Mile high

God, I love Denver. J and I both do, and are sad that we're unwilling to move back until a certain someone is no longer here. but we can bide our time. I'm a patient, patient man.

J is doing a multiday training, and your tax dollars are very kindly putting me up at the Marriott in LoDo. Thank you! I walked with her the two miles to the hospital where the training is, and then continued with my walking tour of all the places I have lived in Denver. Big times!

I have lived in Denver three separate times (well, sort of four, but that's a long story.) All three places were within three blocks of Colfax Avenue, the main west to east thoroughfare that runs through central Denver. Many people's notion of Colfax is that it's all seedy and run down; in the late 90s when I first lived here, a local nickname was Cold Facts Avenue. Not very original, but it gets the public opinion across. While this was and still is true in parts, I have always loved Colfax. It's vibrant, alive, dynamic, loud, urban (until you get into the suburban eastern stretch), fun.

The first stop was actually on our way to the hospital, at the first house J and I lived in together:
It was on Detroit Street. Well, actually, it was in the alley between Detroit and Clayton.

Here's the view from another part of the alley. It was an 80 year old converted carriage house for the main house in front, brick frame construction, basically a pet project of the owner. With a nod to Tom Waits, it got colder than a welldigger's ass. The owner insisted that the pellet stove was amazing, efficient, would easily heat the whole house, including the upstairs where the bedroom was. I don't think she was stupid, so I can only conclude that she lied. Yes, you could heat the whole house with the pellet stove, if you cranked it to full blast for several hours, and wore ski clothes in the meantime. That winter, we were going through an average of two 50 pound bags of pellets a week, and were definitely not blasting it all the time. I worked at a desk that was about five feet from the pellet stove, and still had to use a space heater under the desk to keep my feet from going numb.

In retrospect, this might have played in somewhat to our decision on where to move next: San Diego.

(Confession: I have a somewhat checkered history of selecting housing for J and I. Those of you who saw the studio in Ocean Beach, San Diego, know what I mean.)

After dropping J off at the hospital, the next stop was Rosemary Street, about a 4.5 mile walk from where we started:

I lived in this house the summer after graduating from law school, while I was studying for the bar exam. The old DU law school was a couple blocks away, where it shared a campus with Johnson and Wales University, a culinary and business school that now occupies the whole campus. I shared it with a couple pleasant but dimwitted guys who, as far as I could tell, didn't do anything but drink beer and smoke pot.

It was a run down dump, but good for what I needed at the time: a bedroom, a toilet, and a kitchen. I didn't study there (I mostly studied in the law library, at St. Mark's Coffeehouse, and in the bleachers at Rockies games.) It was cheap, and the owner was perfectly willing to do a summer lease to await the fall semester students who wouldn't mind living in relative squalor.

Lastly is the first place I lived in Denver. I had just graduated from college, and was going to enter a master's program in experiential education in Minnesota. It's an extremely well reputed program, but I decided that summer that (A) I was partially doing it because I couldn't think of anything better to do, and (B) I really didn't need a master's degree for a field where you don't even really need the bachelor's degree I already possessed. So I called A, asked him if he wanted to move somewhere, and Denver was it. We landed in a one bedroom apartment at this miserable little dump on Cook Street:

It was great. We chose Denver basically on a whim, since we both wanted to live in the west, and Denver had the best combination of cheap housing and a strong job market. I literally got calls from all ten jobs I applied to within the first few days, and started a job within a week. It was at Cook Street that we invented the disgustingly delicious Pickle in a Blanket. (Don't ask.)

I worked mostly overnights at a residential treatment center, which was an experience that deserves its own telling. I rode sometimes, but often drove to work in my Ford Festiva clown car. I had a tape with Cowboy Junkies on both sides: The Trinity Session on one side, and Lay It Down on the other. The tape deck was auto-reverse, and that tape played more or less nonstop for about six months.

Many mornings when I got home from work, A and I would walk a couple blocks down to Colfax and get huge, greasy breakfasts at Goodfriends, sometimes washed down with a beer. (HEY, LOOK. It might have been 9 in the morning, but it was the end of my workday, okay? And A may or may not have bothered to go to sleep yet.)

It was actually at Goodfriends where the monumental event of A starting to like good beer occurred. I had been making him taste my beers for a couple years, and he had only two descriptions: "ugh, beery" and "ugggggh, VERY beery". A New Belgium Sunshine Wheat opened his eyes, eliciting a "Hey, that's actually pretty good" and it has never been the same sense.

The Cook Street apartment had no anti-scald hot water control valve in the shower, and for the first month that we lived there, we regularly got burned. Our jackass landlord insisted that it was isolated to our apartment, he had no idea, blah blah blah. We soon found out that many of our neighbors had the same problem. I finally had to threaten to withhold rent and sue in housing court to get him to fix it. He probably wasn't real pleased when we broke our lease early, but was also likely relieved to get rid of us.

This is a half block north of the Cook Street apartment, looking out over City Park to the rocky mountains. It was lovely.