If you read the Wall Street Journal last week, you likely came away thinking downtown Denver is a Mad Max-esque wasteland of blight and crime. In a story headlined “Can This Guy Get People to Live in America’s Emptiest Downtown?,” reporter Peter Grant, profiling Asher Luzzatto and his ambitious plan to convert vacant office buildings into apartments, describes the developer, on an April afternoon, gazing out upon “vacant store fronts, empty office buildings with darkened floors, and deserted streets.”
The portrait only gets bleaker from there, with hyperbolic language describing the Mile High City as “fighting to escape a death spiral,” full of “abandoned buildings and blighted conditions,” and among other U.S. cities with “desolate urban cores.” The story—whose clickbaity framing successfully catapulted it across the Internet—closes by quoting an office worker at the suburban Denver Tech Center, who dismisses central Denver by saying, “I have eyes and I can observe. It’s just not an attractive place to be anymore.”
I also have eyes, and these are some of the things I observed on a stroll through downtown last week: Baseball fans walking to Coors Field, with folks in purple Rockies gear ribbing Dodgers fans in blue; a kid climbing on the Howdy Trouty fish sculptures on the 16th Street Mall; the Oxford Hotel doorman chatting with passersby; and a gaggle of office workers lined up in the morning coffee queue at Amante. I set up my laptop on a comfy chair in the Union Station lobby, grabbed a snack ($8 kimbap from a recently opened Korean spot), and enjoyed a little people-watching. The guy next to me was on mute in his Zoom meeting, and I caught a whiff of something floral as the Beet & Yarrow ladies put out fresh bouquets…