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One charming irony of life in the Centennial State is
that if you're writing a book called Is Denver ?,
then it's necessary to spend some time in Denver
researching the book. Thus for the past week, I've been
living and working in the real world, staying in Longmont
and commuting daily to a downtown Denver office
building.
The activities that are quite simple in Salida -- getting to and from work, eating lunch, parking -- are rather involved processes in the metropolis. Conversely, chores that are a nuisance when you work at home in Salida -- cleaning your desk, hauling out trash, making new coffee -- seem to happen magically in a plush office building.
One field of inquiry suggested itself immediately: the economics of parking. A lot that is right across the street gets $6 a day. Go down the street, and the prices drop block by block, $3.75, then $2.75, then finally the $2 lot I used.
So it's three blocks from the $2 lot to the $6 lot. Those are long blocks, so it takes about eight minutes to walk the three blocks. And you walk three blocks back, for, say, a total of 15 minutes for which you save $4, which works out to $16 an hour.
Obviously, many people downtown make considerably more than that, so perhaps they're the ones who use the closer parking -- and they can probably afford to join health clubs, too, to make up for the exercise they didn't get in going from parking lot to office and back.
I tried to guess from examining the composition of the cars in the lots, but I couldn't tell any difference; it as though one lot was all shiny new Porsches and the other all old clunkers.
Navigation in downtown Denver gets harder with every visit. The traffic isn't all that bad; it's that the I usually use are either closed or a sequence of Cone Zones -- baseball stadium, light rail system, new viaducts, new library, etc. I don't know the better routes during the current construction phase, but I do know where all the public-works money in the state appears to be going.
Another possibility is that Denver is trying to emulate
Salt Lake City. During brief visits to Zion years ago, it
always seemed easy to get into downtown Salt Lake City, but
impossible to find your way out. Likewise with downtown
Denver now. You see the mountains and the freeways; you
just have no idea how to reach them. The signs point you to
the art museum or Union Station, but there aren't any
Exit
or This way out
signs. It's probably a
smart move by the Chamber of Commerce to make sure you stay
longer.
To move on, I exercised my right as a citizen and dropped in on my state senator, Linda Powers of Crested Butte, in her office under the gold dome.
If you measure in cubic feet, legislative offices are quite ample because the Capitol has 25-foot ceilings. But most houses have at least one closet that offers more floor space than her cozy office at the end of a narrow hall on the third floor.
Attention, General Assembly: if you want to impress visiting rubes with the majesty of our state government, figure out some better office space. I wondered if her little cubbyhole was a punishment for being a Democrat from a rural area, but she said they were all pretty much like that, and offered to show me other warrens. Feeling claustrophobic, I demurred.
Of course, no trip to the city is complete without experiencing urban culture, those essential elements of our civilization which only cities provide. I had heard of one such metropolitan institution, almost as prominent as NAFTA in recent news, and so I was most grateful when several kind-hearted folks at the Center for the New West offered to take me there so that I could fully comprehend the urban experience. I can now report that Hooter's is an interesting place for urban sight-seeing, and the food isn't bad, either.
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