her condo are a mess, and she can’t take showers in the morning because there’s…
Ocean Journey is like a ghost town these days. The aquarium just suffered the slowest month ever, and what’s even spookier is that attendance isn’t expected to pick up until March. Just 40,440 people visited Ocean Journey in September, compared to 65,775 last September and 98,324 during the same month…
Even in these troubled times, respect for the law sometimes depends on who’s wearing the badge. Last week, voters in rural Costilla County ousted controversial sheriff John Mestas in a special recall election by a count of 664 to 608. Vowing to clean up the county, Mestas was elected three…
She’s ba-a-ack. Not even six years in the joint could keep Ruth Chiffon von Seeburg-Schausten Prager from returning to the restaurant business, even though she did her time because the evidence against her involved years of bad money deals for eateries she either worked in or ran (“Would You Buy…
The accomplishments of two Boulder-based researchers were all over the news earlier this month after the men, University of Colorado physics professor Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Less heralded was the award another Coloradan recently…
On a sparkling fall morning, the grand entrance of Denver’s City Hall is festooned with giant ribbons commemorating breast cancer awareness month and hung with a banner reading “Denver Celebrates Diversity.” But visitors wanting a closer look at this display are out of luck, because the entire area is isolated…
First comes the Wells Fargo Wagon. Then bulldozers and John Deere tractors. Then the Centennial sanitation trucks. And then a gaggle of industrial lawn mowers, doing spins. A semi-truck from Albertson’s. The Douglas County Republican wagon. And row upon row of marching elementary students. Creeping up the street on a…
In 1891, a Denver rancher named John W. Springer built a mansion on the 22,000 acres that would later become Highlands Ranch. He called the mansion Castle Isabel, after his young wife. Publications by the Highlands Ranch Community Association claim that Springer is a descendant of a Russian czar, though…
There’s a reason that soup kitchens feed the poor with their namesake dish. “Soup is satisfying,” says Michael Mack, a volunteer cook with Denver’s Catholic Worker soup kitchen. “And it’s the easiest way to stretch things. If you’ve got a stone, a couple carrots, some celery and some water, you…
An already incipient recession fueled by the September 11 terrorist attacks may have closed most people’s pocketbooks to purchases of anything other than guns, flags and shares of defense-industry stocks, but apparently it hasn’t affected those who pay top dollar to attend the theee-ater, particularly when the highbrow evening is…
A while back, an area record producer completed the latest album by a well-loved local act. This artist had been supported for years by a successful radio station in the region, and since one tune in particular fit the outlet’s format perfectly, the producer naturally assumed it would receive a…
Have you heard? Barry Bonds is an arrogant egotist who has three lockers in the San Francisco Giants clubhouse but not three friends on the entire team. He’s a slugger who hit 73 home runs this season but wouldn’t score 23 points in a fan approval poll. He’s uncouth, ungrateful…
The Gropes of Wrath Doing our patriotic bust: I was outraged by the women’s mistreatment at DIA security, as reported in Patricia Calhoun’s October 11 “Busted!” I wouldn’t even want my son to witness a woman being treated with such disrespect — her boobs squeezed and butt prodded by “security…
Denver City Councilwoman Susan Barnes-Gelt isn’t known for holding her tongue. She often jousts with the mayor and fellow councilmembers, pushing through proposals such as the city’s new ethics policy, which put an end to the lobbyist-supplied meals and drinks that have long added inches to the waistlines of Denver…
The wind is just starting to die down on Fremont Pass when a faded-blue ’71 long-bed Ford swerves onto the gravel. “Thank God,” says the driver, a wiry little man dressed in jeans the color of his truck. “I was worried it would be too windy for you today. I…
At the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Gary Patton devoted four years to developing conservation strategies for the Canada lynx, a wild cat species on the decline in North America. But this past February, he suddenly found his own job on the endangered list. Patton joined the Fish and Wildlife…
Clear Channel, a San Antonio-based corporation that dominates the radio and concert industries, hasn’t gotten a lot of good press lately in Denver, where the conglomerate is being sued in U.S. District Court by a smaller competitor, Nobody in Particular Presents, for a plethora of allegedly anti-competitive practices (“Taking on…
The current conflict is bringing all kinds of Coloradans front and center. First, former U.S. senator Gary Hart issued a very public “I told you so,” since his study predicting that terrorists were almost certain to strike U.S. soil — okay, sometime in the next 25 years — had gone…
Estes Park resident Paul Saunders is a rarity: an applicant for a license to run a low-power FM (LPFM) radio station who actually stands a good chance of being awarded one by the Federal Communications Commission. “I’ve had a lot of help from a lot of people,” Saunders says. “I…
Albert Chopito’s grandmother died with gangrene, her feet blackened with infection, a gruesome consequence of her long fight with diabetes. Just a little over a year after starting junior college on a scholarship, Albert was forced to quit and return home to care for his parents. His father died in…
Box Score Bloom service: What a masterful job Harrison Fletcher did of capturing the beauty and spirit of a most amazing woman, Jodi Jill, in his October 4 “Out of the Box.” I’m grateful that he was the reporter who wrote about her: He was very thorough, supporting through others’…
Unit 151 stands on the northeastern edge of the Loveland Self Storage lot, on the south end of town, near a concrete drainage ditch and a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The unit is about the size of a one-car garage, ten feet by twenty feet, with cinderblock walls,…
