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September 10, 2020
DENVER, COLORADO
A publication of
VOLUME 93 | ISSUE 44
Downtown Denver: When will the people come back? Innovation Campus teacher Mike Degitis, left, operates a vehicle to guide a tiny home onto a truck. Degitis helped put together a class’s partnership with the Colorado Village Collaborative, an organization that has already launched one tiny home village in Denver. PHOTO BY ELLIS ARNOLD
Tiny homes for homeless built by students, teachers Village to house women transitioning out of homelessness BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Students who attend class in a vast, largely undeveloped section
of the south metro suburbs helped build houses to stand in Denver’s inner city. There was just one more thing to do: Deliver them.
BY CHRISTY STEADMAN CSTEADMAN@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
During the 1918 global pandemic, a new dance was born among Native
Americans. Today called the jingle dress dance, its origins came about when Native American women would put jingles on their dress and dance. As they danced, the jingles would ward off bad spirits and illness, as well as create healing, said Erlidawn Roy, a resident of southwest Denver who is part of the Meskwaki, Ojibwe, Isleta Pueblo and Laguna Pueblo tribes. Another dance that Coloradans
BY JENNIFER BROWN, TAMARA CHUANG AND KEVIN SIMPSON THE COLORADO SUN
may be familiar with is the men’s fancy dance. This one came about during the times of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show — roughly 1883-1913. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody asked the Native American dancers who accompanied him on his U.S. and European tours to create a dance that was fast-paced and vibrant, that would wow an audience, Roy said.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, when downtown Denver largely emptied out after 5 p.m., a diminishing influx of workers headed for the outskirts of the city and its burgeoning suburbs for shopping and nightlife amid sprawling new malls. A recession left skyscrapers with a 30% office vacancy rate. A nowdefunct federal agency liquidated one office building for $1, a shocking development that further dampened property values. Unemployment ticked 2% above the national average. Flash forward to 2020 — six months into a pandemic that shut down restaurants and shops, and kept employees out of office buildings — and it’s impossible to ignore the similarities to the dead zone of four decades ago. “In March, April and May the streets were empty,” said Dee Chirafisi, a downtown real estate broker and resident for the past 26 years. “It felt like the early ’90s.”
SEE DANCE, P15
SEE DOWNTOWN, P8
“We’ve been waiting for the day when we could hand over the keys and say, ‘They’re yours now — welcome home,’” said Mike Degitis, a math teacher at Cherry Creek Innovation Campus in Centennial. SEE TINY HOMES, P6
Celebrating friendship through song and dance Denver Art Museum’s powwow takes place virtually Sept. 12
As COVID-19 continues, few companies have fully returned to their offices
INSIDE: LIFE: PAGE 10
STREET ART THRIVES IN TOUGH TIMES Walls talk in era of COVID, Black Lives Matter P10