Walt Stinson began selling stereos in the West Washington Park neighborhood back in 1972. By 1984, his business was doing so well that Stinson expanded into a warehouse/office building on South Logan Street, just north of I-25. The back side of that structure, with the ListenUp logo painted prominently across…
The transition from jock to jock talker isn’t always easy, especially when the subject is football. On-the-field talent, and the fame that comes with it, is no guarantee of success (Joe Montana, perhaps the greatest quarterback ever, flopped as an analyst), and neither is a controversial nature (longtime lightning rod…
There are so many reasons to detest the French that it’s hard to choose the best ones. Their capitulation to Hitler during World War II holds up pretty well, as does their icy disdain for anyone with the nerve to be from another country. As movie director Billy Wilder once…
Net Gains Hat’s off: Steve Jackson’s “Caught in the Net,” in the August 30 issue, was a great story — extremely comprehensive, an interesting read, and well-written. I’ve known Cassandra since she was about six years old, and my husband and I are close friends of her parents. Through them,…
He waved at the fourteen-year-old girl crossing the motel parking lot. She looked great: shorts, a little white blouse, her brown hair in a ponytail that bounced as she walked toward him. He was high as a kite on the methamphetamine that he’d promised her would make for a better…
Earlier this month, city planners, neighborhood activists and assorted bureaucrats gathered around three tables in a community meeting room. At the center of each table was a huge black-and-white aerial photograph of the northeastern edge of downtown Denver, extending north toward Manual High School and east to the hospital district…
East Village isn’t the only turf war on downtown’s northeastern edge. The largest empty parcel of land in the neighborhood sits at the corner of 22nd and Washington streets, directly behind the Safeway and right across the street from East Village. Uptown Partnership, a nonprofit developer that’s been rehabbing abandoned…
The swimming pool, gone. The running track, closed. The handball court, extinct. Consider such archaic facilities knocked down, cleaned out and forgotten in favor of a newer and thoroughly modern vision of the downtown Denver YMCA. As the outreach slogan of the nonprofit organization reminds members, the 21st-century YMCA is…
Area cultural organizations can stop worrying — for now — about whether Colorado’s Ocean Journey will detract from their sales-tax revenues by becoming a part of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District. Instead, they can focus on changing the way that money from the special taxing district is distributed. The…
In its summer edition of the members-only zoo review, the Denver Zoo addresses the unfortunate rampage of Hope the elephant. Hope, who had been performing a daily, and much-hyped, Elephant Walk alongside a baby elephant named Amigo, escaped from a bathing area on June 10 and ran willy-nilly through the…
When the business wings of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post were fused earlier this year via a joint operating agreement, many observers predicted that competition between the news departments, left independent by the pact, would go the way of those dinosaurs not cute or scary enough to…
Remember Caine? Not the biblical guy, but Kwai Chang Caine, the half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin priest who wandered the old American West in the 1970s television series Kung Fu. Played to subtle perfection by David Carradine — he didn’t look Chinese, exactly, but you knew he was, because he spoke really…
Bad News Bear Trouble’s bruin: Your “Bear Facts,” in the August 23 issue, was in extremely bad taste. A reason, if not the reason, bears are moving to lower altitudes is to find food. There are various reasons for this: development, and a late spring snow that killed their higher-altitude…
It’s the middle of the day, but more than a dozen employees of House of Blues Concerts have gathered in the small conference room of the company’s Greenwood Village offices. It’s party time. Again. In-house festivities have become commonplace around here lately. On June 20, Barry Fey announced that he…
Like most people in the live-music trade, Doug Kauffman, Jesse Morreale and Chris Swank, the three partners behind the promotion firm Nobody in Particular Presents, are colorful, argumentative, shoot-from-the-lip types. But not these days. Ever since August 6, when NIPP filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver against…
Joseph Adams has flashbacks sometimes. In those moments, he practically relives the time he spent in a prison cell in Kuwait, the beatings and interrogations, the terrible feeling of not knowing when or if he would see his family again. But the bad memories are only part of it. They…
This past month, Colorado has witnessed an unprecedented migration of bears into urban areas — a veritable ursineapalooza as bears rummage through suburban backyards, fish in wading pools and slurp through Pepsi-Cola plants. “People are encroaching on bear habitat,” the DOW’s Scott Hoover told NBC on Sunday. “They are going…
A Weld County landscape firm that declared bankruptcy in April has continued to hire Spanish-speaking immigrants and to pay them with worthless checks, say former employees. Applied Landscaping Solutions, which works extensively in Longmont and Broomfield, has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In addition, Boulder County…
When former Colorado attorney general Gale Norton was President George Dubya Bush’s surprise pick to be the nation’s new Interior Secretary, enviros quickly labeled her “James Watt in a skirt.” Watt, the controversial Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan, was a man who had as much of a penchant for putting…
Have you heard? Baseball players are as sensitive as ballerinas. Slip a single off-color rose into your favorite center fielder’s bouquet and he’ll weep at the beautiful incongruity of it. Should ancient Mrs. Trumpington speak crossly at Madame Beltone’s fortnightly reading circle, the average big-league shortstop will avert his eyes…
Stadium Blanket Coverage Flag on the play: Enough already about the new stadium! In your August 16 paper, I had to read about it in Patricia Calhoun’s column, and in Michael Roberts’s media column, and even in Off Limits. About the only place there wasn’t a discussion of the new…
In mid-June, Farrell “Mack” McMahon of Garden City, Missouri, woke up, smoked the first of many cigarettes, and came to a decision. Then he went into town and had his hair cut for the first time in ten years. Long white locks fell to the floor, along with the remains…
