Playboy magazine once called Colfax Avenue the longest, wickedest street in America, and you are on it now, a designation the city has spent decades alternately fighting and embracing. Colfax runs for twenty-six miles from the suburb of Aurora in the east through central Denver and into the foothills to the west, making it one of the longest continuous commercial streets in the United States. At its peak in the 1940s, Colfax was lined with department stores, movie palaces, hotels, and restaurants serving the entire metropolitan area.
The automobile suburbs of the postwar years gradually hollowed out the street: the big stores moved to malls, the movie palaces became pawnshops, and by the 1970s Colfax had acquired its reputation for vice and danger. The street has been in slow recovery for two decades, with new restaurants and bars moving in alongside the old pawnshops and motels, and light rail running down its median since 2013. But Colfax resists gentrification more stubbornly than most Denver streets, which may be exactly what keeps it alive.