Sameness
- Lois Lowry, The Giver
My year living in the Denver area was the first time I was really, glaringly aware of what life could be like when all the businesses and street corners and houses in a city were plagued with sameness. For most of my life I’d lived in smaller towns or in towns that have in some way resisted this state of corporate replication. Certainly these places have all eventually been accosted by Burger Kings and Starbucks and Jiffy Lubes and the myriad other national chains, but in Colorado – at least in the suburb in which I had imprisoned myself – sameness reached critical mass. One could very well end up lost from one major intersection to the next. The same grocery store sat in the same parking lot with the same shoe outlet all walled in by the same streets, the same sidewalks. There were urban trails, thankfully, but for a long ways the grid-like city stretched bleak and flat and boring. No interesting bars, no dusty old book stores. No character.
This, of course, in utter contrast to some of the grittier parts of the city. Uptown Denver (though not so much Downtown) is fairly full of its own unique flair. There are non-Starbucks coffee shops and at least one bar with a giant mural of Jerry Garcia painted in the men’s bathroom. I went to a hamburger shop on Colfax and an employee there tried to sell me one of a variety of rings with my meal. I don’t think the job paid well enough to sustain certain habits, or at least the shakiness of his hands and the fact that he was peddling rings on the clock seemed to indicate as much. Indeed, crime festers around the edges of the older parts of the city. A woman was kidnapped in the parking lot of one of the largest liquor stores I’ve ever visited, a block from where one of my friends lived. Then again, Colfax Avenue stretches east to west across the city and crime is bad all along it, whether it’s downtown or in the eastern suburbs. Certainly, though, the appeal of the old Victorian and brick apartment buildings and ancient houses of the older downtown neighborhoods is dampened by the heightened crime the further into the city one burrows, the further from the comfy Cherry Street suburbs or the new, glossy burbs lining the Tech Center.
March 26, 2009 24 Comments
