Bland Hotel While I appreciate that Patricia Calhoun’s reference to my essay “The Loss of Zeckendorf Plaza” (“Razin’ in the Sun,” May 16) allows that even bureaucrats may have hearts, I do take issue with her charge that neither DURA nor the planning director put up much resistance to the…
The Lone Tree Golf Club describes itself as “a public country club,” and the oxymoron seems entirely fitting. The gabled roof of the 50,000-square-foot clubhouse looms over the fairway, and the club boasts a full-service restaurant and bar, a parquet dance floor, a boardroom, and even suites for overnight visitors…
“Anything’ll set you off,” says garage-door repairman Jerry Sutliff. It was a conversation in a restaurant that set Sutliff off one day last December. Another man was talking about his mother, who’d just died. “What got me,” Sutliff remembers the man saying, “was that Mom’s house was full of rooms…
A new lending institution, which some suspect is nothing but a novel way to lure personal-injury clients to hungry attorneys, has several local lawyers crying foul. Even Franklin D. Azar, the personal-injury attorney whose shameless television commercials have made him a household word, disapproves. “Somebody’s going to be in a…
If you are sixteen-year-old child-prodigy gardener Jonah Bradley on your day off, think polite reserve. Otherwise, just as you begin loading your cart with white petunias and nicotiana–and maybe the strange lime-green nicotiana known as “Starship,” which you have been thinking about privately all winter–some old lady will come up…
LoDo lowdown: On Tuesday, Lower Downtown District Inc. released its much-blabbed-about neighborhood plan charting LoDo’s aesthetic future. The draft document, yet to be approved by the city council, calls for a 100-foot height limit on new buildings in most of LoDo and a 100-foot puke limit for restaurateurs and bar…
Is the man who attacked you on the night of April 12, 1993, in this courtroom?” Heather Smith hesitated for a moment before taking her eyes off Denver Deputy District Attorney Doug Jackson. Everything she had been through in the past three years–the pain, the nightmares, the self-doubts–hinged on this…
Evidently, there are no limits on baseball’s current charms. Volatile Cleveland Indians outfielder Albert Belle, long a wrecker of locker rooms and teammates’ psyches, throws a baseball at a magazine photographer who has the temerity to take his picture, and American League president Gene Budig orders him to counseling. Self-absorbed…
Child’s Pay Michelle Dally Johnston’s April 25 story, “Adopting an Attitude,” was disconcerting to read, for three reasons: 1. If not for private adoption agencies, some of which are highly ethical and caring agencies, the only options left for Coloradans would be Social Services adoptions or attorney-led private adoptions. Social…
The skeletons of two large greenhouses stand at the back of Roy Obluda’s property. “I’ve been a little slow tearing them down,” he says. “Reluctant, I guess.” When they are gone, so will be the last physical reminder of 36 years in the flower business. Thirty-six years of growing carnations…
Prologue: It all started when a group of women in the Denver city treasurer’s office began going out to lunch together. In the end, all that was left was an $80,000 check and a receipt from Hooters. Laura R. Fisher sued the city after quitting her job as a senior…
The sun refused to appear last Thursday morning at the Regional Transportation District’s light-rail station at I-25 and Broadway, but nobody seemed to mind. There were plenty of other dignitaries on hand, and this was clearly Ben Klein’s moment to shine. Klein, the chairman of RTD’s elected board of directors,…
Paramedic Rick Stolte liked practical jokes. So did his co-workers at the Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton. During almost six years of working there, Stolte saw or participated in everything from snowball fights to cars stuffed with shredded paper to colleagues fooling around in the hospital’s computer system. Neither…
Time is about to run out on Colorado’s most irascible political entity. But the tiny Moffat Tunnel Commission is going down swinging. State legislators last week abolished the commission, an obscure state agency whose political monkey-wrenching in the past four years has drawn the wrath of some of Colorado’s most…
Unreal estate: Seems like only yesterday that Denver megadeveloper Larry A. Mizel, last week dubbed “dean” of real estate at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, was just another rich kid in Tulsa. Eventually, of course, he became George Bush’s mightiest fundraiser (he collected $1 million for the…
Imagine the Colorado Springs Sky Sox and the Toledo Mud Hens in the World Series. Or a field of $15,000 claimers running for the roses at the Kentucky Derby. Or a pair of unknown club pros playing the final at Wimbledon. That’s what this year’s Indianapolis 500 is going to…
This is Historic Denver Week, which neatly overlaps with National Historic Preservation Week. And so on Thursday, Mayor Wellington Webb is scheduled to speak on the “importance of preserving, renovating and reusing Denver’s historic structures.” He will do so at the newly refurbished Holtze Executive Place on 17th Street. No…
Rest in Piss Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s May 9 column, “Disturbing the Piss”: Although it is probably a waste of time to dispute the opinion of anyone who would use such a vulgarism in the title of her article, I feel I must try. Perhaps Ms. Calhoun does not mind “letting…
Legislators like to give the impression that they are part of a sacred mission. Working in dark-paneled chambers filled with high-minded speechifying, they create the laws that drive social policy, behavior and morality, all for the greater public good. Right. In reality, legislators can get awfully personal. So can their…
We help injured people…that’s our job!” “I know how to handle insurance companies; I used to be their attorney!” “I will fight for your rights!” “Been in an accident? Got your check yet?” On the tube there’s the guy in the tank who runs over a car, the woman in…
It’s one hell of a way to get ahold of somebody. But more than twenty years after US West assigned a devilish prefix to telephone users in the towns of Louisville and Lafayette, the communities are still getting their kicks dialing 666. Over the years, the numerical sequence has inspired…
That’s rich! Now that the Rocky Mountain News has cut back on its distribution area, it’s not as much fun to compare the two dailies’ creative-writing efforts that “interpret” the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Not surprisingly, both the News and the Denver Post found something to…
