Motel Hell, part 1

In March, 2003, when The Regency was still a hotel, local alternative newspaper The Westword wrote an article detailing the seedy place the hotel actually was. It was titled "Motel Hell." Here it is, in three parts:

I was never afraid of elevators until I rode in the elevators at the Regency Hotel. There are three of them, equally spooky, lit with bare white fluorescent bulbs. Carved swastikas and gang symbols scar the wood-paneled walls. The emergency-phone compartments hold dangling wires, pistachio shells, cigarette butts, scorched pizza crusts and broken crack pipes. Some floor buttons are missing, and many of the rest don't light up when pressed. When the elevators ascend, they squeak and rattle and creep along, as if they are being pulled up by hundreds of chinchillas running on treadmills. Going down is worse. Much worse. Going down, the elevators don't rattle and squeak -- they shudder and groan as the lights flicker. And they are prone to sudden, blood-chilling plunges, like small planes hitting air pockets in a thunderstorm.

The elevators behave as if possessed. They randomly freeze between floors long enough for claustrophobia to prowl the edges of your composure. They jolt to a halt on floors where no one has called them, doors sliding open to reveal empty hallways.

I was never sure where these elevators were taking me during a recent Saturday stay at the Regency. But Lee was. Lee is the Regency's self-appointed elevator operator. He lives in the former luxury hotel, paying a little over $100 a week for his room a hundred feet off the ground, in the main tower. All day long he rides the elevators, hitting up passengers for tips. Nights he holes up in his room and smokes methamphetamine. Lee claims to be a wizard. He only rides the middle elevator; he says the other two are cursed beyond his power. All I know is, the middle elevator never dropped when Lee was on it, and several times he coaxed it out of a stall between floors, his hands flitting like spiders over the buttons, pushing four, then six, to get me to nine.

"There are secret combinations," he says. "You just have to know, and I know. I'm numerological."

My introduction to Lee was uncivil. I was on the twelfth floor, having just checked in, and I was trying to get back down to the lobby, except the elevator call buttons on my floor had been torn from the walls. A fellow guest, a Mexican laborer newly in this country from Culiacán, Sinaloa, showed me a trick: He removed the cap from a ballpoint pen and began violently stabbing it into the socket that had once held the "down" button. "Elevator's coming," he said after five or six thrusts, then vanished into a stairwell. (Many hours later on another floor, where the call buttons were likewise missing, I witnessed a different guest achieve the same effect by wedging a bent key in the socket and then kicking it.)

A minute passed, and then I heard squeaks in the central shaft growing slowly louder, accompanied by a coarse voice spewing profanity. The squeaks stopped at my floor. The muffled swearing continued. I heard a warbling chime, and the doors slid open. There stood Lee. He was tweaking -- jaw grinding, eyes vibrating beneath a watch cap low on his brow, ratty black T-shirt pulled tight over the crystal-cut muscles of a natural athlete on speed. Lee looked me over. "I will fuck you the fuck up!" were his first words to me. He paced back and forth in three-step cycles. "You're making me paranoid," he said. The feeling was mutual. The doors began to close, and Lee reached out to part them with both hands like a ghetto Moses. "Well, get the fuck on this motherfucker," he said.

On the way down, Lee told me to give him a dollar. "Gotta tip the elevator man. You don't tip the elevator man, there's no telling what the elevator man might do." I tipped the elevator man, then told him I just wanted to ride along for a spell. He said it would cost me one dollar for each trip up, two dollars for each trip down. In return, he guaranteed safe passage. We shook on it. Moments later we hit the lobby, and two men got on carrying plastic bags stuffed with bottles of strawberry-flavored fortified wine, plastic liters of cheap vodka, chips, orange juice and candy. They both had untrimmed beards and wore torn leather jackets over grimy hooded sweatshirts and Army jackets. They wouldn't have looked out of place standing on a corner during morning rush hour, holding cardboard signs: "Christian Vet. Anything helps. God bless."

"I haven't been here in ten years," one of the men said, checking out the plywood patches in the elevator's ceiling. "I see it's still a shithole."

"Yeah," slurred his buddy. "But it's a shithole with a view."

There's a manila folder in the Western History Department archives at the Denver Public Library marked "Regency Inn." Inside is a color brochure dated 1973, depicting the Regency's trademark gold dome and tower, situated at the intersection of 39th Avenue and Elati Street, just west of the asphalt artery that was then the Valley Highway and is now Interstate 25.

"Have a love affair with Denver at the Regency," the brochure invites. "Visit a world of friendliness and gracious living. A world of splendor and grandeur amid the majestic Rocky Mountains."

Once the favorite Denver hotel of Elvis Presley, the Regency is no longer fit for the King.

Gang graffiti mars its stairwells, where pine-scented disinfectant fails to mask the reek of urine. A banner above its lobby advertises "Low Weekly Rates." Gutter punks beg for change in a stone courtyard by the drained swimming pool. The gift shop sells Army surplus MREs -- pasta in Alfredo sauce, nine for a dollar. The hotel's soda machines are perpetually empty of everything except diet cola, and its rooms are chambers of the surreal, where the decorative prints on the walls are three copies of the same crude painting: evergreen trees before a setting tropical sun, framed in fake gold.

The Regency once rated four stars in travel guides. Denver developers Victor and Martin Lederman were its first owners, having built the hotel's original tower and lobby complex in 1969 at a cost of $4 million. There were 180 guest rooms in the tower, and two lounges, two dining rooms and a coffee shop on the first floor. The hotel was successful, and in 1973, the Ledermans hired local architect Richard L. DeGette to design a $5.5 million expansion. It added 230 rooms, an outdoor pool, a 16,000-square-foot ballroom with two-story-high ceilings, a conference center and a 12,000-square-foot exhibit hall beneath a massive golden dome. The Regency was then one of the few luxury hotels of its size in America to be independently owned. In addition to Elvis, President Gerald Ford and Olympics track-and-field star Jesse Owens stayed there when they came to town. It was a popular spot for weddings, black-tie fundraisers and high school proms.

Denver's economic slump in the 1980s hit the Lederman brothers where it hurt, and in 1990, they declared bankruptcy and put their landmark hotel on the auction block for $20 million, blaming the reconfigured Mousetrap at the junction of I-25 and I-70 for the hotel's decline in business. The Regency languished throughout the 1990s. Meanwhile, local entrepreneur Art "Smiley" Cormier, owner of the gargantuan 24-hour Smiley's Laundromat on East Colfax Avenue, was hoarding his quarters, ever on the lookout for new investment opportunities. In 1995, Cormier opened El Fugitivo (The Fugitive), a Westminster nightclub catering to fans of Mexican folk and dance music.