“Denver is open for business,” Mayor John Hickenlooper announced at his inauguration, between hugs and feather blessings. Open for business — if there’s any business to be had, that is. In these dog days of summer, the economy bites. And when President George Bush breezed through town earlier this month…
Next month, Boulder will try to break the Guinness World Record for the largest group hug — as if that town wasn’t locked in an eternal clinch. But this week, Denver has Boulder beat. The changing of the city’s political guard was such a touchy-feely event that Happy Haynes, the…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was…
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Or eat it. A hundred years ago, radium was a miracle cure, a wonder drug, the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Viagra — and Colorado was playing doctor to the world. Marie Curie herself came out West, prospecting for uranium; Denver turned…
The last time Richard Florida came to town, to speak to a ballroom full of business types about his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, John Hickenlooper seemed like just another one of those business types — although not quite as well dressed. And while he’d rubbed ill-clad elbows…
This is not the story I intended to write. The notes for that story have been lost in luggage limbo for 45 hours and counting. Then again, I never thought I’d get stuck in a flying sardine can with thirty Slurpee-slurping fellow travelers — and no bathroom. But let me…
In New York City, they’re throwing chump change at a $4 billion budget gap by fining 86-year-old men for illegally feeding pigeons, and teenagers for sitting on unauthorized milk crates. In Denver, where next year’s budget deficit is projected at $50 million, they nailed Larry Barnhart for trying to sell…
Mayor Wellington Webb will soon be gone, but he won’t be forgotten. Not when he’s left his size-thirteen footprints all over this city. Webb’s name will live on at the $130 million Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, a stunning new structure draped around the old International-style Civic Center Annex…
My next-door neighbor, a caring, creative and very patient man, ran for Denver City Council. On garbage day last week, his recycling bin held a tidy stack of now-obsolete campaign signs. Years of hopes and dreams, going out with the trash. But a political bid doesn’t always end with such…
Lying flat and helpless — as flat and helpless as Denver’s economy — alongside Speer Boulevard is a giant steel-and-fiberglass sculpture created by Jonathan Borofsky. But by the end of the month, and surely by the time the U.S. Conference of Mayors convenes here in early June to salute outgoing…
The devil got down at the Regency one Saturday night. By Monday morning, Maruca Salazar’s entire eighth-grade class was talking about it. “I arrived at school and found all my students with their eyes big and wide, all shuddering and totally talkative. ‘Did you hear what happened? Did you hear…
It’s so nice to see the government getting cozy with the media — embed together, as it were. “The side benefit, it seems to me, is there’s now a new generation of journalists who have had a chance to see firsthand what kind of people volunteer to put their lives…
Denver’s in a world of hurt. The bad news came at Tuesday’s Mayor/ Council meeting. With the economy still scraping bottom, the city is now looking at a $50 million shortfall — which means a 7 percent cut in the 2004 budget. In a budget that was already whacked to…
“We have seen mood swings in the media from highs to lows to highs and back again, sometimes in a single 24-hour period,” said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last Friday, doing a mean imitation of Dr. Phil as he kicked off that morning’s press briefing before a roomful of…
In Denver, no one’s separated by six degrees. Two, maybe. The connections are so close that back East, pollsters and political consultants marvel — and mourn over — Denver’s coziness. It’s Mayberry, they say. So when Ari Zavaras’s campaign dared to ask some negative questions about specific mayoral candidates –…
Not long after Brandy Duvall was murdered by a gang of Bloods in May 1997, a wooden cross appeared by U.S. Highway 6 mile marker 269.5, just above the riverbank where the fourteen-year-old girl, handcuffed and stabbed 28 times, had tried to climb to safety. Through the seasons, the cross…
Will the last one to leave City Hall please turn out the lights? In these fiscally strapped times, there’s no reason to waste pennies on useless utilities. And besides, it’s only appropriate that Denver’s next mayor be left in the dark. The men and women who would be mayor are…
No one lit a candle to mark the one-year anniversary of Denver’s world-class fiasco — but plenty of people are still feeling burned. On January 31, 2002, John Oglesby, then-director of parking management for the city, pronounced that in keeping with Denver’s status as a “world-class city,” the Department of…
The sad parade keeps passing through the Colorado Legislature. College administrators losing departments, towns losing road projects, cancer patients losing critical treatments. It’s death by a thousand cuts. But the sorriest sight to date were the downtrodden developers, fresh from the biggest year in the history of homebuilding, now appealing…
As the only newspaper in town dedicated to printing the uncensored truth — every juicy, titillating, squirm-inducing, profane word of it — we eagerly awaited the moment when the 570 hot, hot office e-mails between Arapahoe County Clerk Tracy Baker (one of our 2002 Hall of Shame honorees) and his…
Merry Christmas, Mayor Webb. In the mail you’ll find a check for $40 to cover the two parking tickets I picked up last week — my gift from city employees eager to make up Denver’s revenue shortfall. One was delivered at 9:05 a.m. (my meeting ran ten minutes past a…
Last January, Denver considered itself such a “world-class” city that John Oglesby, director of the parking management division, announced an ambitious scheme to boost revenues by adding parking meters, raising rates and extending meter hours from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week — in keeping with Denver’s…
