Ask A Genius 987: A Silty River, the Fraser River and Colorado
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/29
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was mentioning how the cemetery was a place I used to walk around, and you mentioned you used to go there in your home town with your poodle. There’s another part of my town with the Fraser River running through it. It’s a silty river, thick, cloudy, and muddy. People used to jump off the bridge all the time for fun; I did when I was 16. I remember there were a couple of benches along the side of the river. The bridge crossed over to more First Nations territory. When the tide was low, people would hang out along the “beach sands” on either side of the river. These benches were scattered throughout, and people actually used them quite a lot. It was a nice part of life growing up in a small town. Were there things like that in your area when you were growing up?
Rick Rosner: Yes, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, a picturesque town that increasingly catered to tourists. My father owned a ladies’ ready-to-wear store on Pearl Street. The building had been in the family since the 1880s and had been a dress store since, I believe, the early 1930s.
In the mid-70s, the city proposed turning Pearl Street into a pedestrian mall. It used to be a main driving street, but they wanted to close it to vehicles, pave it over with walking bricks, and make it a place for pedestrians to stroll and shop. My father commissioned a study on what happened to commercial districts across America where similar changes were made and found that it was disastrous for the businesses along those streets. New businesses might come in, like ice cream stores catering to tourists, but existing businesses like shoe stores would suffer. Armed with this study, he took a lawsuit all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court to try to stop this plan, but he lost. The pedestrian mall was established.
There was a sundial and giant concrete animals like a rabbit and a snail for people to sit on. After a few years, my father’s store and one other were the only pre-mall businesses left. As the study predicted, old-style businesses were wiped out. Additionally, my father struggled to compete with places like Walmart, where his middle-aged and older customers increasingly bought their clothes. He decided to close the store down. When he did, the Standard and Poor commercial credit rating agency called to inquire why he was going out of business, as he had the best credit rating on the street. This indicated that many new stores were financially unsound and possibly laundering cocaine money, as Boulder was a significant cocaine hub in the 80s.
I worked at a bar where everybody was using and dealing cocaine. It was terrible, but I saw a lot of cocaine and used it a few times just to avoid suspicion of being a narc. I didn’t even use enough to get a buzz, but I disliked being around people who were high on cocaine. Despite the chaotic start, the pedestrian mall has become a charming part of town, and I assume it now has financially sound businesses.
We had Chautauqua Park, part of a healthy living and nature program from the early 1900s. Boulder’s Chautauqua is particularly scenic, situated at the base of the mountains overlooking the city. Boulder also has hiking trails, the Flatirons (rock formations tilted at about 45 degrees), and Boulder Creek, where people float down in inner tubes.
The first bar I worked at, from 1981 to about 1986, was Anthony’s Gardens at the Harvest House, a giant L-shaped hotel with a five-acre beer garden. Every Friday in the summer, 2,000 people would gather for the Friday Afternoon Club to drink and socialize. On football Saturdays, the place would fill with 10,000 people after home games, especially University of Colorado vs. University of Nebraska games. I worked there for five years. Despite being picturesque, the bar disco part of the hotel was so chaotic it made it impossible to get any sleep, which was detrimental to the hotel business.
These are just some of the places that made Boulder a fun and picturesque place to live.
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