From the word go, the as-yet-unnamed Denver justice center project, just west of the U.S. Mint on Colfax Avenue, has been a disappointment. First, starchitect Steven Holl, who was designing the courthouse portion of the complex, was dismissed — though paid in full — over cost estimate overruns that he…
Colorado’s powerful and compelling lobby of small, independent liquor store owners has once again managed to successfully kill a bill that would have let grocery and convenience stores share in their business. Senate Bill 149 – to allow full-strength beer and wine sales at those retailers – died 5-1 in…
Romance on TV generally sucks. Soap Operas ruin most of it, since love can’t be an ending on a show that never ends—so nothing ends happily, no one stays together, no one can resist the wiles of a hermaphroditic demon patch-eyed midget. But the regular network offerings don’t do much…
My wife and I have been told to arrive between 2 and 3 to get our tickets to see the Late Show with David Letterman. We arrive at a quarter to two just to be on the safe side, and people are already lining up. We’re one of the first…
January 23, 2008 by Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D The American Mid-West | The story of how On The Road was written is perhaps a better known story than the plot of On The Road itself: In 1951, a young writer named Jack Kerouac rolled several scrolls of teletype paper into his…
January 23 by David Amram The American Mid-West | As boy brought up on a farm in Pennsylvania in the late 1930s, I have never forgotten the love of trains, which our generation shared. The distant rattle and rumble of the steam locomotives pulling their freight and passengers across America…
“Scourge of the Underworld,” Alan Prendergast, February 7 Going Gangbusters! Kudos to Alan Prendergast for a marvelous story of crime and corruption in Denver in the early 1900s. Special applause for his use of the vernacular of the times.Joe GallegosDenver I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed…
Coors has called Colorado home for more than a century. Even after the Golden-based beer maker merged with Canada’s Molson, Coors remained tied to the Rocky Mountains when the combined company put its headquarters in Denver. But that could change after Molson Coors completes its planned merger with Miller Brewing…
On one of my favorite television shows, Friday Night Lights, there’s a character named Tim Riggins who’s an all-around stud. He has his problems with alcohol, sure, as well as father issues and occasional outbursts of violence, and he’s not the smartest Panther in Dillon, but the ladies all love…
The police blotter is among the most popular features in the Denver Daily News, and Daniel Williams is the reason. Weekdays for over three years, Williams has trekked to the tiny press room at the Denver Police Department’s Cherokee Street headquarters to page through reports, and until recently, he found…
For more than eight years, Sharon Skiba waited behind locked doors. Her life had stopped on February 7, 1999 — the day her son and nine-year-old granddaughter disappeared. In the days and weeks and months that followed, the house she’d once been happy to share with them became her prison…
In June 1975, Howard and Virginia Morton got a call from the boss of their eighteen-year-old son, Guy, in Arizona. He said that Guy had hitchhiked to Phoenix to try to get back the deposit on a car he couldn’t afford, and never returned to work. A dozen years later,…
The conspiracy theorists must be right: Denver International Airport is a gate to Hell. After all, what other than some diabolical force would deign to upset nerd-tastic musician David Byrne (he of the Talking Heads) as he tried to access his favorite websites while passing time in our fair airport?…
For most of us, the college experience—what we remember—lives on in two neat categories: “Never Again” and “I Found Myself.” This formative process produces “Don’t Remind Me” and “The Best Time of My Life,” where high-minded philosophies mix with pragmatic acceptances that retain extraordinary influence on our decisions, hopes, fears,…
After running with the idea of building a new and mostly subterranean Colorado History Museum within Civic Center for months (as discussed here in “Going Under?”) the board of the Colorado Historical Society, in a rare moment of clarity, formally rejected the idea at its January 31 meeting. The vote…
Single-game tickets for Colorado Rockies games will go on sale Febuary 16, and yes, the club will once again rely on Paciolan (now owned by Ticketmaster) for Internet purchases. Paciolan is the California company that handled last October’s World Series ticket debacle, which infuriated so many baseball fans when it…
Back in Representative Larry Liston’s day, people called ‘em as they saw ‘em, and Liston calls ‘em sluts. Or at least, that’s how the Colorado Springs Republican chose to describe unwed teenage parents on February 6 during a Republican caucus meeting. “In my parents’ day and age, they were sent…
A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Sean — one of my original commandoes, a hired gun whose long and noble service to the cause dated back to my first days here. An ex-chef and patissier, Sean was one of the first guys to eat with me professionally…
In 2002, Westword published its nineteenth Best of Denver issue, a celebration of the city that saluted everything from the Best New Festival (Frozen Dead Guy Days took the chill off March in Nederland) to Best Start for a New Neighborhood (the Millennium Bridge was beginning to rise above Riverfront…
January 19, 2008 by Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D Denver | Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, based in part on Kerouac’s own life traveling back and forth across the United States in the mid to late 1940s, was written in a spontaneous but highly disciplined style of writing, which very effectively documented…
I got this call at work two weeks back. It was someone asking me if I wanted tickets to go see David Letterman. Now, it’s been a longtime goal of mine to see David Letterman’s show in person. Late Nite or Late Show, either one, doesn’t matter. Whatever Dave’s doing…
