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,…
The shelves of the Denver Public Library hold many items that some might find objectionable. The books of the learned Laura Schlessinger, for example, bestsellers by the talk-show hostess with a doctorate in physiology whose advice clogs the airwaves. Yes, the Denver Public Library contains many objectionable items — but…
The valet parking area at the Westin was full, but they took so long to tell me that I felt aggrieved. So I squealed down to the basement of the hotel parking garage on my Firestone-recalled tires, talking on a cell phone that was almost certainly shooting deadly electronic impulses…
“The gauntlet had been thrown. And now the town was to see an interminable newspaper war, with attacks, journalistic screams, fisticuffs and gunplay. Meanwhile, the people of the city read this whirlwind paper in increasing numbers. It became known everywhere — and feared.” — Gene Fowler in his classic account…
The right click opens up your Windows options, Paul Verizzo tells his computer class. “It opens up your life.” But that window’s about to slam shut. A week from now, Verizzo will be gone from the Curtis Park Community Center, where he’s been director of the technology program since last…
Two weeks until summer begins, and already the dog days are upon us. They’re snapping at our most exquisitely sensitive spots. As might have been predicted, the most rabid area is Boulder, a town literally going to the dogs — and the cats, and the ferrets, and the parrots –…
Last Friday, John Bray landed on the ground outside our office, a bullet in his chest. On Saturday, his killing landed on the front pages of both dailies, already labeled “road rage” — the first such deadly instance in Denver. But by Sunday, Bray’s death rated just an inside mention…
Pity the poor Denver City Council members who get caught napping after Monday night’s meeting. On Tuesday, May 2, “the City will begin enforcing ordinances that prohibit trespassing, including sleeping overnight, at any City and County Building,” according to an April 20 memo from the Department of Human Services. “Notices…
All of Denver’s neighborhoods have character. Few have clout. Not the clout of Hilltop, certainly, which ten days ago wrested from Denver City Council a moratorium that temporarily bans lot-splitting in the pricey neighborhood, where the stuff inside the residents’ wallets is as green as those big, broad lawns that…
With a Republican in the governor’s office — a Republican who, during his 1998 campaign, told the Christian Coalition he supported banning tax money from going to organizations that provide abortions — and Republicans dominating both sides of the Colorado Legislature, I thought by now we’d be teaching creationism in…
