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On the way to Invesco and Obama, a stop by a meth lab

Meth ahoy!
Those waiting to get into Invesco Field at Mile High last night to hear Barack Obama’s acceptance speech went on quite an odyssey as the queue snaked this way and that through the stadium’s asphalt wasteland. Attendees were forced to clamber down hillsides, guard against line cutters at parking-lot switchbacks, fend off hordes of T-shirt hawkers – and, unbeknownst to many, amble by a former meth den.

At one point, the line ran through the trash-strewn alley behind Angel’s Sports Bar. Along the way, line-goers may have spotted a few boarded-up doors adorned with orange tape and warning signs (see photo). That’s where the bar’s owners found a squatter doing meth in the summer of 2006. While the Denver Department of Environmental Health determined there was no lasting contamination to the building, apparently no one’s ever bothered to remove signs of the bust – providing Invesco’s attendees with one more unusual spectacle along their long, winding journey toward history. – Joel Warner

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Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword in 1977; she’s been the editor ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly CPT12 roundtable Colorado Inside Out, played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City, once interviewed President Bill Clinton while wearing flip-flops, and has been honored with numerous national awards for her columns and feature-writing.
Contact: Patricia Calhoun

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