When I turn my car onto southbound Grant from Colfax after passing by the capitol buildings, parks and other civic detritus of downtown Denver, I am struck by the same sickly nostalgia I have felt most anywhere I have lived at some time. Here it is: beauty, decay, the full, the empty.
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Now behind me is the state offices where I waited in hours to plead and negotiate and navigate my way through stale offices and endless forms to get my teaching credentials transferred to Colorado, when I thought I would find a place again with a stale classroom and a “Mr.” in front of my name. I didn’t, and won’t, and the last time I was at this block was for a quick pho, or as quick as pho could be.
On the south side of Colfax and Grant, one finds a member of a common species, the city block, or, perhaps the subspecies, desperate city block. Finding adjectives that are fair and respectful are sometimes hard for strip malls, suburbs, and, it seems, the city block that doesn’t meet at least one of the following criteria:
1) A minimum number of “people love us on Yelp” badges in shop windows, or at least, moorings containing bicycles into which some amount of creative energy was invested;
2) In the case of apartments or single family dwellings: those that are clearly not halfway houses;
3) At least one condo redevelopment in the last five years, but not too sterile and not too smarmy;
4) At least one surprisingly thriving business that serves clientele who you didn’t even know were your neighbors.
This latter point is what I have come to appreciate about being a city dweller, what I miss about Denver now that I live in a suburb, what I think people mean when they say a city is vibrant, and it is the lens through which I try to see the best in blocks like that bounded by Colfax, Grant and Logan. I have tried but I have failed, on foot, hungry or curious, once by day and once guardedly at night.
I grew up in a small city in the West and then a small town in the West, both in a relatively new state, a place where fortune is made and lost and agriculture minimal because farmers don’t like to bet and anyway betting for water against a desert only pays maybe two years in seven. Nevada: the land of instability. It has taken me a while to realize that my vision of urban America—what used to be a minority (in 1790 one in twenty Americans lived in cities) but now four out of five of us live, plus or minus the suburbs—was shaped fundamentally by the television show Sesame Street.
Oscar the Grouch lived at 9th and Broadway.
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