1. The Rocky Mountain News
This was the BEST newspaper I've ever come across. I enjoyed going out every day to either a vending machine on the corner or a nearby convenience store, bringing the paper back to my apartment, sitting there and reading it before starting my day. I could practically read the whole thing from cover to cover. It was tabloid-style in its format, but not its content. This made it a lot easier to sit down and read. I was working at newsradio station in San Jose in 2009 when our network news reported that the paper was going to cease publication. I told the anchor/news director that the news was hard to hear because it was my favorite newspaper while I was living in Denver. He agreed that it was a good publication.
2. Westword
Since I'm on the subject of newspapers, I also have to give a shout out to my favorite alternative weekly of all time. Like The Rocky Mountain News, I enjoyed reading just about all the articles. It was this publication through which I found my apartment and attempted to find girlfriends. I liked it so much, I tried to get a job in their want ad department. When I interviewed, the person in charge said she was trying to move the want ad department from its appearance as a dorm room to that of a professional place of business. Well, gee, that was the whole I wanted to work there. I didn't get that job and I never saw any other opportunities for employment there.
3. Angelo's Pizza
This place was just a couple of blocks away from my apartment and they took credit cards. Anytime I got a craving for pizza and I didn't have any cash (which was often), I could go over there, get an individual-sized pizza and walk it back to my place while it was still hot. Every time I returned to Denver in the years after I had moved to San Diego, I would go there and eat. I just wasn't able to take it back to my apartment. It has since become Angelo's Taverna and now features an oyster bar. They still have pizza. But I'm not going to order an oyster pizza if I ever go back there again.
4. Senor Burritos
This place was right across the street from the Mayan Theatre. They had amazing burritos that you could order plain or smothered in verde sauce. The only problem was if you bit into a plain burrito, you would sometimes have butter shoot out the other end and it would drip past your hand, down your arm and mess up your shirt sleeve. When it first opened, it was just a little hole-in-the-wall to-go counter and just had a couple of people on staff. I went over there one day when everybody had left for some unknown reason. I went inside and waited about five minutes. Finally, they came running back in. When I paid for my burrito, I saw they had several hundred dollars in the register. With the amount of time I was there alone, someone could have easily come in and taken all their cash.
After I moved away, they were able to expand it to include a dining room. The last time I went was in December of 2009. I was in Denver for the funeral of my cousin Jend. Loyd and I stopped by the Mayan Theatre. I had originally planned to eat a breakfast burrito there the next morning. However, Loyd was hungry, so we decided to grab a quick snack of fries while we were there. I wasn't hungry enough for a full burrito at the time (they are very large), so I didn't order one. Come the next morning, all of our family decided to go have breakfast at Denny's across from the motel, so I couldn't have a burrito for breakfast. While Loyd and I were contemplating going to see a movie at 10am, we planned to eat at Senor Burritos afterward before he drove me to the airport. I really wanted that burrito. But right before we left, I got a call from Knod. I had been trying to reach her the night before so Loyd and I could visit her, but she never picked up her phone. It turned out her youngest daughter was sick at the time and was hallucinating, so she was not able to have company. We were at her apartment in Arvada for a couple of hours until it was time to go. We didn't have enough time to go to Central Denver and eat, so we drove straight to the airport. After going through security and the shuttle, I found out my flight was being delayed several hours. It was not because of snow in Denver. No, it had been pretty clear that day. It was because there was snow in Houston and everybody was freaking out at the airport over there. But they didn't figure out there was going to be a delay until right before I got there. If I had been notified sooner of the delay, we could have gone and gotten burritos. I'm still angry about missing out on that because I haven't been back to Denver since. But it's nice to know that it's still there in case I do get to visit again.
5. Buffalo Bill's Hot Wings
This was another place by the Mayan. The wings would be dripping with sauce, so I would dip the bones in the sauce and lick them clean. They had a variety of flavors. I remember making a joke when the Mayan's Manager Mr. M asked what sauces they had. I told him one of the flavors was grape. (They had lemon.) I still recall his shocked expression before I told him I was kidding. The decor inside featured movie posters of direct-to-video releases. The only movie that ever showed at one of our theatres was "From Hollywood to Deadwood." At some point in the past, the restaurant changed locations and moved to 12th Avenue.
6. The Continental/The Cooper/Century 21
Denver was home to three large movie theatres with the capability to show 70mm while I lived there. (I should point out that Landmark's Esquire could show 70mm, but the screen size paled in comparison to these three.) Having lived in small towns all my life, I never got so see movie screens this size before. (However, I seem to recall the movie theatre in Las Vegas where I was "Superman" was very large. And I might have seen a re-release of "The Sound of Music" in 70mm in Albuquerque around 1974, but these screens were still overwhelmed by the obvious size of the ones in Denver.) The first movie I saw in 70mm at the Continental was "Die Hard." I was astonished by the size of the screen, which ad been advertised at 3 1/2 stories tall. It did not disappoint. These three theatres weren't always showing 70mm. When they had regular 35mm, the Continental and the Cooper's screens would get a little smaller, but they were still the largest in the area. Mr. M wanted to go see "Dances with Wolves" at the Continental on the final day it was showing there (because they would be showing "The Doors" in 70mm the next day, even though it was still pulling in big crowds before winning all the Oscars that year). He said, "If I don't go see 'Dances with Wolves' at the Continental, I'm not going to see it!" A lot of us felt that way.
When I moved to San Diego, there were three large screen theatres there: The Cinema 21 and Valley Circle (both of which resembled the Century 21) in Mission Valley and the Grossmont in La Mesa. There was a fourth theatre that could show 70mm, also in the Grossmont Center, but it used to be a single screen that was split up into three theatres with the largest being in the middle. When I went to see "Far and Away" there, the sides of the image had been chopped off to fit it onto a 1:85 screen. (I think they wound up in the other two theatres) I knew this the second I saw the "d" in Ron Howard's last name get caught in the side masking when his director's credit came on. I was just FURIOUS during the whole movie. If I had paid for it, I would have demanded my money back after seeing the whole movie.
Of the three listed here, only the Continental remains. I haven't been to see a movie there since 1993. (I was not able to find a decent photo of the Century 21, which was just down the street from the Cooper.)
7. Wax Trax
One of the nice things about living in the city was being able to go to an independently-owned record store to shop for music. When I worked at Unimart/Rent City, Wax Trax was just a couple of blocks away, so I would go there almost every day because I had to take a full hour for lunch. But the funny thing is that I don't remember ever buying anything there. I was kind of poor at the time and didn't buy a lot of CDs. And if I did, I had a tendency to get them at the chain stores because Wax Trax charged at least $2 more for new releases. But I LOVED to look at the music I could potentially buy if I ever got a job that paid a lot of money.
8. KTCL
KTCL was a free-form radio station based out of Fort Collins. They mostly played alternative music, but would venture into other genres. On Sunday mornings, they would play classical music. If I fell asleep listening to the station on Saturday nights, the dreams I had before waking up would feature a very dramatic soundtrack. The only bad thing about it was that all the air talent acted like they were announcing for a classical station, ALL THE TIME! You'd think they'd put some more personality into it and be excited about broadcasting a free form format. However, when I moved to San Diego and started listening to 91X, I found that wasn't necessarily a good thing. There could have been a happy medium. Since I moved away, they have more of an emphasis on modern rock, and feature a lot of area acts.
9. The siphoning effect of evening rush hour traffic
It seemed like the entire state of Colorado drove into the Downtown area to go to work. I've already gone into detail about my first experience with the morning commute. Sometimes, when I least expected it, I would have to drive somewhere away from the city between 4pm and 6pm. The one good thing was that after the first few miles, traffic would lighten up. At every exit along the highways going North, South, East and West from Downtown, a large number of vehicles would leave the highways, creating less traffic along the way. This meant that only the first part of the commute was really rough. In San Diego, it seemed like everybody who commuted into the Downtown area all came from the same exit in El Cajon. But at least that had all the bad traffic going in one direction. It was even worse when I'd moved to San Jose, in which every ramp that had a lot of cars exiting, the exact same number would be coming onto the highway, and this would be true for both directions. Now, I don't know how traffic is in Denver now, but I can only imagine it's much better than what I have to currently drive home in.
Well, in retrospect, it looks like the main things I liked about Denver were the newspapers, food, movie theatres, music and traffic. That about sums up everything I did during the three years I spent there.
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