War is heck. After the terrorist strikes, we all recognized that profiling was not only politically expedient, but suddenly politically correct. We accepted, if reluctantly, that certain males of certain nationalities would be subjected to more stringent study at airports, a more thorough going-over at security stops. We never suspected…
Get me rewrite! Denver loves beating dead horses — especially dead Broncos. That’s what the city’s been doing all August, ever since the Denver Post decided to rewrite history by calling the team’s new pigskin palace “Mile High stadium” — despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good, if defunct,…
From my back yard — a polite term for “mess of weeds overlooking a highway interchange” — the history of the city stretches wide. When gold was found at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek almost 150 years ago, that discovery inspired the Rush to the…
A thousand miles of highway from where I’d left Montana that morning, the blue Qwest signs welcomed me back to Denver. From gazing at stars, I was now reduced to seeing stars over corporate Colorado’s continued incursions on the skyline (a vision no doubt clouded by my inability to get…
The Boulder City Council just banned circuses, five years too late. The circus came to Boulder on December 26, 1996 — the day that six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was reported missing — and it’s never left. Although the Ramsey action occasionally moves out of the center ring and into some lunatic-fringe…
First things first: The new Broncos stadium does not look like a diaphragm. A spaceship, maybe. A bedpan, sure. But a diaphragm? No way — unless it’s a diaphragm that’s just gone through your washing machine’s spin cycle, an activity not recommended by its manufacturer. The new Broncos stadium does…
Donta Page never should have been allowed to leave a Maryland prison, never should have entered a private treatment facility in Denver, never should have spotted 24-year-old Peyton Tuthill outside her Gaylord Street duplex that day in February 1999. Had Donta Page never come to Colorado, Peyton Tuthill would be…
Picture this wildly improbable scenario: Brilliant businessman who abhors publicity and favors conservative causes slowly buys up much of the known world — oil fields, Western art, real estate, railroads, sports teams, sports stadiums, a publicly ridiculed Baby Bell — then ventures into the entertainment industry with the stated goal…
Just two hours after Wellington Webb faced the cameras and confirmed that yes, Boeing had snubbed Denver in favor of Chicago, fourteenth windiest city in the country, the mayor received his consolation prize: a thirty-pound meatball. Chicago had landed 500 aerospace executives and major bragging rights to another Fortune 500…
My polling place was empty at 7:20 Tuesday morning; I was the first — and by all appearances, likely the last — resident in the precinct to vote on Denver’s charter amendments. Obviously, the rest of my edge-of-downtown neighborhood — home to almost as many proposed jail sites as District…
Back in the days when Denver fretted over its designation as a cowtown rather than a world-class city, the great city it had already imagined it could be, local boosters introduced a hospitality program known as Smile High Denver, which was intended to turn our frowns upside down. It didn’t…
Jack A. Weil surveys the street outside of Rockmount Ranch Wear. He’s been doing business here for 55 years, since the days when Wazee Street was lined with warehouses, shops and factories rather than restaurants and offices and lofts. The five-story Rockmount building at 1626 Wazee, built in 1908, housed…
When Barbies are outlawed, only outlaws will have Barbies. Life in Boulder isn’t all fun and games these days — although you might think otherwise, considering how much time the Boulder Valley School Board has spent playing with dolls. The games began when a precocious eight-year-old set up her exhibit…
By the fourth hour of dialing, I was ready to start drinking. It was not an appropriate reaction. My young friend, a 26-year-old with a good heart and bad judgment, had netted herself a DUI in another state, then moved to Colorado without a driver’s license but with a strong…
It’s just a name. It’s just a game. And now it’s over — with Denver the loser. But we have only ourselves to blame. We should have known the score the second Pat Bowlen’s lobbyists showed up at the Colorado Legislature three years ago, arguing that the Broncos’ owner needed…
If only Linda Chavez had spoken more than English only, she might still be George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Labor. If only Chavez had spoken Spanish, for example, she might have understood immediately that her new pet charity back in the early ’90s, Marta Mercado, was in the…
“I predict that a large city in Colorado will be the victim of a strange and terrible pressure from outer space, which will cause all solids to turn into a jellylike mass…I predict the name of the city will be Denver, Colorado.” — Criswell Predicts From Now to the Year…
Jefferson Smith came out to Colorado when this state was booming — the first time. He tried Creede and Leadville but discovered he could make a much better living in Denver. His specialty? Squeezing suckers. It was in Denver, aka Suckerville, that Smith picked up the nickname “Soapy,” in honor…
This is the never-ending election. Because even after all the counts and recounts are completed, Florida finally sinks into the sea, and the U.S. at last has a new President-elect, Colorado won’t have the one thing that would prove a more lasting legacy than four more years: sensible growth control…
As this column went to press, the Metropolitan Football Stadium District announced that it was suspending naming-rights negotiations — at least for now. “Some things should just not be for sale,” said Wellington Webb. Denver’s mayor was talking — to just about anyone who would listen last week, including National…
Six dead women — the body count so far this month for Colorado’s victims of domestic violence — weren’t enough to lead local TV newscasts. Patrick Roy’s arrest early Sunday morning was, making the NHL’s most winning goalie ever an unlikely, and unwilling, poster child for Domestic Violence Awareness Month…
In May 1998, Chris Clendening, who by then had more than twenty years with the Denver Sheriff’s Department under his belt, was assigned to extradite a prisoner from Detroit. A second deputy sheriff collected an advance check to cover the trip; he cashed it and turned over the entire amount,…
