Off Limits

The rest is history: Central City residents have been having a good laugh over all the bad press that Black Hawk, their affluent neighbor downstream, has collected with its proposal to move the truly historic Lace House to a fake “historic village” in order to expand casino parking. But the…

The Height of Insult

A long-running dispute between former Longs Peak ranger Jim Detterline and his bosses at Rocky Mountain National Park has taken another turn into pettiness: Detterline and a party of world-famous climbers, including best-selling author John Krakauer, were denied use of a mountain cabin this summer by park officials. Detterline, known…

The People’s Hired Gun

Nearly two years after it began, a federal lawsuit filed by a Denver police captain against Mayor Wellington Webb and other city officials has been all but buried in a blizzard of paperwork and legal maneuvering, with no end in sight. The suit, which alleges sexual discrimination and political retaliation…

Letters

The Egos Have Landed Until Patricia Calhoun’s “The Princess and the Peons,” in the September 11 issue, it looked like you’d lost interest in the Ramsey case. Too bad. I was hoping you could shed some light on the weird dance being performed by the police and the DA. Is…

War of the Words

The war between the sexes takes no prisoners–except children, who often earn their purple hearts during custody battles. Even after Anthony Roszel won the court fight to be named custodial parent of his daughter (won it twice, in fact), the war with his ex-wife, Keleigh Kasteile, wasn’t over. Not by…

What a Rush!

Down the tree-lined streets of the Hill in Boulder, where many of the University of Colorado’s fraternities are located, you can see the signs of an uneasy cease-fire in the booze war between CU frat boys and Boulder police. In the quiet blocks around the Greek houses, people walk their…

Spaced Out

In the mid-Eighties, investors from around the country began pouring money into a proposed real estate development just outside the town of Morrison. Over the next few years they wrote checks for tens of millions of dollars; one Pennsylvania bank alone injected close to $50 million into the project, called…

Hell to Pay

Flight attendant Joanne Berg-Goehl figured she’d hear from the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s office about why her ex-husband’s child-support payments had dropped off. Last year he was threatened with jail time if he didn’t pay her $1,000 immediately. Berg-Goehl got that money, thanks to a check processed by a company…

Fightin’ Words

If it’s true that the pen is mightier than the sword, it is equally true that the pen is not as tough as the almighty dollar. Knowing this, town officials who take offense at newspaper coverage of them have sometimes retaliated by pulling advertising from the offending publications. Those days…

Off Limits

Prints charming: What was Wellington Webb press secretary Andrew Hudson doing in the September 3 Denver Post, staring bug-eyed from the editorial pages as though he’d just been goosed by his former employers at RTD? Getting ready to goose much of the local press, it turns out. Riding the anti-media…

Hiring and Firing

With something like a half-billion dollars for construction of the Pepsi Center and the new Broncos stadium about to pour into Denver, questions about who will do the work are bubbling to the surface. And one of the biggest questions concerns the percentage of minority and women contractors–as evidenced by…

Losing at the Track

Every horse on the grounds comes equipped with four legs. It doesn’t really take Magellan’s navigational skills and two tanks of gas to get out there. The jockeys don’t lift your wallet in the parking lot, and anyone who brings three kids along is pretty likely to go home with…

The Princess and the Peons

Princess Diana’s body was barely back on British soil when the most unlikely people began acting like royal pains, comparing their own plights to that of the deceased princess. On September 2, Larry King’s live show got a surprise call from none other than Patsy Ramsey, who wanted to pop…

Letters

Duty to Di Was Kenny Be’s Princess Di Hip Tip, in the September 4 issue, really necessary? I enjoy reading Westword, but I think that cartoon was tasteless and disrespectful. Dana Murphy Northglenn Your last issue was another one avoiding all important life-and-death issues: this time, the untimely death of…

The Spin Crowd

The tango fanatics are easy to spot on a recent weekday night at the Washington Park Grill; they’re the ones crowding around a makeshift dance floor they’ve created by shoving a few tables out of the way. Already the room is buzzing, and the women, many of them older and…

It’s the Pits

Marshall “Slim” Hopkins stands on a windswept precipice in southern Teller County, a couple of miles outside the town of Victor. It is a place he comes to often, to take in what may be the most sobering view in all of Colorado. Looking west, Hopkins can see rolling hills…

The GOP? In Boulder?

Republicans in the Second Congressional District have ground a dozen different can-didates into fodder for David Skaggs and Tim Wirth. Next year, though, the name of the Democrat running for that seat will change, along with one other thing: The GOP may nominate somebody who has a chance to win…

Reform School

Although two high-profile campaign-finance reform measures are grabbing all the attention–and threats of lawsuits–the City of Westminster has quietly instituted a reform that’s effectively changed the system. And so far, there isn’t a lawsuit in sight. Both Amendment 15 and a new ban on contributions to RTD’s latest tax-hike measure…

Off Limits

Hail Mary: After Sunday’s Mile High opener, the most intriguing Monday-morning quarterbacking focused not on the late hit on John Elway, but on whether a deal’s in the works that could rid Denver of Pat Bowlen and ensure that any stadium vote is a hit with voters. Everybody knows that…

Forest Bumps

The nation’s top outdoor-recreation official, Lyle Laverty, isn’t scheduled to take over the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region until November, and Colorado environmentalists are already howling like a pack of wolves. “Recreation is the new game,” says Roz McClellan of the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, “and as a result,…

Old Flames

Now that the Padres and Rockies, newcomers to these proceedings, are peering up from the darkness, it cannot hurt to examine what they see high above. They see the Giants and the Dodgers, a couple of storied teams that would just as soon slash each other’s throats as exchange pre-game…

While You Were Away

Since I last visited the Lace House, back on Memorial Day, an entire tourist season has come and gone–without one tourist touring through what was once Black Hawk’s top (and arguably only) attraction. But that was in the days when people enjoyed the ramshackle charms of the old mining town…