At Monday’s tourism rally, Governor Bill Ritter urged us to “Rediscover Colorado” this summer. I started by walking the length of the 16th Street Mall at lunch yesterday, and found that this seventeen-block stretch — touted as the most successful pedestrian mall in the country and one of this town’s…
Verse came to worse last night at the Central Library, where close to a hundred people gathered for last night’s Fresh City Life poetry reading inspired by “Mustang,” Luis Jimenez’s blue horse sculpture out at Denver International Airport. We were in the depths of the basement, but spirits soared as…
Before we were panicked about swine flu and twisted by torture-memo leaks, we were terrified by the Devil Horse, Luis Jimenez’s killer sculpture that stands guard outside Denver International Airport, its red eyes shooting deadly lasers at unsuspecting passersby. Or are those glowing orbs actually illuminating this town’s deep well…
I’m looking out my back window over the Platte Valley, across the highway and the river and the railyards to Union Station, and thinking that I’ll never see the Ski Train pull up again. After close to seventy years, the last twenty of them under owner Phil Anschutz, the train…
One of Denver’s greatest draws is its strong network of neighborhoods, dozens of neighborhoods, each filled with advocates rooted to their particular patch of turf, but also to the city at large. And even in these depressing times, there’s good news coming from them. The EZE Mop Shopping District, a…
Dear Mexican: First of all, please don’t think that I’m a self-loathing Mexican; I was born in the U.S. to northern Mexican parents. As far as I know, my ancestry is just Indian, Spanish and a little French. For some strange reason, I have developed an intense fascination — and…
My first look at Colorado was from a train. When I was a kid, my family was part of a group that would pile onto the Denver Zephyr in Chicago late on a winter afternoon. While the parents sat up all night in a coach car, our cadre of kids…
Back in 1967, Stella Cordova was working as a cook at Chubby Burger Drive-In at 1231 West 38th Avenue when its owner, Bill Gray, asked if she wanted to buy the place. Even though she had a big family and little money, she took him up on his offer, paying…
With just a week to go until InDenverTimes decides whether to pull the plug or revise its business plan, news comes of yet another paid, online newspaper venture. This one is Journalism Online, another brainchild from Steven Brill, who brought us the magazines American Lawyer and Content (a now-defunct journalism…
While Mayor John Hickenlooper was outlining some of the ways that Denver is speeding up projects to stimulate the local economy, DIA aviation manager Kim Day yesterday announced plans for a 500-room hotel at the airport, which will be built right by the anticipated FasTracks stop. The hotel project could…
Dear Mexican: In an earlier column, you mentioned that conservatives can’t have an argument against illegal immigration without it degenerating into a diatribe against culture. Here’s an argument that has nothing to do with culture. In California, we now have a severe water shortage. I work for a municipal water…
Standing outside the EZE Mop building on an overcast Saturday, watching the cars roll past on 17th Avenue, Stephanie Shearer tries to figure out where her story really begins. Maybe it was ten years ago, when she and her husband, Chris Dacorn, were opening Soul Haus, a men’s clothing shop…
For five decades, the EZE Mop building at the corner of 17th Avenue and Franklin actually sold mops, earning a Best of Denver award back in 2002. But a few years later, David Jurenka closed up shop and put the building on the market.It soon became one of the most…
As protesters rally around the country at Tea Parties protesting Wall Street greed and increasing government incursions into private pocketbooks (Peter Boyles is broadcasting live from the State Capitol right now on KHOW/630 AM, although the Denver protest doesn’t officially start until noon), we get the final chapter in the…
Paula Woodward’s departure from Channel 9 is not good news — except for loafing workers and, probably, Woodward herself. She deserves a break after 32 years at the station, 32 years that have seen some major changes in the television business. Woodward popped up in one of the first issues…
State Senate President Peter Groff will be heading to Washington, D.C. after this legislative session ends to take a job in the Department of Education pushing faith-based programs. But first, he’s keeping the faith that the state’s $17.9 billion budget bill will be approved by the Senate today. The most…
Denver District Court Judge Larry Naves has yet to rule on whether the University of Colorado must give Ward Churchill his job back or pay to make him go away. But CU has already promised that it will “vigorously challenge” any effort by Churchill to rejoin the faculty. “Vigorously challenge”?…
Pinnacol Assurance gets a glowing endorsement in today’s Denver Post from former Governor Bill Owens, who notes that “in 2002, I signed a law requiring Pinnacol Assurance to operate like a business, meaning its liabilities would not be the state’s responsibility, while its assets were specifically protected from seizure by…
Dear Mexican: For as long as I can remember, Mexicans were known for doing three things: Drinking lots of cerveza, having lots of niños, and saying “¡Ay, caramba!” While I can vouch for the first two, I’ve never, ever personally heard a Mexican utter those famous two words. Is this…
An hour after getting all the appropriate permits, the long-awaited Houston’s finally opened this past weekend at 303 Josephine Street. This sibling of the Cherry Creek Grill and other restaurants in the Hillstone chain has an expansive, sleek dining room and an inexplicable eleven seats at the bar. Eleven seats?…
“In this country, we have to let every child — it doesn’t matter if they are documented or undocumented — live the American dream and have a chance to go to college,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yesterday on a tour of Bruce Randolph School with Michael Bennet, the…
A strong, independent streak runs through Colorado politics, a vein of common sense that cuts across party lines — and leads straight to Ari Armstrong, the creator of FreeColorado.com, and a man always ready to smack down political correctness. When Independence Institute head Jon Caldara was slapped for saying “bitch…
