The more things change in Denver … the more things change in Denver.

On Wednesday, I was attending a “New Play Crawl” fundraiser in Olde Towne Arvada. That’s a fun group adventure where you move from storefront to storefront and actors perform short fictions right in front of you. Then, you’re on to the next.

One story took place on the patio outside Clementine’s Hair Salon. The plot was intense: One woman had lured another to this very spot under the guise that she had kidnapped her new boyfriend. All was well, though: Turns out, the woman’s loyalty to her man was simply being tested. She passed.

(On second thought: All is clearly not well in that relationship.)

But while the dozen others in my group were simply appreciating the clever writing and professional acting on a beautiful late spring night, I couldn’t help but think how perfect it was that this little drama was playing out here, at Clementine’s. I grew up nearby, so I knew this to be the second-oldest building in Arvada. It was constructed in 1874 as Grange Hall and converted into a longstanding community playhouse in 1962.

The place holds a special place in my heart. My mother wrote about the plays at the Arvada Festival Playhouse as an editor for the Arvada Citizen newspaper. And she introduced her horde of children (all eight of us) to live theater by bringing us along. In fact, the first play I ever reviewed as a grown-up critic turned out to be a disastrous swing at “Pippin” right here. (I still have the typed, mailed response from the apoplectic director, just in case I ever needed to turn it over to the police.)  

How many in my group of night crawlers knew this setting’s symbiotic connection to the short play we had just seen, I wondered?

None. (I asked.)

Perhaps, to them: Once a salon, always was a salon.

The sad, natural reality of American life is that a building is just a building until it becomes something else. And before long, you start to forget whatever was there in the first place.

Case in point: Drive past the Whole Foods on Colorado Boulevard enough times, and you might start to wonder: Wait, was Celebrity Sports Center just off Kentucky Avenue – or Louisiana?

The mind plays tricks on all of us.

I have officially reached the stage of life where I will lament wistfully: “That used to be a Pizza Hut.” (And, with apologies to the Talking Heads, it’s not all covered in daisies.)

There’s a modest building at 3800 Irving St. that stands as a chameleonic scrapbook of my life as a Coloradan. When I was growing up and attending what (used to be) nearby Regis Jesuit High School, it was Lehrer’s Flowers – still the largest floral business in Colorado, but now long gone from the corner lot where I bought my prom date’s corsage. (She brought me a cigar – and I don’t even smoke.)

When I returned to Colorado years later and bought a house in the old neighborhood, the formerly white, then bright yellow brick box of a building had been painted a menacing black. It was now Salvagetti’s Bike Shop, and that’s where I bought the 10-speed I still use to tootle around the neighborhood.

During the shutdown, I started a ritual I called my COVID Walk: A 3-mile daily pilgrimage to nowhere to keep my body moving at a time when we were all afraid to walk down the same side of the street as any other living soul. Unfortunately, I never did break my compulsion to multitask, and thus I learned first-hand just how real the uneven Denver sidewalk issue is by twice face-planting into concrete. Both times, I found my way to 3800 Irving St., now an essential but utterly nondescript neighborhood AFC Urgent Care, for stitching.   

(Forget distracted driving. Distracted walking is real.)

Back in the distant past, when I had time in my life for outside interests, I had an obsessive outside interest in chronicling the collective scraped history of metro Denver. It began while driving south down Wadsworth Boulevard from Olde Town Arvada toward I-70.

To our right, the godson sees an RTD Park-n-Ride. (Now he sees a Harkins cineplex). I see what we called “Arvada 1 & 2”: The sports fields that were the scene of my very limited football glories. To the left, the godson sees Red Robin (home of the greatest french fries since the King’s Food Host.) I see what was once the massive, majestic Wadsworth Drive-In.

When progress intrudes, time passes and a seminal place goes away, the real tragedy is when you start to forget all the crazy “Stand By Me”-like things that happened there because the mental visual inevitably fades. Like sneaking stacked bodies into that drive-in through the front end of our car (it was a Volkswagen Bug, after all). 

I have a dormant blog that still lives on Tumblr called “This Used to Be Denver.” It was a “hobby bloggy” that attempted to preserve a record of things that “Used to Be,” even in the most unremarkable of places. Sort of like Willy Loman screaming, “Attention must be paid” in “Death of a Salesman.” Each entry remembers something that has been replaced by something else. (You will also learn where Bob Dylan and Grace Kelly lived – not together! – in Denver.)

For example, when you pull up to Willis Case Golf Course on West 50th Avenue, chances are you won’t notice the generic condos to your immediate right. But that “Used to Be” the elegant El Jebel Shrine, home to Colorado’s most magnificent dance hall. About a mile south, the gateway to the Tennyson Street shopping district off 38th Avenue “Used to Be” the Elitch Lanes bowling alley – a favored dive known for its corn dogs, cheap beer and loose arcade games. Now it’s a Natural Grocers. (Not that I’m complaining. That’s where I get all my ear candles to this day.)  

But then there is the Denver Diner. Make that “was” the Denver Diner.

Once a mainstay at Colfax Avenue and Speer, that corner now makes space for an offensively nondescript branch of the Chase Bank. Seriously, Chase has 20 locations in Denver. Did it need No. 20 so badly that it was willing to mop a chapter of Denver history away like a spilled milkshake?

(I know. It was a fire. It had to be replaced by something. It’s just easier for me to focus my anger at anything called “Chase.”)

This is an impossible game to keep up with, because by now, everything in Denver “Used to Be” something else – likely many times over. Acove “Used to Be” Patsy’s. The Wild Corgi Pub “Used to Be” Gabor’s. The (yawn) Zang office building at 1553 Platte St. “Used to Be” the most magical, mind-expanding coffee shop in Denver: Paris on the Platte. (Or, a cranny of it.)  

The Walmart on Ralston Road “Used to Be” the Arvada Plaza Shopping Center, which means my uncle’s now long-razed Red Lion Lounge is now part of your parking lot. A few miles south, my dad’s old Eddie’s Cordial Lounge is also reduced to asphalt as it awaits some manner of overpriced redevelopment or another right across the street from Casa Bonita.

It’s still too fresh to say this without some heart and taste-bud pain, but El Chingon is about to become what “Used to Be” the El Noa Noa Mexican restaurant at 722 Santa Fe Blvd.  

Change is necessary, of course. If 7 South never goes away, we never have a hi-dive. If Motorsports Gallery never leaves 2669 Larimer St., we don’t have the charming Denver Central Market. It’s the price we pay for progress.

But doesn’t all this head-spinning, nonstop change also make you appreciate all the more when a Casa Bonita or a Buckhorn Exchange or a My Brother’s Bar or a Carl’s Pizza manages to live on as a “Still Is” rather than a “Used to Be”? 

Old Denver scored a huge win this week when it was announced that the owners of the Oriental Theater will be restoring and reopening the nearby Federal Theatre as a venue for live music and other amusements. It was refreshing to see that news celebrated by both young and old, as if the greater value in preserving any 102-year-old building in Denver is mutually understood. 

When an iconic business like Celebrity Sports Center closes, or the original Elitch Gardens moves, only to be replaced by housing or generic developments, something both tangible and intangible is erased: History. Community. Identity. Traditions. Generations of shared stories. A shared emotional bond to a time and place.

It doesn’t matter if you and I were ever in the Red Lion Lounge at the same time. If you ever set foot in the Red Lion Lounge, then we have that shared experience. (Believe me, it didn’t change from night to night.) Far better than realizing we have both parked at the same Walmart. 

And while thousands have been migrating to Denver for generations for the fresh start that is inherent to life in the American West, when we lose too much of what once rooted us as a community, it becomes all the harder for newcomers to ever feel part of our collective past.

The key to making modernization and preservation work in some kind of harmony is to start with a plan – something that often seems lacking in a city run by government officials who believe that all growth is good growth – especially when it comes to Denver’s haphazard approach to housing.

It works when developers embrace an intentional strategy called adaptive reuse — which only means being mindful of retaining whatever it was that made a place special while reimagining it to meet modern needs.

When you turn a diner into a generic bank, for example, that is not employing intentional strategy. But Denver is filled with successful examples of adaptive reuse: The most notable example over the past 25 years has been adapting the power plant for the city’s long-gone trolley system as the new home for REI’s flagship store. That building had stood derelict for years. Now it is the gorgeous, undisputed anchor to the redevelopment of Denver’s Central Platte Valley. It’s a perfect marriage of space, product and clientele. And not for nothing: REI reported $3.53 billion in net sales in 2024, largely thanks to customers who run, cycle and tube right outside its doors.

Will this beloved place one day ”Used to Be” REI? Almost inevitably. If we old-timers weren’t, you know – dead – it sure would be fun to watch what happens when Old Denver meets Generation Alpha, all grown up and nostalgic for its past.

Will they even have lawns to get offa?