Denver’s Degeneration into a Golden Goose Slaughterhouse
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution"
— Emma Goldman
Twenty plus years ago, I definitely thought of myself as a revolutionary. But I wasn’t a dancing revolutionary. At the same time, I believed deeply in standing arm-in-arm with every one of my comrades who agreed that the revolution required dancing.
We had a code.
It wasn’t a loose and poetic code, broadly open to interpretation. It was specific. The code had a name, the St. Paul Principles. These were the shared ground rules which united radical anarchists, deliberate Quakers, free-loving hippies, shrewd union organizers, and all sorts of activists during the anti-globalization movement:
It was a moderately more bookish way of saying “snitches get stitches”, but also of committing to a central priority that facilitated real strategy.
Very different people can disagree on a hell of a lot and still know at the end of the day what side they’re on and who and what they’re ultimately fighting against. In this way, atheistic anarchists can support theocratic anabaptists when the state wants to force their children into state schools. Industrial unionists can support primitivists in opposing the displacement of small towns and wilderness areas to build a dam. It was simple. We opposed the fat cats who took whatever they wanted from whomever they wanted by any means they could get away with. We opposed the few who wanted to dominate, control, manipulate, and syphon off the wealth and power of the many. We could disagree on basically everything else, but it was pretty easy to align on that.
This simple code was the only reason that we got anything done. And, we got a lot of things done. We stopped logging operations in biodiverse ecosystems. We stopped military recruitment wage draft tactics in inner city high schools. We won sensible compensation for janitors and migrant farmers. And, arguably, we stopped the FTAA. Still, our visible loses always outnumbered our wins. We drained war chests to fund grassroots campaigns for ballot initiatives only to be defeated by “citizens coalitions” that were always made up of consultants and corporate lawyers that cleverly spun and cheated people into voting against their interests year after year.
Through all those times, the real win was spending my Saturdays sitting on the floor in a broad circle with the elders of the American Indian Movement, the radicals in the Native Youth Movement, strategists from the American Friends Service Committee, with playful anarchist mechanics, with severe syndicalist union goons, and all the others, knowing that we didn’t agree on the details, and making plans together anyway.
Social unrest was different in some ways in the nineties and aughts. Some of our current social crises were just coming into the spotlight. Older problems were radically changing form. One of those issues came to a head the day that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris skipped class to go bowling and returned to the Columbine High School campus to take revenge on the people they blamed for their problems. A lot happened really quickly here in the Front Range after that day. One of the events which followed was an FBI inquiry into the reading habits of U.S. citizens. During that widespread inquiry, one of Denver’s greatest folk heroes was put to the test.
Joyce Meskis was the owner of the Tattered Cover bookstores for almost all of my life and about half of hers. Her mark on Denver was unique, not only in Colorado but in the whole of the country, maybe in the world. Joyce built Tattered Cover into the largest independent purveyor of new books in the United States, all while taking the position of a free speech absolutist. Note: There’s some debate about Powell’s, of Portland Oregon, being bigger, but only by counting their used book business — which Tattered Cover didn’t incorporate until after it started shrinking. It really doesn’t matter which was bigger for the sake of this article, or anything really. And, I have nothing negative to say about Powell’s.
There are thousands of bookstore owners in the U.S. All of them are heroes to me, if we’re being honest. But, there is something special about someone who builds a monumental bookstore while maintaining such a controversial opinion and set of policies. Under Meskis’ leadership, all employees from the coffee shop to the director of purchasing were explicitly forbidden to openly pass any judgement on the media consumption of any customer or vagrant that wandered into the store. During the week long training process, Joyce and other management would role play wide ranging scenarios with new hires, scenarios involving pornography, books on the techniques involved in crime, and fringe politics and controversial philosophies. The answer in every scenario was to never imply to anyone that they should or shouldn’t read anything at all.
In the wake of the massacre at Columbine High School, FBI agents approached Joyce Meskis with a list of books and requested all of the customer data she could gather on the people who had purchased the books on the list. To the surprise of the FBI, Joyce demanded a warrant. In pre-9/11 United States, the FBI reluctantly had to comply. Of course, the FBI returned with a warrant, but in the intervening time Joyce had destroyed every pen stroke and bit of customer data that the Tattered Cover Bookstore had collected, for every customer purchase, sacrificing valuable business data and risking a life altering fight with the federal government.
From the people in my life who had a personal relationship with Joyce, this bold move was unsurprising. She would have done it for anyone, in any circumstance. Under Joyce’s ownership, Tattered Cover maintained a focus on social betterment. And when I say ‘focus’, I mean that Joyce was dedicated to improving society in one potent way, by providing unmitigated access to human thought. Tattered Cover was a place in which, no matter what ideas or expressions or interests you wanted to explore, you would not be judged by the staff in any way. At checkout, the staff would not comment in favor of or opposition to anything you wanted to buy.
Still, there were staff recommendation shelves prominently displayed. It wasn’t hard to tell what types of opinions a lot of people you encountered there had. But, you wouldn’t be judged for yours. The sanctity of that simple principle guided every decision from book purchasing to guest author events and the layout of the store itself. The Tattered Cover was a temple to open-minded exploration and freedom of expression.
In order to remain a temple to open-mindedness, it necessarily could not be anything else. How could the Tattered Cover assure anyone that their thoughts, ideas, and expressions were welcome and worth exploring if they took sides on any issues other than free speech, the freedom of the press, and freedom of personal expression? To take up any other political position would be to echo the Animal Farm mantra of All are Equal; Some are More Equal than Others.
Every copy of Adbusters which was ever released had been available for sale at Tattered Cover, not that it was anywhere near the most radical political periodical on offer. In late 2010, Adbusters pivoted from advocating for general and random culture shocking art stunts and started printing specific and time-bound calls-to-action, culminating in the call for a protest on Wall St. which kicked off the Occupy Movement. By this time, the St. Paul Principles were all but forgotten. Some of the people who knew about them had even begun to refer to them as problematic for various and often contradictory reasons.
The occupation was a mixed bag. I can only speak in any specific way regarding Occupy Denver, though conversations with friends from New York and other places have yielded similar accounts. It brought out some of the most optimistic and creative social thinkers I’ve yet met. It also attracted a lot of hangers-on who simply enjoy chaos and crowds. It allowed some people who were already sleeping in tents in the city to sleep in tents alongside people who had money and social resources. There were impassioned and inspirational talks. And there was heroine. A few social benefit projects which were conceived in those conversations are still operating and iterating toward novel solutions to difficult challenges. Occupiers went on to work on The Agile Learning Center in New York, numerous distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs), to initiate mutual aid projects, to found collective housing projects, tool libraries and other novel sharing networks, and to document new forms of decentralized decision-making and deliberative processes. On the other hand, a few complete maniacs may still be doing time for things like nut-tapping an elected official who visited the encampments for a debate and — of course — setting the whole Occupy Denver encampment on fire.
In the middle of that whole mixed bag, the Downtown Denver Partnership came out in full force against Occupy. No surprise there. The DDP is basically a polite racketeering organization for Denver’s 16th St. Mall. They exist to bolster tourism, mostly just from Denver’s suburbs. People traveling from out of state tend to bee-line it for Vail. From what I understand, for businesses on the 16th St. Mall, avoiding membership in the DDP is kinda like telling Guido that you don’t need Big Tony’s protection. So, Tattered Cover was a member of the Downtown Denver Partnership, like every other business on the strip.
A contingent of activists from Occupy decided that attacking the Tattered Cover was going to be their best strategy to break the DDP alliance, which wasn’t actually an alliance at all — not any more than all people who pay taxes are aligned on how those taxes are spent. I personally invested as much time as I could intervening against this misguided strategy. The response that I consistently received was that Joyce’s single issue stance was an example of toxic privilege, that if she cared about the betterment of society that she would come out in support of them and the Occupy non-agenda, and so forth.
Joyce defied the bullies from Occupy just as she had defied the FBI. But like so many of the leaders of contemporary radical movements, this contingent from Occupy were nothing like their more focused, strategic, well-read predecessors. Instead of focusing on a campaign which might have produced some kind of benefit or alliance building, they continually redoubled their attack on a bookstore.
Even with the dissolution of Occupy, the most vocal and aggressive circle that had gathered there continued their vendetta against Joyce and the Tattered Cover, now in the form of Denver Homeless Out Loud. That’s DHOL, pronounced D-hole. Their decision, not mine. For some reason, they had decided that she specifically had to use her position to take their side. They didn’t focus their efforts on the apolitical businesses or even the businesses which had spoken out in support of the DDP and the urban camping ban which they sponsored — with the exception of a confused breakfast spot owner, who proceeded to waffle. And, I can’t out them because, frankly, they were just railroaded by everyone for no good reason. I think the only reason DHOL laid off of them was because everyone could see that they were just struggling to understand what was going on. That particular business was so confused about what to do that even a bunch of homeless punks picking on them read as punching down.
I digress.
DHOL was deeply offended that this woman spent forty years building a business selling books in a world with declining literacy rates. She stood up to the feds. She held out while Barnes & Noble opened a few blocks up, lasted a few years, and closed, held out against Amazon, held out against the thousands of people who undoubtedly sought similar compromises against her principles over decades of operation. After all of those years she had the gall not to stop and ask a few strangers who had never achieved anything or contributed anything to society how she ought to run her business, how she ought to engage in her civic responsibilities. She hadn’t stopped to check-in with the people who were born around the time she was suing the state for constitutional violations. She didn’t ask them whether or not she was activist enough for their tastes. It never occurred to her that she should give away control of everything she had worked for to a few angry people with strong opinions, no investments, no skin in the game, and — if we’re being honest — no demonstrable integrity to speak of. She just hadn’t considered the obvious benefits of handing social resources over to immature and uneducated people who hadn’t worked for anything. And that just really ticked them off.
Joyce went on ignoring them.
They protested her for five years more. They protested her explicitly for doing nothing. Nothing that they wanted. Of course, she’d taken many other political actions with moxie and follow-through. Joyce’s actions against the state for putting limitations on free speech put her livelihood and reputation on the line. And DHOL went on protesting a woman who spent her whole life erecting sanctuaries of human thought, of exploration, of inquiry, of creation. They protested her because she hadn’t done what they think they would have done in her position, having never put in the work to have attained any similar position. That was the actual charge against her, not choosing a trendy enough cause in the eyes of the mob. And they picketed in front of her bookstores for that, blocks away from the offices of Halliburton, Newmont Mining, J.P. Morgan, et cetera, these social change makers made things harder for a woman with an independent bookstore simply and explicitly because she was committed to encouraging and facilitating absolutely free thought. And, to show that she was committed to free thought, she never corrected them, never complained, never retaliated.
In 2017, Joyce accepted an offer from Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan for a controlling interest in Tattered Cover. The moment Joyce turned over the reigns of Tattered Cover, the world lost one of its greatest treasures. I cannot say whether or not the misguided protests were a factor in her decision. In her seventies, no one can question her decision to retire. My belief is that, to the very end, she was tougher than the few cranky activists whose only strategy was to avoid doing anything either effective or useful for fear of the responsibilities which might follow.
Unfortunately, Len and Kristen were either not as strong or not as committed to the founding principle of the Tattered Cover as Joyce. And, hell, as pissed as I am about how it all turned out, I think Len and Kristen should be cut some slack. Few people will ever be as tough as a woman who lived and worked for decades with all of the problems of a female entrepreneur in America and all of the problems of a librarian in inner city America. I’m assuming that Len and Kristen did the very best they were prepared to do.
Three years after the sale, the tragic-comedy of misguided activism repeated. Local self-elected leaders in the movement for black lives chose to target, not any number of openly white supremacist organization in Colorado, not the legislature of Douglas County which still has a law on the books exempting people of color from the protection of probable cause, not the hospitals where black mothers and children have enormously higher mortality rates in delivery and extensively documented cases of negligence associated with those deaths, not the school board which continues to set black boys up for prison in a hundred different ways, not the NFL and the NBA which profit from ruining black lives and communities, not the Ministerial Alliance which excuses the worst cops and pacifies the black community following police misconduct, and — goodness this list could go on a long time. No, Black Lives Matter™ chose to ignore all of the people and organizations inside and outside of black communities that actually terminate and erode black lives. Instead they focused on a cancelation campaign against a free speech activist, the woman who — after it went out of print — promised me that she would track down Huey P. Newton’s To Die For The People for me if it took her weeks, who scoured the world for a copy of They Call Us Vandals because I said it was important to me, who fought with prison officials to get my cousin banned books when he was locked up. The movement for black lives went after her.
There’s a bunch of detail that could be added here about how treacherous the Lighthouse Writers showed themselves to be, how a ridiculous consulting firm called Prismatic was brought in to bolster the allegations which had already been assumed true. It’s a story of drama and pageantry. But the details of the death rattle are not the point.
In the St. Paul Principles era of activist thought, nothing like these campaigns could have happened because every activist organization would have recognized them as a clear violation of all of the principles which allowed us to collaborate to create positive change.
Note: I by no means have rose colored lenses for the anti-globalization movement and the general latch-key-kid era of activism. We fucked up a lot. Like. A. lot.
But we didn’t do this shit.
We mostly made the inverse error, trusted people simply because they understood enough political theory and activist process. Those are stories for another time. At the end of the day, I only have scars from being too trusting. I have shame from every instance in my life of not giving good people enough of the benefit of the doubt. I’ll take scars over shame all day. I think all decent people try to err in that direction. And, that can only lead me to believe that our contemporary movements for social uplift are not being stewarded by anything like decent people.
And, from everything I can see, contemporary movements do not further positive social change. There is still some good environmental work happening here and there, but most social change work has been taken over by the malignant force that causes mobs to attack a bookstore owner for “not saying enough”, a yoga studio owner for having worn a “problematic” halloween costume decades ago, or a comedian for a joke they didn’t understand — instead of a predatory lender, a human trafficker, a parasitic corporation, or a corrupt politician. Twenty years ago, we sat in strategy sessions to figure out how to cost Boise Cascade major contracts. Now “activists” gossip for days about their former friends who still haven’t unfollowed Matt Rife and call it “developing a culture of accountability”. This malignant force is more interested in coopting energies, forcing compliance, and coercing agreement than benefiting anyone.
Tattered Cover’s new owners, Len and Kristen, gave the new radical left an inch, and the parasitic new radical left stormed through the door and demanded a seat at the table making fundamental decisions for the company. Len and Kristen sold the business shortly thereafter to a private equity firm. Last week that private equity firm sold the Tattered Cover Bookstore to Barnes & Nobel.
Denver doesn’t deserve nice things because Denver doesn’t take care of nice things. At least, Denver doesn’t take care of nice things that don’t get it drunk. It is totally possible that all of this misplaced activist antagonism wasn’t the principle cause of the financial decline of the Tattered Cover. It’s more than possible; it’s likely. The simple decline in the value of published materials is more likely behind the demise of the Tattered Cover. That does not paint the people of Denver in a more favorable light.
I went to the Denver School of the Arts, one of the best schools I’ve ever even heard of. It was founded by Dr. Michael Bautista with a vision of providing the highest possible levels of education in the humanities. I’ll never forget the orientation assembly when he told the school that there would be no focus on college preparation in our school. Instead, he expected every member of the faculty to teach at the college level, to make colleges obsolete, to have higher expectations and achieve greater and more novel things than any high school was expected to. And we did. We sent students to major Hollywood studios, to Cirque du Soleil, to numerous major symphonies, and our work has populated publishing houses, galleries, and museums to the present. Our jazz band was hired right out of high school to be a house band on a cruise ship. Numerous performers were signed to labels and went off directly into production careers. Students founded their own production companies, solved frontier mathematical speculations, and scattered across the globe on adventures and into prominent universities. When the school board looked into the school’s success, they discovered that Dr. Bautista had overruled many district policies in order to give the art department heads more latitude to build distinct and effective programs. Each department head was the lord of a fife, and they had little-to-no constraint on their processes and regulations. We had no dress code. Attendance policies were set by teachers. The school had no specific disciplinarian. The campus was totally open. The theater department ran profitable productions, which meant that family members sometimes couldn’t get tickets to sold out shows. The visual arts department made no restrictions on depictions of violence, nudity, or drug use. I started drawing from live nude models when I was twelve or thirteen. The school board fired Dr. Bautista and gutted the institution immediately. They killed the project, kept the name, and slapped it on something different.
We spent a decade building slot homes that are made of 35% staircase and 100% flimsy garbage. No one will want to live in any of them when they have kids, start to get old, or develop an ounce of taste. How did we allow every vacant lot in the city to fill up with architecture designed for such a narrow and temporary demographic of people? Who wants to spend three quarters of a million dollars on a four-story home that sits on an 800 sq. ft. footprint of land and shares its driveway with five other homes? Why did we start bulldozing perfectly sound single family homes that would have stood another three centuries to build duplexes that start falling apart before they’re finished being built?
We gave up the legitimately family oriented Celebrity Sports Center, and for what? Celebrity’s was a true monument to everything the latch key era actually got right. Families would show up and parents would either tell their kids that they’d be bowling or in the pool hall. And the kids would disappear to the water park and the arcade, checking in with their parents any time they were out of quarters and too exhausted for the pool. It worked because of the way things were different back then. It wasn’t that parents didn’t look after their kids; it was that parents looked after everyone’s kids. And older kids looked after younger kids. It didn’t always work out, but we didn’t live our lives in fear of each other. We lived in fear of the Russians. Celebrity’s was a place where whole families could genuinely enjoy themselves for eight hours at a run. We gave that up and we got a few trampoline gyms where parents stand around and watch their kids jiggle surrounded by a hundred posters with lists of rules and everyone is over it in an hour because the whole place genuinely fucking sucks.
We used to have dozens of underground punk venues that attracted world class performers. Against Me and Lucero played my living room. I met Dave Kinsey, Grey, and Sam Flores at a warehouse party in a venue that hung some of Banksy’s first touring work — Revoluciones. Now it’s a doggy daycare. And, I love dogs. But, it’s just a really generic, cliche business that happens to occupy the location where globally relevant culture moving stuff used to happen. And that stuff doesn’t happen there any more because the people of Denver didn’t value it enough.
Speaking of cliché businesses. There’s a high production value but entirely unimaginative brewery that stands where the Velvet Hammer once stood. It is run by people whose faces glaze over when you try to impress upon them the significance of the Velvet Hammer — a lesbian bar that was around thirty years ago. And that was just a block uphill from Baby Doe’s, the mine shaft restaurant. If you think that Casa Bonita is an experience restaurant, well … you’re right. But Baby Doe’s offered a highly polished theme restaurant experience — not better but different, and unique. The Baby Doe’s real estate is now home to a bunch of cheaply built but really expensive apartments, like most of Denver now.
One predictable retort to the primary gripe of this article, regarding Tattered Cover, might be, “Why whine about a private bookstore? What about Denver’s amazing central library?” It is a really great library. But, somehow, every time I tried to visit it in the years just before COVID I found myself in a homeless shelter that looked oddly like the library but was definitely operating as a homeless shelter. I am grateful to all of the patient librarians who have stepped in to fill this need. But the job they had before was also a need. These are both high and noble callings, but they are not the same. So many people who were initially trained in library science are now working as social workers, and baby sitters, and psychotherapists, as addiction treatment providers, and as summer camp directors. And, apparently they are still being paid the same subsistence stipend as before to do all of these jobs at once. I don’t know how any of the librarians from the central library are doing now. Since COVID, the library, which was entirely finished decades ago, has been under new construction for longer than it took to build it originally.
In Denver, our best musicians, actors, sculptors, painters, singers, they all leave. When I talk to them, they don’t usually tell me that they’re loving it in L.A. or New York or Seattle. Usually its more that there are just enough people and just enough infrastructure there that it basically works. Those cities don’t entirely hate them just for existing. L.A. might chew you up and take everything you’ve got leaving you with nothing but a story worth telling, a SAG card, and melanoma. New York may break you from the inside out, but it’ll put your name in lights for a few minutes and call you “baby” while it slaps your ass out the door. Denver, by contrast, will send SWAT to raid your music venue, beat the shit out of the band on stage, and mace the crowd — RIP Linoleum. Denver will throw your teenage ass in jail for selling CDs of your own music on the 16th St. Mall. Denver treats creators and sustainers of culture and thought like rancid medical waste and treats parasitic land barons and international corporations with laundry lists of human rights violations like favored sons.
Denver modeled much of the development of River North after its most sensational venue, Rhinoceropolis, then threw them out, and killed the DJ. Denver repays every good deed with fines, cheap imitations, displacement, depression, and death.
We had a book store once. A massive, world famous, four story temple honoring fantasies, inventions, research, and discovery from living minds and active presses the world over. It was beautiful. But we stopped deserving it. We developed a taste for simpler thoughts, more convenient media, a shallower approach to being human. We gave into instant gratification politics and instant gratification discourse.
What comes next will be ugly, painful, and slow. Despite what the school board may believe, the humanities are not extra curricular, elective, or optional. They are exactly what they are called. They are our humanity. The strokes and measures that we dance and sing and paint are our cultural lodestone. What the best of us painstakingly articulate in longform lucid prose is our guide to being human. When a population no longer values these efforts enough to keep one of the most glorious bookstores in the world operating profitably that population has decided its own grizzly, disoriented, chaotic fate.
It is going to hurt.
This is not an accidental fate. This was chosen.
***
UPDATE: I am exceedingly grateful to the people who have reached out to tell me how much this article meant to them, how much they enjoyed it, and to share with me their shared love and appreciation of the Tattered Cover. Bree Davies reached out and had me on the City Cast Podcast, not the first time she’s included me in her journalism. It helps to know that there are so many people who definitely care.
I am differently, and potentially more acutely grateful for the feedback I received on the first draft of this piece, specifically the feedback that it didn’t read very well to folks not from Denver — and how. I have done my best to clarify those elements of the article and it is really much better for it.
On this evening, just before I sat down to refine this article and get it published, the fire alarm went off in our hotel. I woke up my family and rushed them out onto the hotel lawn. It’s the same thing that I had to do almost exactly a month ago when an arsonist set fire to our neighbors home, which is the reason we’re living in a hotel.
Society is losing its collective mind — and consequentially.
Emergencies don’t just happen. The U.S., not just Denver, has a higher law enforcement to civilian ratio than much of the world. And our metropolitan police and other emergency departments are still understaffed and lowering entrance requirements to meet demand. Those staff shortages are a matter of comparison to the volume of requests for police assistance, the number of crimes reported and requiring investigation, and the incidence of catastrophic emergencies. Most of these situations begin with someone making idiotic decisions or simply failing to pay attention to what they’re doing. If the U.S. has so many cops and is still empirically under policed — according to civilian demand — and those demands mostly follow people doing stupid shit, then we, as a nation, are engaging in a lot of inane, reprobate, careless, negligent, predatory, and generally moronic behavior.
Sit with that.
Really sit with that.
And, are you someone who dedicates any amount of your precious time and resources to improving your community, to developing new economic models, or to regenerating ecosystems?
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