Lex Anteinternet: "Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

Lex Anteinternet: "Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.: .

"Denver has outgrown us". El Chapultepec closes.

I really wondered how it was hanging on.

I'd never been in there, and I apparently never got a picture of it from the outside for our Painted Bricks blog.  It wasn't very photogenetic anyway.  But when the Mexican restaurant turned jazz club found itself no longer in the seedy Five Points district it had survived in for years, but in the new gentrified up and coming Coors Field area, without moving an inch, it just didn't look quite right.  It's old school "the nightlife ain't the right life, but it's my life" type of genuine atmosphere didn't squire with the hipsterization of where it was.

COVID 19 didn't help things, but the owners were quick to note that it wasn't solely responsible for brining its 87 year existence to an end.

Jazz musicians and blues musicians, they shouldn’t have to time their sets around baseball innings and when the crowds are going to get out and be wild. They should be able to play their music, and the crowd should just be there to enjoy them, The employees and our musicians, our customers, we shouldn’t have to be worried about our safety when it’s time to leave.

Denver’s outgrown us.

So stated one of the owners.

I love Coors Field and baseball, about the only thing about Denver I actually like. But there isn't anything I like about Denver without some degree of reservation.  Like everything else, there really isn't a permanent "old Denver" that was in some state of perfection.  The area that El Chapultepec was in prior to Coors Field was a scary dump which was a bit scary to drive through in the middle of the day.  It wasn't until Coors Field overhauled everything downtown that it changed.

But it was a change that to an end the feeling that the jazz club belonged there.  A jazz club could probably exist somewhere else in Denver, but it wouldn't be genuine in the same fashion that El Chapultepec was.

But that's true of a lot of Denver now.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the US, but Denver is somehow sort of unique in this way.  The town that my father was born in, four years before El Chapultepec opened, was still around in many ways into the 1980s when I first started to go there on my own. Bits of that, indeed, still are.  But when it pulled out of the oil recession of the 1990s it really started off in another direction even as the oil companies came back.  Prior to that point it was sort of an overgrown cow town in some real ways. Then it started to become a hipster epicenter, followed soon thereafter by a new weedy culture based on pharmacological stupefaction. That's what basically characterizes the town town today.  And the change hasn't overall been a good one.

Not that those who hung out at the jazz club were models of universal clean living.  It was a bar. But the set in seediness in the old Five Points district was of a different sort than the new widespread seediness that characterizes a lot of Denver.  In between was sort of a high point when it looked like the city would overcome its decay without creating a new one, based on Coors Field and what it brought to the downtown.  It did partially succeed but weed took a lot of it away.

Wyoming Territorial Seal, Big Hollow Food Coop, Laramie Wyoming.

This is a nice rendition of the Territorial Seal of Wyoming on the Big Hollow Food Coop building in Laramie.  We've featured this building before, but we missed the seal in our prior photographs.  Indeed, one of our remote roving contributors to this blog just picked this one up.

Wyoming has a complicated history in regard to seals, and this one was actually the state's third.  This is additionally slightly complicated by the fact that some versions have the year 1868 at the top, rather than 1869.  1869 is, I believe, correct.

The seal depicts a mountain scene with a railroad running in the foreground in the top field.  In the bottom left it depicts a plow, shovel and shepherd's crook, symbolic of the state's industries.  The bottom right field depicts a raised arm with a drawn sabre.  The Latin inscription reads Cedant Arma Togae, which means "let arms yield to civil authority", which was the territorial motto.

This seal was an attractive one and in some ways it was a better looking seal than the one the state ultimately adopted.  The state actually went through an absurd process early in its history in attempting to adopt an official state seal that lead, at one time, the Federal mint simply assigning one for the purpose of large currency printing, which featured state seals at the time.  Part of the absurdity involved the design, which was describe in the original state statute rather than depicted, which lead to the sitting Governor hiring his own artist as he didn't like the one art of the one that had been in front of the legislature.  That caused a scandal as the one that he picked featured a topless woman, which had not been a feature of the legislative design, and ultimately it was corrected to the current design.

All in all, looking at the original one, I think they could have stuck with it.

Nolan Chevrolet, Casper Wyoming

Nolan Chevrolet was an early Chevrolet dealership in Casper, Wyoming, probably the town's first.  It opened in this building, which was built for it, in 1924.  The company originally operated in this location on South David Street until it outgrew it, becoming Schulte Chevrolet in 1965 and then being bought out by the Schellerbargers in 1966.

In 1969 the Chevrolet dealership moved out of this downtown location into a new facility on East Yellowstone, where it is today.  While this facility was still in use when I was a kid, I don't ever recall it being a Chevrolet dealership and until this recent work was done on it, I didn't know that it had been.

In 1973 this building and a neighboring one became Plains Furniture, which I do recall. A childhood friend of mine's father worked there.  It was completely redone at that time.  Plains closed some time ago and these buildings have changed hands again and are part of a restoration process which is restoring the look of the block to its 1920s appearance.  The area here, which was once a display yard for the dealership, had been enclosed by the Plains remodeling but has been re exposed, along with the Nolan sign and a Schellabarger sign as well.