Blog Living the high life on low-life East Colfax

If you live in Denver, odds are you’ve spent some time on East Colfax. Perhaps you’ve marveled at its wonders or recoiled at its terrors. Maybe you’ve even run its marathon or fearlessly biked its cracked asphalt. All of these things are possible on Colfax, the nation’s longest continuous avenue, because Colfax isn’t just a street. It’s an experience, a monster with many faces, many personalities, and more than a couple venereal diseases.

But have you lived on Colfax? Because I do, and every day’s an adventure.

In case you maintain one of those sheltered, carefree Baker lifestyles, or go about your day-to-day existence in the warm, comforting embrace of the Congress Park neighborhood, let me paint you a little picture of life on East Colfax: I live in an old, run-down house that’s constantly hanging in the balance between being foreclosed and being sold to some sucker who thinks it’s a “fixer-upper.” Thankfully, neither ever happens, so I enjoy suspiciously inexpensive rent paid to a landlord whose only real function is to collect said rent money. If something breaks, it doesn’t get fixed. I’m on my own. It took me at least a full year of living in the house to realize that it’s actually a slum. I may or may not be illegally squatting.

Sound terrible? It can be, but it also has its perks: Our landlord maintains a distinctly laissez-faire relationship with his tenants, so living where I do is a little like international waters—it’s a law-free zone where nearly anything goes. In my three-plus years of living in this building, only two incidents have warranted police involvement. Not among those incidents: playing loud guitars and drums at all hours; hosting raucous, drunken parties; selling drugs in the parking lot; sleeping in the grass around the side of the building; and, perhaps most perplexingly, beating a man with a baseball bat in the McDonald’s parking lot. Yes, my roommates called the cops about that last one, but they never showed up.

But the boys in blue did come to investigate after the tenants living in the ground-floor unit completely demolished the apartment before “moving out,” i.e. being arrested. I’m talking bright yellow paint thrown all over the walls and the furniture, all interior glass smashed, ketchup sprayed across the ceiling in every room, crude graffiti on every bare wall, and every window busted out. Charming. The cops also showed up when someone living in the basement unit either got stabbed or stabbed someone else. The situation was never entirely clear.

But there are other interesting-not-life-threatening things about this neighborhood—like The A.V. Club office—you won’t find elsewhere. There’s the cute girl who works across the street at the Monarch Society (a cremation parlor) who parks her Mini in the same spot every day. There’s the guy who walks the street in heavy black boots and a black cloak, but who cooks naked in his second-story kitchen in full view of the entire block. There are the weekly Mexican weddings and quinceañeras at the church next door to me that make every Friday night a party. There is the Geeks Who Drink pub quiz every Tuesday at the Irish Snug that pulls in more than 20 teams a week. Mezcal (3230 E. Colfax Ave., 303-322-5219) does late-night dollar tacos. And you can go see a great show almost any night of the week without straying from the avenue. I can’t wait to get drunk just by being in the same room as The Pogues October 23 at the Ogden Theatre, and how lucky am I to have the Pixies hanging just down the street at the Fillmore two nights in a row in November?

Despite what you may have heard, it’s possible to live the good life on Colfax. You just have to learn to live with the ugly and the tired and the stupid—and once you do, it's great.