It’s impossible to travel through Five Points without thinking of Charles Cousins. His signs are everywhere — offering this property for rent, announcing that his company manages another. But Cousins, who passed away Monday morning at the age of 91, left his mark in so many other ways. The history…
Yes, the Nuggets are advancing, but Colorado can already claim a real winning team: the East High Constitutional Scholars, who just won the We the People contest in Washington, D.C. — for the third year running. The high schoolers are already preparing to make it four in a row, but…
With two cases of swine flu (the “other white flu”) confirmed in Colorado and bumbling Vice President Joe Biden calling for quasi-quarantine, it could be time to go to your bookshelves and dust off that copy of The Stand, Stephen King’s 1978 novel. In this epic (it was re-released, uncut,…
After pork producers and Israeli officials complained about the name “swine flu,” world health authorities have come up with a new name for the pending pandemic: “the other white flu.” Variations on that joke have been flying around the Internet for days, but to Brian Gansmann, who was on the…
Andrew Speaker, Denver’s accidental tourist, has some sense of timing. Speaker, the focus of our last international health-scare when he went on the lam, and in the air, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and warned not to fly, this week filed suit against the Centers for Disease Control for invasion…
Dear Readers: As you drinko por Cinco on May 5, please hold on to this column listing songs that mariachis will gladly play instead of having to glumly strum through the umpteenth “La Bamba” and “Guantanamera.” The following eclectic choices (and reasoning) came from hundreds of suggestions submitted by wabs…
At Greetings From Colorado, a store on the A concourse of Denver International Airport, don’t expect to find many actual Colorado greetings. Yes, there are cards from Leanin’ Tree, the Boulder-based Western art emporium that Edward P. Trumble founded back in 1949; and gilded aspen-leaf jewelry created in this state;…
“Colorado Speaks for Itself.” That’s the tagline of a new Colorado tourism campaign, a variation on the old “Let’s Talk Colorado” that puts quote marks around pretty pictures of the mountains. But sadly, the campaign can’t leave well enough alone. A pricey two-page spread in the April 20 edition of…
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…
