The bad news came not in a front-page story or on a TV broadcast. It arrived in a letter from the principal of Denver’s Fairview Elementary School. “I am very sad and regret to inform you of the death of one of our Fairview students,” Kathy Wiemer wrote to Fairview…
Welcome to Ver, Colorado. That’s the economical, creative side of the Mile High City. While Den is all about Cherry Creek and fur coats and sleepy thinking and SUVs that never go anywhere near the mountains, Ver is the edgy end of Denver. The place where necessity is the mother…
There’s no place like homeless for the holidays. At the initial meeting of the city’s new task force on homelessness, more than two dozen representatives of social-service organizations, the private sector and public office debated what to do with the residence-challenged folks who hang out on the 16th Street Mall,…
On Monday evening, there wasn’t a city booster in sight at the Diamond Cabaret & Steakhouse, the strip club that had just landed Denver all over the national press. No Angela Baier, Denver’s first-ever director of marketing. No Tom Clark, who heads the Metro Denver Network, the eco-devo branch of…
Pleased to Greet You While marketeers float puffy, potential slogans far above the Mile High City, one new program will take Denver’s message straight to the streets. Make that street — specifically, the 16th Street Mall. The Business Improvement District that stretches along the mall, both monitoring and funding its…
Hey, whined the city booster who’d just read my cheap shot at “Downtown Denver: A Great Place to Live, Work and Visit, or Dangerous Urban Jungle?,” the downtown residents’ forum held Tuesday night at — where else? — the Wynkoop Brewing Co., the restaurant founded by John Hickenlooper, now king…
“Meeting in fifteen minutes, people,” shouted the newspaper editor before slamming the door of his office. “That means everybody.” The water-cooler conversation started gushing. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. So the rumors were true: The paper was being sold. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. The paper being sold was not Westword, but the Denver…
“Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the city to help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness — that is, by defusing political, religious and ethnic tensions, both locally and globally — through the identification and implementation of any systematic, stress-reducing…
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” said Jorge Luis Borges. And standing at the gates to that paradise will be a librarian, one index finger pressed to pursed lips while the other punches the delete key on the computer system tracking patrons’ reading records,…
I’m waiting for the phone to ring. Shooting starts next week on Silver City, the political potboiler that renowned writer/director John Sayles has set in Colorado, giving the local film industry a much-needed boost and, come next summer, offering filmgoers what’s certain to be an eye-popping look at our state…
Come and listen to my story about a man named Bill A poor mountain guv barely filling his state’s till And then one day he was gunning for some cash When up from the ground came a grinning jackass… Tourist, that is… pure gold Texas twee How does this sound…
“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…
