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Volume 3, Issue 18
August 30 -September 12, 2001
BOTTOMS UP!
Alex Neth
DIM LIGHTS, BIG CITY
@
CHARLIE BROWN'S
980 Grant Street, Denver, Colorado
303-860-1655
We denizens of Denver like to imagine ourselves as residents of an
actual Metropolis. We offer as proof crime, tall buildings and an
arteriosclerotic
traffic problem. We mention our police
force, long on ammunition and short on
patience, and our miles and miles of
trackless suburban wasteland. We nod
appreciatively in the direction of Colfax.
But these are all so much hallucination;
for, as anyone who has ever left
Colorado for any reason
knows, The Queen City of
the Plains just doesn't
stack up.
Which, naturally, is
part of its charm. But
Denver has more in
common with Scranton
or Butte than it does with
San Francisco and
Chicago. Our tiny downtown,
choked off in every direction by
competing municipalities and Levittown-like
planned communities, is almost a
novelty. We have cute little nicknames for
areas that aren't as big as some Los
Angeles parking garages. What Culture
we've cultured fights to avoid being
smothered by Colorado's ubiquitous,
leaden conservatism.
But sometimes you find yourself in a
place that takes you away, far away from
Northglenn and the 16th Street Mall-- a
place like Charlie Brown's Bar and Grill,
smack dab in the middle of Capitol Hill,
our most assuredly hip area. This is a Big
City Bar if ever there was one.
And not just because the clientele ranges
from the queer to the disturbingly quiet,
from aged card players to youthful pleasure
seekers. It's a feeling-- the feeling of
being able to walk in on a slow afternoon
and get a sense of the place, of the neighborhood,
from the few scattered cus-tomers.
It's the fact that they don't have
any beer on tap, which might not score
them any points in my book, but still
seems somehow cosmopolitan. It's the
antique heating grate in the entryway, the
20-foot tall ceiling, the wraparound patio.
It's punk rockers and natty old Asiatic
men in beige having lunch in harmony.
It's accents, questionable outfits, the
blessed undercurrent of weirdness.
Charlie Brown's occupies the bottom of
the old Colburn Hotel (now apartments)
on 980 Grant, where Neal Cassady once
lived with his wife and Allen Ginsberg.
The décor is dark and woodsy, with lots
of model ships and watercolor paintings.
The bar itself is a huge thing, undoubtedly
a relic of the place's 1927 genesis, with
shelves 10 feet off the ground. Only the
paintings and the big screen TV identify
the modern era. Without them, you might
as well expect a parking lot full of Model
As, or a bartender with a handlebar moustache
and tuberculosis.
It is an expansive place, by Capitol Hill
standards-- the outdoor patio alone is bigger
than all of Gabor's-- but
thankfully, not an expensive
one: no lunches cost more
than $10, and most run
in the $6-$7 range, and
the food is big and
palatable. Drinks are
moderate-- bottled
imports are $3.50 (no
Pabst, yet another strike
against), cocktails retail
at significantly below
downtown prices. But, in the
most authentic Big City Bar tradition,
this is not about saving money.
Because if all you wanted was to save
money, you would have gone to the
Punch Bowl or the Stadium Inn, or Don's
Club Tavern, or stayed in your hovel and
gulped Aqua-Net to the melodious strains
of your dissolving stomach tissue.
Charlie Brown's isn't going to pauperize
you, but it just seems right to toss a few
extra bucks on the table here. This bar is
as much about place and presence as it is
about liquor; this is a show, a key compo-nent
in the survival of the different, where
a plaid-clad retiree and a drug-snortling
drama queen can discuss old movies over
a snifter of Cognac.
Come here and feel like Alexander
Woolcott, inventing drinks and bons mot.
Let this be our Algonquin; let us form a
round table of real Denver squares. Let us
revel in the touch of refinement that
makes the sleaze so appealing. Let us
drink bottled beer and vodka gimlets in
the afternoon and watch the business of
liberal Denver unfold on the sidewalk and
at the bar. Let us avoid the machinery of
the downtown partyplex, scorn their
weak pours and posturing Arvadans. This
here is the Big City, and if you squint
right, it almost still looks like Denver. B
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