Sunday, September 26, 1999
Can't get to Denver from here
BY PETER BRONSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If you are ever in Denver and want to sample the coolest jazz and the hottest tacos in the Rockies, drop into El Chapultepec, where the red leather bar hasn't changed since Ella Fitzgerald sat there in the '50s.
Everyone in Jazzland swings through “the Pec,” from Count Basie to Eddie Harris, from “Sticks” Hooper to “Cleanhead” Vincent and “Lockjaw” Davis.
But if you want to play Old Blue Eyes on the juke box, bring along a big wad of Andrew Jacksons, because they won't take your VISA. After a few days in Denver, your credit cards will be melted down and maxed to the limit.
It's not that Denver has mile-high prices as steep as Pike's Peak. They just have too many things to do and buy.
Denver's 16th Street Mall is a shopper's theme park with 17 blocks of downtown shops: Nike Town, Colorado Hat Co., Skyscraper Kites, Wolfgang Puck Cafe, Bare Escentuals and Zap Caps (try on the “Kiss My Bass” fishing hat). If your stamina runs a quart low in the thin air, there's a Starbucks or Java Man in every block, with an oxygen bar around the corner.
McDonald's looks the same — but classical music and operas spill out the doors onto the sidewalk. Homeless guys park their Hefty bags of pop cans and sit in the Saturday morning sunshine playing chess. In the anti-Cincinnati, pedestrian signs are taken as a suggestion — not a “Thou Shalt Not Walk” commandment. Denver strolls, saunters and jaywalks with laid-back indifference and aimless curiosity. Lines snake out of restaurants at 11 a.m. On Friday afternoons, 113,000 downtown workers make a prison break for happy hour in Margaritaville.
And this has all happened in the same time it takes Cincinnati to get out of bed and wake up to what's happening in the rest of the world: about 10 years.
Pedestrian counts on downtown Denver streets are up 40 percent to 80 percent in just two years. Three office buildings are going up — the first in a decade. Retail sales downtown have swelled by $80 million since 1991. And downtown job growth rose 25 percent last year — creating four times as many jobs as the surrounding county.
The center-city population grew by 6,600 residents since 1990. And from what I could tell during a visit last week, every one of them was happy, friendly and eager to test the outer limits on my credit cards.
The Rockies rock and downtown Denver is on a roll. “Lodo” (lower downtown) was skid row five years ago. Now it brags about being the hippest entertainment spot in the West, with 80 new brew pubs, sports bars and restaurants. And one big reason is the Downtown Denver Partnership, a private development group that has a track record like a gold medalist in the city olympics.
“We manage the whole mall, although it is all public right of way,” said Cindy Chritensen of DDP. Last year, her team recruited 221 downtown leases.
That's nothing. Cincinnati has put up at least that many sheets of plywood (see Fountain Square). When city Economic Development Director Andi Udris quit last month, his list of “successes” included four years to replace a classy Gidding-Jenny with a T.J. Maxx discount store on Fourth Street. He left us a festering lawsuit over a bonehead plot to move a drug store to make way for a department store that never came.
Our downtown is arthritic without a steady transfusion of taxpayer steroids: $28 million for a new Lazarus; $800 million for stadiums.
Baseball has been good to Denver. But the new Coors Field is not the whole nine innings. Denver revived its historic, colorful downtown by benching the bureaucrats and substituting a lineup of private professionals who actually know how to play the game.
Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls and Councilman Phil Heimlich want a similar outside development team for Cincinnati. Good luck. Our city manager is the Mike Brown of downtown. The Bengals will win the Super Bowl before he gives up an inch of his astroturf or admits he has fumbled.
So City Hall will remain hostile, incompetent and negligent. City bureaucrats will treat new businesses the way carney operators eyeball a hayseed from the sticks: At best, an easy mark to be plucked of taxes and fat fees; at worst, a nuisance to be driven off with a scarecrow of sticky red tape.
Welcome to Cinci-not-here.
If you are ever in Cincinnati and want to check out the exciting nightlife, they won't take your VISA or your American Express. They're probably closed.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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