History Colorado Center: Are Coors bottles really part of the recycled floor?

"In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that." So said Mark Twain, and after the first historic week of the History Colorado Center, we have a quick correction: You may not be walking...

By Patricia Calhoun

May 4, 2012

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"In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that." So said Mark Twain, and after the first historic week of the History Colorado Center, we have a quick correction: You may not be walking on Coors bottles. When we'd toured the unfinished facility last fall, we were told that the floor included recycled bottles from Coors, itself a piece of Colorado history. But while a sign in the elevators notes that beer bottles might well be included in the composition of those floors... ...there's no guarantee that those bottles are from Coors.

A little revisionist history. Here's the official word from History Colorado spokeswoman Rebecca Laurie: "The floor is made with a variety of different types of recycled glass, including beer bottles, as we understand it. And while there's no way to know the percentage of what could be beer vs. other recycled glass (or of that recycled beer glass, what percentage could be Coors), given the popularity of Coors in the general market, there's likely Coors glass -- as well as other major brands -- in the floor."

And the rest is history.

Read Michael Paglia's review of the History Colorado Center (which he loved) and its contents (which he didn't) in his column "The new History Colorado Center is an architectural triumph" and see more suggestions in the Show and Tell post "Ten shows the History Colorado Center should have opened with."

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Patricia Calhoun is editor-in-chief of Westword, the alt-weekly she co-founded in September 1977. She’s been inducted into the Colorado Press Association Hall of Fame, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia Hall of Fame and the Colorado Restaurant Association Hall of Fame. She’s also received dozens of local, state and national awards for writing, including first place for feature writing and first place for column writing with the Society of Professional Journalists. Patricia is a weekly commentator on Colorado Inside Out, PBS 12's public affairs roundtable, which has won two Emmys.

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