Revitalizing Denver's "Harlem"

A new theater is opening in what was once Denver's center for black culture. Now the neighborhood is a mixture of 25% black, 43% Latino, and 27% white, so this theater plans to draw upon its neighborhood history but also expand to showcase a variety of cultural influences.

5/10/07, The Denver Post - New theater opening in Five Points neighborhood: "The Denver neighborhood once called "the Harlem of the West" is enjoying a cultural renaissance of its own these days....

Another person who sees the upside on the cultural front is Denver lawyer Kurt Lewis, who sold his house to open a new live theater, Crossroads at Five Points Theatre....

Five Points developer James Ellis is one of his biggest fans.

'One of the things we really like about Crossroads is that there are no boundaries, and that is implied by the name,' said Ellis, who plans to restore the facade of the historic Rossonian Hotel next door and reopen it as a live jazz venue with an upscale restaurant by summer 2008....

Five Points once boasted more than 50 jazz clubs and earned the city's first-ever designation as a neighborhood of 'cultural significance,' Ellis said. It was not only a favorite destination for such legends as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, it was a respite from the racism that pervaded just 10 blocks to the south....

And now Lewis, a white man, has leveraged his future to build an 84-seat, $450,000 theater in a building owned by a black man.

Everyone involved with Crossroads believes the theater, and the neighborhood, can best survive into the future if it celebrates its cultural past while also welcoming, even encouraging, all those who dared not go there before. That means celebrating diversity in a rainbow of colors.

That's one reason Lewis' 3,600-square-foot theater is opening with an Irish play. 'Bold Girls' will be followed by a one-woman jazz musical, and the world premiere of 'The Sisters, Sweetwater,' the story of two black women in the 1920s written by Hugo Jon Sayles of Shadow, Denver's only black theater company.

But Lewis envisions a melting- pot community resource open all day every day for classes, jazz, cabaret, poetry, fashion shows and even weekly 'open- mic dance.' Theater performances will start no later than 7 p.m., followed by late-night spoken- word artists Café Nuba and late- late-night screenings of the cult film 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.'

Allowing many visions

'Denver doesn't really have a place that embraces the creative class, and it doesn't have a place that celebrates ethnicity,' Ellis said. 'Crossroads is a place that plans to do that and then some.'

Crossroads board member donnie l. betts said the theater will be unique because it seeks a convergence of creative cultures with differing values."