Last night, for the first time in eight weeks, the garish holiday lighting of the Denver City and County Building was not my night-light. That’s because the city had finally flicked the switch, turning off the display at City Hall and packing up everything on the steps: Rudolph and his…
Governor Bill Ritter will celebrate Colorado Tourism Day this afternoon at the State Capitol, and there’s real reason to celebrate: The embarrassingly awful, Joan Rivers-ish “Let’s Talk Colorado” campaign has disappeared almost entirely, with just a few “Let’s Talk Colorado with the Locals Who Love It” videos buried on the…
“Have a voice,” urges the web site for Denver’s new zoning code, which has just been given its first major overhaul in 53 years. “Attend a meeting.” And that’s a good idea — because nowhere on the very elaborate, informative site can Denverites actually voice their thoughts about the code…
The Colorado Legislature officially went to pot yesterday, when Senator Chris Romer finally introduced what remains of his medical-marijuana proposal: Senate Bill 109, which would put a strict lid on the relationship between a doctor and a would-be medical marijuana patient. The Colorado health department was at the Capitol, too,…
Dear Readers: Siempre, the wisest words that appear in this column come from ustedes, y the following two cartas prove this maxim. The first one addresses my year-end column, in which a working-class gabacho insisted his people apapachan a Mexicans mucho: Dear Mexican: Half-Mexican here. I was fortunate enough to…
“We don’t want to become another Los Angeles,” Denver city councilman Charlie Brown said after touring that city’s pot dispensaries, which outnumbered L.A.’s Starbucks outlets, in urging his fellow councilmembers to come up with some regulations for Denver’s booming medical marijuana industry. Mission accomplished. Although L.A.’s city council had been…
The horrors of Haiti hit close to home for Mary Nguyen, owner of Parallel 17: Her husband, Raphael Jouvenat, is from there. “Haiti has always been a poor country; a country with political turmoil and limited resources neglected by most of the world,” she writes. “However, it is the place…
Dan Jeune chose the most unlikely place to look for people who wanted to help Haiti: the bars of LoDo. Luke Turf watched Jeune, a native of Haiti whose father is a minister, recruit among the hat boys and frat boys, and then followed Jeune and the group he’d gathered…
One day back in 1985, one of the Westword artists who lived at the edge of Highland — we called it Barbaria then — called with a tip about a great storefront burrito at this new place, Rosa Linda’s. He was right, and we quickly became lifetime fans of the…
The country’s largest parade in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. will kick off this morning in Denver, Colorado, a mid-sized city with a small black population, but a big record of fighting for equality. Wilma Webb, then a state legislator, was instrumental in pushing to make MLK Day a…
Forget Charlie Sheen. The biggest scandal in Aspen these days involves Dan Sheridan, a 44-year-old singer musician who’s lived in that mountain town more than twenty years, doesn’t like some of the changes he’s seen, and describes them very eloquently in his song “Big Money.” But while Sheridan croons that…
Worried about who’ll be running Denver while John Hickenlooper is running for governor? Fear not: councilmember-at-large Doug Linkhart (who’s rumored to be taking a look at running for mayor himself) is on the job, as he explains in his latest e-mail blast, “Hick Up! Not a Problem.” Which ends with…
Dear Mexican: I’m surprised by the choice of the word “amnesty” by those who would demonize immigration reform, especially in the South. Doesn’t the modern well-being of many Southerners derive in some way from their ancestors’ having sworn to amnesty oaths, both before and after the Civil War? Isn’t it…
Colorado was the first state to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, and the annual Marade, the march/parade in his honor, is the largest in the country. So how does Denver Public Schools mark this august occasion? By offering a lunch menu on January 15 — the same day…
It may be “giddyup” time for John Hickenlooper, but his announcement that he does not plan to resign as Denver mayor in order to run for Colorado governor put a major “whoa” on all the dark horses already preparing for a run at the top slot at City Hall. And…
First Atomic Cowboy started serving pizza, thanks to the addition of Fat Sully’s. Now it has fresh biscuits and sausage gravy (made fresh daily), along with other Southern breakfast comfort-food items, courtesy of the Denver Biscuit Company, which just opened inside the Bluebird District hangout at 3237 East Colfax Avenue…
Our throats were dry, our eyes were red. Blame it on pot. Specifically, on listening to four hours of pot testimony and discussion — on top of the salute to the National Western Stock Show and another hour of civic housekeeping — at last night’s Denver City Council meeting. But…
On the 1400 block of Market, the Ruth’s Chris space is still dark and the former home of Buca di Beppo is slated to become a medical marijuana dispensary — but Gaslamp got the lights on this past weekend. Gaslamp is owned by Greg Gallagher, who also owns the Front…
Despite suggestions that he hold his horses and wait to see what the Colorado Legislature does, Charlie Brown pressed on with his proposal to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city of Denver, and that proposal will go to a vote of the full council tonight, after a two-hour public…
The Fort will be closed from January 11 through January 21 for a kitchen renovation — the first since the Morrison restaurant, a recreation of Bent’s Old Fort, was built out of 80,000 handmade adobe bricks back in 1962. Some of those bricks are right behind the dishwasher, which helped…
Governor Bill Ritter hosted more than thirty business leaders at the Governor’s Mansion yesterday for a roundtable discussion of one of his major priorities for 2010: job creation. But Ritter had already given job creation a major push the day before, when his official announcement that he would not run…
As the owners of 8 Rivers, their fourth restaurant, Wanda James and Scott Durrah know the food business. And as the owners of Apothecary of Colorado, the medical marijuana dispensary they opened in December at 1730 Blake Street, just two blocks from their restaurant at 1550 Blake, they know their…
