Denver Could Elect to Have a Night Mayor Help Bring Back Downtown After Dark

After last call on July 17 last year, shots echoed outside Larimer Beer Hall, at the intersection of 20th and Larimer streets, the dividing line between LoDo and the Ballpark neighborhoods.

While confronting Jordan Waddy, a 23-year-old club-goer with a gun who'd been in an altercation that night, three Denver Police Department officers fired their weapons, injuring six bystanders and Waddy, who never fired his gun.

A grand jury decided to indict one of those officers, Brandon Ramos; both he and Waddy are now making their way through the legal system.

It was the most dramatic episode in decades of problems when bars and clubs in the LoDo, Ballpark and, now, RiNo neighborhoods let out, but it had pundits once again wringing their hands over what they consider a Denver in decay.

And even those who recognize that reputation as overblown think Denver could use an infusion of energy and a redirection if it's going to draw people back downtown and support the live-music venues and other creative outposts already there.

“It’s very urgent,” says Stephen Brackett, founding member of the band Flobots and nonprofit Youth on Record, and currently Colorado’s Music Ambassador. “We have an opportunity to course-correct for the city, and we have this very small window, and if we don't...it feels like cultural erosion is what's happening. We're just losing more and more of the topsoil. The identity of the city is being wiped away. As much as that means a lot to me as someone who has lived in Denver my whole life, it also has devastating impacts for what makes a city successful.”

"It feels like cultural erosion is what's happening. We're just losing more and more of the topsoil."

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Brackett is part of a new nonprofit, the 87 Foundation, whose mission is to preserve Denver’s cultural identity and build a vibrant nightlife by developing programming and events that honor the city's history and give its residents a voice in its future.

The 87 Foundation is using the revitalization of the building that was long home to El Chapultepec as a case study. The legendary jazz club at 1962 Market Street, just two blocks from the site of the July 2022 shooting, opened during Prohibition and closed in December 2020 in part because of the pandemic, and in part because the patriarch of the family who owned it had passed, and his daughters didn't want to deal with the area’s growth and the club's proximity to drunk baseball fans pouring out of Coors Field.

For a while it was leased to Valentes Corleons, a notorious LoDo club owner whose legal name is Hussam Kayali, but in November 2022, Monfort Companies bought the building and the Giggling Grizzly next door for $5.8 million.

Now the 87 Foundation is trying to determine how to restore what's left of the space after Corleons largely destroyed it, and how to use it as an example of the importance of maintaining cultural touchstones.

“That's just one of the more famous ones that we've lost,” Brackett says. “How do we start changing the ecosystem to start making sure that we keep the ones that we have and create new ones where there are gaps? With the city growing and growing, every neighborhood deserves to have its place of cultural relevance where people can participate.”

That’s particularly important in downtown Denver, which has gone through other tough periods. In fact, forty-plus years ago, the 16th Street Mall was authorized by the federal government as a way to revitalize a downtown center. Many of the old warehouses of lower downtown Denver would have been razed, as many downtown buildings already had been, if then-Mayor Federico Peña had not worked to designate LoDo as a historic district in 1988.

The opening of Coors Field just northwest of LoDo in 1995 brought more people to the area and inspired the creation of more nightlife venues. But as growth continued, creatives got priced out of the old warehouses and went to other parts of Denver...and then out of Denver altogether.

“Unfortunately, what was happening downtown has now spread throughout the entire city,” Brackett says. “We are truly hemorrhaging creatives.”

For most of his 44 years, he says, Denver’s vitality has come in waves. But right now, it feels like there isn’t a captain on the ship.

“All of this is not because people were doing things wrong," he adds. "It’s because there’s no way to come together on the planning. What is the best way for this to work? What are the best practices? I want to make that more concrete.”

And so Brackett and others involved with the 87 Foundation contacted someone in a position that they think could help Denver, too: a night mayor.

The Night Mayor Concept

Howie Kaplan was one of the original beer vendors at Coors Field before he moved to New Orleans in 1997. There he founded a music venue called the Howlin’ Wolf, managed many bands and became part of the National Independent Venue Association, which fought to sustain music venues during the pandemic.

After the shutdown, venue operators in New Orleans formed a political action committee to support candidates who would give nightlife the attention and care it deserved. “There are 50,000 people in the hospitality industry in the city of New Orleans,” Kaplan says. “There is no industry that comes even close to employing as many people, and we just wanted to make certain that those people had a voice.”

All of the candidates supported by the PAC won, and at their urging, New Orleans formed the Office of Nighttime Economy. In August, Kaplan became its founding director — essentially a night mayor for New Orleans, someone in city government who focuses on culture, nightlife and entertainment outside traditional operating hours.

Since then, he's talked to as many people as he can about the importance of that city's nighttime economy. “In New Orleans, our culture is everything,” Kaplan notes. “So that's what I've been doing for the last year: mediation, doing things that direct public safety, figuring out what the city needs the office to be — not necessarily what I think it should be.”

Denver has a similar number of people working in the hospitality industry, with about 50,000 jobs in accommodation and food services in the city in 2022, according to the Denver Office of Economic Development & Opportunity. That's a sizable enough constituency for Denver to have a night mayor, too, Kaplan says.

Other cities around the country have been creating night-mayor positions to focus on gaps in their cultural landscapes. Sarah Hannah-Spurlock has been the nighttime economy manager for Fort Lauderdale since 2018. Originally, her position was created to address the negative perception of so-called “nighttime nuisances” with a team that worked overnight to combat those issues, but after budget cuts, she shifted her focus to advocacy for the hospitality industry.

Austin officials realized early on that the Texas city needed to focus on supporting live entertainment and created a music office in the early 2000s. Brian Block, that city’s entertainment services manager, became its night mayor. “It became clear right away that it was more than just supporting and managing the live-music venues,” he says. “It really needed to be about all of nightlife.”

In Seattle, Scott Plusquellec’s role as nightlife business advocate emerged after a nonprofit worked closely with the city to improve contact between the government and music, arts and nightlife.

“I am the inside-the-city person who they can come to if they have issues,” Plusquellec says. “But I'm also here to advocate and advise city officials on the needs of the industry so that we can develop policies and programs that enhance it, grow it, support it and make it a more vibrant and better place.”

The work of a night mayor isn't merely about policing and eliminating nuisances; it’s about encouraging the positives and making sure all the pieces fit together. That’s what Sacramento realized it needed when it hired Tina Lee-Vogt to lead its Office of Nighttime Economy.

While most of these night mayors help with code compliance and managing safety in entertainment districts, their primary role is to serve as a liaison between the city's day-to-day operations and its nighttime culture.

“The job is, in and of itself, about bringing together stakeholders and making those connections and being a catalyst for conversations,” Plusquellec says. “There's a lot, but if you work really hard to cultivate those relationships, it can be pretty easy.”

As Kaplan notes, nightlife operators are sometimes hesitant to ask sticky questions of the city because they fear putting themselves on the radar for potential enforcement action. With a night mayor, they have a point of contact who isn’t an enforcement authority. “Because I'm somebody in the industry, people are still afraid a little bit," he says, "but they recognize that my first thing is, ‘Look, I'm not here to run a ticket. I'm here to find a solution.’”

These jobs involve making city processes work for the hospitality industry. Hannah-Spurlock, for example, streamlined the alcohol permitting system in Fort Lauderdale. Before she took over as night mayor, operators had to apply for extended-hours permits to serve alcohol past midnight or 2 a.m., depending on the district. That created unnecessary paperwork, since she determined that nearly every operator wanted the choice to serve alcohol later.

“We eventually just did away with the whole extended-hours permits, and now anybody can serve alcohol after midnight,” Hannah-Spurlock says.

Lee-Vogt took her night mayor job last fall, after twelve years of managing Sacramento’s entertainment permit program. “The biggest goal that we have is just to make sure that we have a safe and vibrant city,” she says. “We really want to make sure that we have a nighttime economy that provides opportunities for people to get together and socialize.”

For nightlife operators, it can be hard to navigate the tangle of police departments, licensing departments, transit agencies and event permitting, as well as simply dealing with people. A night mayor is the lighthouse in that storm.

“My job is to advocate for the nighttime cultural economy of the city of New Orleans and her culture bearers,” Kaplan says. “A culture bearer can be a musician, it can be a Mardi Gras Indian, it can be a baby doll, it can be a sous chef, it can be someone running an Airbnb. … Culture isn't any one thing. It's overpowering and overreaching, and so we need to make sure that we're protecting all of those people.”

According to Hannah-Spurlock, the pandemic crystallized the need for night mayors because the hospitality industry took such a hit. “We worked really hard to help mitigate those devastating impacts by trying to come up with policies to allow them to have more outdoor dining, for example,” she says.

To share knowledge, tips and best practices, night mayors across the country formed the Nitecap Alliance, a professional organization that helps them leverage their positions.

“We advocate for good policy, good governance and policies that help cities’ nightlife,“ Hannah-Spurlock says. “Not just the entertainment part of nightlife, but also those who live and work at night."

And Nitecap, with fifteen member cities, is there to help others that want to explore the night mayor concept.

“I really encourage other cities to do this,” Plusquellec says. “The pandemic really showed us how important this industry is.  ... I love my job. I love making these connections and helping people, and nothing makes me happier than seeing a venue thrive and get through a difficult time. I would wholeheartedly endorse Denver doing something like this.

"A city that neglects its nightlife is neglecting a huge aspect of its culture."


The 87 Foundation team has been talking to different stakeholders in the Denver entertainment scene about the nighttime economy. Brackett says he’s noticed that while people are craving solutions to challenges ranging from staff shortages to city red-tape tangles to violence, they don’t feel like there’s a way to get there.

“All we're able to do right now is kind of present that, oh, this part of the neighborhood is on fire to the police officers,” Brackett says. “There's no way of even gathering any of the data on the size of the emergency, the scope of it. Nobody is gathering it.”

A Denver night mayor could gather that information and find ways to act on it. That person would oversee nightlife — including bars, restaurants, venues and after-hours entertainment — as well as work on safety, solve questions about transportation at night and look to other solutions for making the city responsive at times when the government is traditionally closed.

"They really help to coordinate what happens in our cities in the evening time," says state Representative Leslie Herod, who's looked into the night mayor concept. "They help to train bartenders and hospitality workers around how to engage with the clientele that is coming together to create safety. They really highlight and focus on the safety of our neighborhoods and our creative districts, but also ensure that everyone can participate in a safe way that is safe for all of us, including our artists and performers and the party-goers."

Taking a cue from his grassroots activism work with Flobots, Brackett has been collecting anecdotal and experiential evidence of what's working for some venues.

He points to Handsome Boys Hospitality, headed up by Josh Schmitz, which has taken over the space across from 87's base on the other side of Market Street. Until March, it was occupied by El Tejano, along with Loaded and Smash Face Brewing; Schmitz's group replaced them with five new concepts. El Tejano was often the site of violence and arrests, but since Handsome Boys put its spin on the area, there haven't been any problems. Brackett credits Schmitz with training his staff to be welcoming and polite, and to redirect patrons who seem like potential trouble.

“There are little best practices that will immediately start showing results,” says Brackett, who notes that there's no official process for sharing these practices. “If we started having a group where all these different bar owners are looking at their own numbers and they're like, ‘Wait, Josh, your numbers are so much lower on these kinds of instances. What are you doing?’ — we can share these out.”
Schmitz is down with the idea of a night mayor for Denver. LoDo's neighborhood association has meetings with the Denver Police Department, he notes, but there isn’t enough collaboration between all of the entities related to nightlife to make real strides.

“Denver's growing enough to where we need to start to look for out-of-the-box solutions,” Schmitz adds.

While these conversations are important, Brackett says that turning words into action is key.

In other cities, night mayors have done just that. Safety is a big concern, and Hannah-Spurlock and Kaplan both say that improving access to public transportation at night is important, especially for the employees who make nightlife work and may not be able to afford parking near their jobs.

“When I've been talking to people about what feels more dangerous, it’s traversing between the different parts,” Brackett says. “It used to be people would get up to the 16th Street Mall and walk to the ballpark, and a lot of people aren't willing to do that.”

Schmitz agrees that when people can easily navigate the streets, nightlife improves. Handsome Boys has a dance club, Disco Pig, in Larimer Square, which is closed off to cars. Even when the party spills into the street, pedestrians feel safer.

“That's a great model,” he says. “I don't understand why more entertainment districts don't have their streets blocked off.”

He’s not the only one pushing that concept in Denver. The DPD says it plans to close certain streets this summer to allow for faster emergency response; it declines to name those streets, though.

Right now, nights are quieter in Larimer Square because many buildings are closed for construction; meanwhile, things can get much livelier closer to the ballpark, particularly on the 1900 block of Market.

“I haven't lost faith in downtown,” Schmitz says. “I wouldn't say it's not safe, but it's definitely rowdier. It's definitely an entertainment block.”

“I haven't lost faith in downtown. I wouldn't say it's not safe, but it's definitely rowdier.

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A night mayor could solve some problems quickly, he suggests, by introducing shared safety improvements. For example, if every bar in the area got on the same ID system, that could prevent violence because people who'd already made trouble in one bar wouldn't be able to go elsewhere.

“For instance, if someone was kicked out of Whiskey Row — or kicked out of our space — and trying to go somewhere else, when they tried to get in there, they would automatically be notified that they'd been ejected from another location,” Schmitz says.

Such technology would run about $3,000 per business, which is a big ticket for small companies and those just getting started. But Schmitz says he's found the system very helpful at his own concepts, and suggests that a city program could help businesses purchase it with some kind of tax relief or rebate.

Schmitz also says that he and some other business owners would be willing to pay a small, additional tax that would go toward street sweepers, private security and community crisis responders in entertainment districts in order to make those spaces more unified and safer without putting more of a burden on the DPD.

Schmitz acknowledges that police response times are slow, but he also knows that the DPD is understaffed, and doesn’t think it’s fair to demand that the police department solve all nightlife problems.

“Honestly, it's on the business owners, too,” he says. “Even with COVID, there's a lot of business owners that are like, ‘Oh, the government will help me out. They're gonna take care of me through this.’ It's like, there's no cavalry coming to save small-business owners. We are the cavalry.”

Law and Order

During his tenure as night mayor, Kaplan has worked closely with the New Orleans Police Department to improve the nightlife situation. Together, they're pushing Narcan training and getting Narcan behind every bar, which Plusquellec helped pioneer in Seattle, too.

“That's what the night mayor's office should be doing,” Kaplan points out. “Helping these venues instead of just going to LoDo and putting thirty cops out there and waiting for the first problem.”

Getting more mental health support out in the community would also help, he says, as would teaching business operators how to better handle tough situations, removing some of the demand on police departments.

“Let's have a better conversation about what we can do to make things easier for the police,” Kaplan says. “That will be different in Denver or any other city. Each police chief could say, 'This is what we need help with.'”

According to a Denver Police Department spokesperson, it hasn't heard of the night mayor concept, but it wants to encourage everyone to engage in safe and lawful behaviors and is looking at best practices across the country.

Using shared knowledge to create solutions specific to each city is key, according to Nitecap Alliance members. And with the right tools, a night mayor can integrate out-of-state investors more successfully into a city's nightlife.

“What I would love to do, especially if we had an office of nighttime economy, would be to say, 'Here's some additional context for the place that you just invested in,'” Brackett says.

Kaplan says that following the money has been his biggest lesson so far.

“This is about dollars that help sustain families, and help sustain businesses that help sustain growth, that help sustain the reason why people move to a city like Denver,” says Kaplan, who was just back in the city. "I used taxis. I used bikes. I spent a ton of money. I took a ride out to Red Rocks. I went to restaurants. I bought stuff for my kids. Those are all dollars directly related to me engaging in something at nighttime. So why aren't we focusing on that?”

Denver has plenty of culture, he adds, but he thinks that city officials might need a reminder of that culture and how this is an attractive place to live. Denver isn't just about proximity to the outdoors; it's a thriving city where lots of dollars are being generated after 6 p.m. as people dine out, grab drinks and attend activities like concerts.

Cities also need to expand their definitions of who's part of the nightlife scene, notes Hannah-Spurlock, since there are people with alternative work schedules, such as nurses and cleaners, who need child-care options and commuting help at night.

Encouraging nightlife goes hand in hand with encouraging spaces where creatives can flourish. “Arts and culture is the canary in the coal mine of any city,” Brackett notes. “Nighttime economy is inextricably linked to music, arts and culture.”

That culture needs to be more accessible, he says, adding that he hopes that a night mayor would diversify entertainment options to include families and teens as well.

“Downtown Denver is now a place where it's borderline illegal to be a teenager,” Brackett says, adding that when he was a teen, there were places he could go downtown without spending a lot of money. “That's an actual crisis. That is a mental health issue. That is a talent retention issue. These are the kids who are going to determine if they're going to stay in the city or not, and if it's not for them, we will lose them.”

“Downtown Denver is now a place where it's borderline illegal to be a teenager."

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Herod is the chair of newly elected mayor Mike Johnston's inaugural committee. He wants to highlight culture at his inauguration, she says, and while she can't speak for him about programs, he's excited about what he's heard regarding the nighttime economy.

"Now it's time to get a little bit deeper into those conversations and to really determine what that could look like for Denver," Herod adds. "We're at a place in our city where we are starting a new chapter, which is a great time to get involved and to ensure that things like the creative economy or the night economy are a catalyst for how we will continue to grow."

But Denver's next mayor would have to choose the right person for a night mayor. It has to be a great facilitator who loves building relationships, who understands the bureaucratic process and is already connected to nightlife. It has to be someone who loves downtown Denver as much as the business owners trying to make a living there do.

“I care about the city a whole lot,” Schmitz says. “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's gonna be instances — it's a downtown metropolitan area — but don't let yourself be controlled by fear. Don't let some preconceived notion stop you from going and visiting those small-business owners, because we all need it.”

The June 13 Shooting

Another instance came up early on June 13, when a shooting at 20th and Market streets left ten people injured, including several people who had been celebrating the Denver Nuggets championship win. According to Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas, there were hundreds of police in the immediate area at the time, attempting to keep the party in check.

This time, no DPD officer fired a weapon. Instead, the officers triaged the scene and helped the injured quickly receive medical care; two suspects are in custody for what's been suggested might have been a drug deal gone wrong.

“Unfortunately, we know what has happened when you have gunfire in a large crowd in LoDo," Armando Saldate, executive director of the Denver Department of Safety, said at the press conference. "We've seen some very negative consequences of that. As I said, we've learned from our training and our tactics and our experience, and that response was evident."

The city worked across departments to prepare for what it knew would be a rowdy night in order to help keep everyone safe, Saldate added. That included businesses in areas that it anticipated would be affected, Thomas confirmed.

The department had already been changing its approach to handling nightlife in the area this summer. After the incident outside the Larimer Beer Hall last July, it's adjusted training to include strategies for preventing and de-escalating situations in large crowds.

“The department believes its previous proactive efforts and presence, especially during out-crowd hours, successfully prevented disturbances from escalating to violence and have also resulted in the recovery of firearms from the area,” says a DPD spokesperson.

“After the Nuggets game...we saw firsthand the risks of violence after dark, especially in LoDo," says mayor-elect Johnston, who was at Ball Arena that night. "But we have a unique opportunity to think proactively about activating positive activities for the city after dark in order to create joy across the city rather than fear. I’ve been encouraged by Stephen Brackett’s work here in Denver to drive forward the concept of a ‘night mayor,’ and I look forward to working collaboratively to invest in and prioritize a safe, vibrant nightlife economy.”

Instead of the litany of complaints about downtown safety, Brackett says people are ready to hear about solutions to improve the area.

“Where we're going right now is we will tend toward inaction and paralysis, and we'll just see our power slip away,” Bracket warns. “I still do feel like this nighttime economy, a night mayor...is going to be the real starter. Everybody I’ve talked to about it is excited. ... That's the whole point. You need people to say, ‘That sounds really exciting; I would love to be a part of that.’”

This story is on the cover of the June 15 issue of Westword, which went to press on June 12; it has been updated here to include responses to the shooting at 20th and Market early the next morning. Find out more about the 87 Foundation here.