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Across town last weekend — the first full weekend since smoking was banned in restaurants, saloons, and small family farms if the pigs object — Off Limits came across people throwing nicotine fits.
But amid all this chaos, unexpected order: At Paris on the Platte, the coffeehouse that pioneered the 1500 block of Platte Street long before the area was remotely hip (the venerable My Brother’s Bar being the exception that proved that rule), loyal patrons sat happily inside, smoking their Dunhills and cloves. And it was all legal!
“For the past twenty years, we’ve sold import cigarettes and cigars way over 5 percent of our gross sales,” says owner Jeffrey Maguire, referring to one of the smoking-ban bill’s loopholes that allows cigar bars to stay in business. (It helps, of course, that the price point on Paris’s other amenities — coffee, pastries — is so low.) “Eventually, I’m sure we’ll have to go to court and get an injunction and show that we’ve met the guidelines of the law. But Denver has not been responsible in getting some way of going out and verifying the sales figure so that you could have a certificate or something that would designate you as a cigar bar.”
Should Paris’s status as an exempt cigar bar be challenged, Maguire has no doubt that he can blow enough smoke to beat the bureaucrats. “My personal feeling is that America and democracy were never meant to have a majority designate to a minority,” he says. “There are seventeen Starbucks that are non-smoking within a few miles of Paris. People definitely have a choice. The non-smoking advocates are saying we don’t want a choice for anyone. But what would life be like if you couldn’t make a bad choice?”
Good question.
And one worth asking in the 11900 block of East Colfax Avenue, where a Starbucks might be a welcome sight at this point. Certainly more welcome than the three bums that Myron Melnick spotted sitting and smoking out front of the Zephyr Lounge when he pulled up to his place Tuesday — and they weren’t even customers. “I’ve spent three years not letting people loiter out there,” he says. But all that changed on July 1, and now if his patrons want to smoke, they have no choice but to go outside, where they get to mingle with some of Aurora’s less savory elements.
“This law was created to relieve the employees of smoke in their faces,” Melnick adds, “but this looks terrible. It makes a big mess, and we’re having to police these people.” This past weekend, he reports, one woman had her purse snatched when she was out having a cigarette (the Zephyr crew managed to catch the scofflaw), and another woman got beaten up after she went off with a man — a non-customer — whom she met while smoking out front. “It’s been some of the worse days I’ve had here,” Melnick sighs. “If you have ten, fifteen people out smoking, they’re not in here drinking.”
Melnick has hopes of putting a patio outside the bar that’s been in his family for three decades, and using an $80,000 community-development grant from Aurora to do it — but so far, the city is insisting that the grant be used to fix up an adjacent parking lot, even though it, and the motel next to it, are likely to disappear sooner rather than later. “The city still wants to go through with it,” he says, “then rip it all out within a year. I’m saying we should put the money into the part of the building that’s going to stay.”
The award for the fastest patio construction in town could go to Phil’s Place, at 35th and Larimer, which added a modest little enclosure in back — complete with Corona banners, plastic chairs and an ornamental toilet holding some posies — a few days before the ban took effect. But it was worth the effort, because Phil Garcia and his parents, Gary and Junie, were able to buy the building outright from the convoluted group of relatives that controlled it. And ban or no, Junie Garcia continues to runs a smokin’ kitchen, with some of the hottest green chile in town (“Chile Today,” October 14, 2004).
She perfected that chile while working down the street at the Bamboo Hut, a joint at 2449 Larimer that deserves an automatic exemption to the ban. This classic dive really needs cigarette haze for atmosphere — and to cover the aroma raised by years of spilled beer and sweating bodies. But the dive’s regulars were out of luck last weekend as they sat at the bar watching a salacious Court TV murder mystery, the blue-and-white “Thank you for not smoking” signs silently mocking them.
Toke of the town: When The Early Show‘s Winnebago hits town Friday, it will broadcast — briefly — from the Civic Center. That was the choice of CBS morning star Harry Smith, but the former Denver radio personality/Channel 7 reporter won’t be on board. No, weatherpersonality Dave Price will be doing the honors, broadcasting live from Denver — as he is from sixteen cities across the country during the “Great American Vacation” tour.
Denver plans to take full advantage of its 1.75 minutes of fame, and is encouraging residents — particularly those in the tourism-and-hospitality industry — to show up at the park at 4:45 a.m. Although that’s fifteen minutes before Denver’s parks officially open to the public (the parks close each night, the better to discourage the homeless from sleeping out under the stars, and drug dealers from making this the really Mile High City), the Denver Police Department will no doubt look the other way for this boosterism bonanza.
And how best to sell the city for 105 seconds at 6 a.m.? We’d recommend having one of Denver’s burrito vendors — an entirely homegrown institution — knock on the Winnebago’s door. And offer some of Junie Garcia’s green chile on the side.
Scene and herd: On Saturday, Jared Polis, multi-millionaire member of the Colorado Board of Education, was at JR’s Bar & Grill to celebrate his recent coming-out in style. Except that Polis doesn’t really have any fashion style, according to one Off Limits operative. We’ll just have to take it on faith that Polis is gay.