Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i 5280 Magazine

As anticipation for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo ramps up—and excitement for the electric U.S. women’s national soccer team, which won the World Cup last year, builds—the Colorado Rapids are starting another season in Commerce City. The question among football followers on the Front Range is: Does anyone care? Several months ago, 5280 senior editor Spencer Campbell set out to learn why the Rapids have failed to thrive since winning the MLS championship in 2010. What he found was not only a story of organizational mismanagement, but also a tale of fan apathy that boggles the mind if you’ve ever spent a fall Saturday watching the passionate players (and parents) who fill grassy fields in youth soccer leagues all across Denver. Although MLS has exploded in popularity in other…

“SHELBY TELL ME EVERYTHING” There Will Come Soft Rains (March 6), Esmé Patterson (formerly of Paper Bird) “TRAIN” Rattlesnake (2019), Neyla Pekarek (formerly of the Lumineers) “STEAL THE NIGHT AWAY” Your Heart, The Stars, The Milky Way (2019), Daniel Rodriguez (formerly of Elephant Revival) “KEEP MOVING” How to Be Okay Alone (2018), Brent Cowles (formerly of You Me & Apollo) “CUSTOMS” The Captive (2015), Brad Corrigan (current member of Dispatch)…

If you live or work south of Englewood, you’re in luck: You’ll battle far less I-25 traffic to get to Lone Tree’s seven-month-old Urban Village, where chef Charles Mani is cooking exciting, refined Indian fare. An alum of New York City’s acclaimed Babu Ji and Badshah, Mani never settles for the ordinary, rubbing duck legs with cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, and star anise to make confit and enhancing a coconut curry with fresh scallops. Such creativity—plus the arsenal of custom spice blends Mani makes every day—yields lighter, brighter dishes you don’t typically see at area Indian restaurants. The best way to savor his subcontinent-spanning repertoire is to order Urban Village’s tasting menu. The three-course meal includes four appetizers for the table, from the likes of “kale moong dal chaat” (crispy fried…

We are lucky to be living in a time when ordering a mocktail no longer comes with a chaser of ridicule—and even luckier to have more options than ever before (so long, O’Douls). In fact, consumers are downing myriad no- and low-ABV drinks, and the sober-curious movement is strong—yes, even here in the Napa Valley of Beer. After all, Colorado’s outdoor-rec-rich lifestyle isn’t particularly conducive to raging hangovers, and alcohol and cannabis (our other favorite vice) don’t always mix well. That’s why Niki Sawni, a Canadian transplant, decided to start his nonalcoholic beverage company, Grüvi, in Denver about a year ago. “We wanted to create a line of drinks to pair with cannabis consumption,” Sawni says. “But nonalcoholic options for people who aren’t drinking alcohol, for any reason, have been…

The house I was born in went up for sale last year. Not the house I grew up in; the one I lived in until I was three, with my mom and my dad and my older sister. A little bungalow on Albion Street. It was just the four of us there, those few years before we moved into the house I think of as our family home—the house where my little sister was born, where we grew up, and where my parents still live to this day. My little sister died by suicide when she was 28, eight years ago. It’s as simple and complex as that. Is her death relevant? Does it matter to the story of our first house that she’s no longer with us? She hadn’t…

There’s no denying the mile-high residential real estate market has been one of the hottest locales in the nation for the past decade. Depending on your situation, that can be a wildly lucrative or bank-account-emptying prospect. Either way, the market’s nuances as well as the legal and financial processes involved are almost always confusing, if not downright mystifying. That’s where our inaugural directory of real estate agents—all of whom produced among the highest sales volumes in Denver in 2018 (the most current data available at press time)—comes in handy. Whether you’re looking to buy or sell, harnessing the expertise of one of these professionals may help deliver you quickly and (hopefully) painlessly to the ultimate goal: closing day. BLACK DIAMOND INDIVIDUALS $10 million–$19,999,999 JULIE ABELS Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage julie.abels@coloradohomes.com…

Adam Cayton-Holland Comic & Writer Colorado comedian Adam Cayton-Holland’s schedule seems perpetually packed: touring, releasing comedy albums, planning the High Plains Comedy Festival in Denver. So it’s borderline miraculous that he found time to pen “This Old House” (page 56), an essay that’s ostensibly about walking through the house he was born in but ends up being about so much more. “I was so viscerally affected,” Cayton-Holland says, “I had to go home and write about it.” The result is a moving meditation on memory, grief, and the power of nostalgia. Cayton-Holland’s 2018 book, Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir, won the Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction last year. Sarah Boyum Associate Photo Editor If you’ve flipped through the pages of 5280 over the past five years, you’ve likely…

It was 2014, and Brad Wickham was done with death. He’d spent the past 25 years working as a respiratory therapist in hospital emergency departments, where the relentless cycle of seeing patients die caused him such trauma that he’d been diagnosed with PTSD. Wickham turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. Realizing he needed a fresh start, Wickham moved from Missouri to Nederland because he heard he might find work there. Eventually he did—though there was one catch: Would he be willing to spend time with a dead body? Although small, Nederland has an outsize reputation, partly due to a local named Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian man who’s been dead for 30 years. In the early 1990s, Morstoel’s family brought his corpse to town, aiming to create a cryonics facility,…

The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility holds records so old, they make those at the Library of Congress, the University of Cambridge, and the Vatican Apostolic Archive seem like new releases. Instead of manuscripts, though, the “documents” at this U.S. Geological Survey–managed warehouse in Lakewood, the only one of its kind in the country, are archaic pieces of frozen matter. Scientists drill the samples, called ice cores, from deep within glaciers and ship them to this facility, where they’re stored in meter-long chunks at minus 36 degrees Celsius. (The suburb is convenient because it’s near a major airport and the low humidity here minimizes pesky frost buildup.) Preserved within the cores are accounts of Earth’s climate from long before humans were around to record data. The chilly ledgers exist…

How did you go about creating this new list for the Denver market? In July 2019, 5280 debuted its first Top Real Estate Producers survey. The link to the online questionnaire (available at 5280.com/top-real-estate-producers) was sent out to real estate brokerages in the seven metro-area counties; it was also shared via social media. The survey asked brokerage administrators to provide the names of both individual agents and teams of agents who, based on their sales volumes for 2018, qualified for our list. Nominees in hand, our researchers reached out to each agent to confirm the sales numbers as well as to confirm contact information. What qualifies someone to be a Top Real Estate Producer? We have five categories—individual agents, teams of two agents, teams of three to five agents, teams…

Our hearts wahoooed! when we learned a traveling Mario Kart–themed race series would be in Denver this month. Then the event was put on hold indefinitely. Don’t worry: Our hazard-lined streets feature enough obstacles to test even the most nimble mustachioed motorists.…

When Angelina Jolie and Oprah want cashmere, they call New York’s Ryan Roche—who often hits up Boulder’s Edie Ure for her nature-infused textiles. “Natural dyes connect you to the soil in a way you can’t when you buy from Target,” Ure says. Fortunately, local boutiques and makers are providing plenty of alternatives to synthetic dyes. Here, the organic materials they start with—and their vibrant final products.…

Shannon Lovelace-White couldn’t believe what she was seeing on her first day in the kitchen at a local vegan bakery. “I was horrified by all of the food and packaging waste,” she says. The former higher-education administrator soon set out on her own to satisfy Denver’s allergen-free crowd without adding to landfills, and today, Lovelace-White runs 10-month-old Squeaky Little Wheel Bakery from her home kitchen in Capitol Hill. Her ultra-moist, all-natural, plant-based cake doughnuts come in vanilla and chocolate varieties with myriad icing and topping flavor options to choose from, including lemon-poppyseed, German chocolate, and tangy raspberry with cacao nibs. You can buy the treats freshly baked to order ($30 per dozen, via pickup or delivery in Denver) or purchase a handy doughnut mix kit ($12.95 to $13.50), which can…

American Elm is a decidedly local joint with destination aspirations. Owner Bob Reiter moved to Denver from Brooklyn this past year and this is, in fact, his first restaurant—yet American Elm exhibits a surefootedness not typical of a new restaurateur. Part of its success comes from the experience of the wonderfully named executive chef, Brent Turnipseede, and sous chef Nick Duree, who both cooked at downtown’s upscale Guard and Grace. Reiter clearly also set a high bar for American Elm, one based, he says, on the quality of the neighborhood bistros he frequented when living in Brooklyn. I, too, lived there, for almost 15 years, and watched the rise of the sort of restaurants that inspire Reiter, like Frankies 457 Spuntino and the now-closed Franny’s, where I must have eaten…

I. A BEAUTIFUL GAME On February 22, 2010, Richard Bamber moved to Denver from Surrey County, England, an affluent woodland area attached to London’s southwestern flank. Having never lived outside the queen’s purview before, he immediately began searching for something that might help him acclimate to life in the States—and found the British Bulldog, a pub on the edge of downtown that serves English beer and a decent order of fish and chips. Any reticence about the place disappeared the moment he opened the door and discovered the dim lighting, pressed-tin ceilings, and, most striking, “the table”: a roughly four-by-six-foot chalkboard showing the standings of England’s Premier League. “It was obvious,” Bamber says, “whoever was running the place really cared about soccer.” The Bulldog’s then general manager Jon Forget was…