Tonya Tiscanni never wanted to needle a sleeping giant.
But the former South Broadway bar owner acknowledges she felt stung by Regas Christou’s new “SoCo” campaign.
“I was like, what? That’s kind of a rip-off,” says Tiscanni, who once operated the Baker neighborhood watering holes 60 South and ZooDenver. Both bars are closed now.
Tiscanni has long endorsed the neighborhood acronym “SoBo,” and still operates the website sobodenver.com to promote South Broadway as an entertainment destination, particularly as it’s one of several central Denver neighborhoods that have seen rising real estate prices and new residential construction alongside the Baker neighborhood’s already healthy night-life scene. Then, last year, the marketing machine behind nightclub magnate Regas Christou started producing fliers, stickers, e-newsletters and websites meant to brand the blocks around his businesses “SoCo,” for south of Colfax.
As Denver’s urban neighborhoods develop, city folk seem to stumble over new acronyms all the time. Realtors pick up on them quickly as a way to market hot new areas to homebuyers.
The latest? The Fax. That’s the catchy new moniker adopted by businesses along East Colfax Avenue between Colorado Boulevard and Yosemite Street – a branding attempt that coincides with this year’s first Colfax Marathon in May, and the accompanying “Feast on The FAX” festival.
But a quick survey of the various attempts to create the region’s “next LoDo” reveals that “SoCo” and the rest of these neighborhood nicknames may be misconceived.
Tiscanni started pushing the name “SoBo” about eight years ago. With less capital behind the effort, however, the term never became cemented in the vernacular of the hipsters who live, work and play there.
Christou says he simply wanted to centralize the business and residential interests along Broadway and Lincoln under the “SoCo” moniker.
“(The branding campaign) will help get our neighbors involved,” says the businessman, who hatched the idea after a recent trip to Madrid in which he relished that city’s Puerta Del Sol entertainment district.
“The whole idea is that this will be no different than LoDo,” Christou says. “You can park in one place and walk to others.”
He concedes he could use more neighborhood alliances. During one recent application process for a new liquor license, for instance, residents in a nearby apartment building posted an anti-Regas notice in the elevators that read: “Do you really want another nightclub?”
Eileen Hall is a Denver graphic designer who goes out in central Denver about twice a week. Half the time, she ends up at one of Christou’s clubs – The Church, Shelter or Vinyl. But Hall has yet to adopt the term “SoCo” to refer to that neighborhood. “It sounds more like ‘Southern Comfort’ liquor than an area of Denver,” she says.
It’s far from being the only new Denver neighborhood acronym out there. There’s also “NoDo,” for north downtown. That term surfaced almost two decades ago, before the city broke ground on Coors Field. At the time, there was only one enthusiastic neighbor lobbying for that brand.
“The first thing you need to do is get people to recognize that the neighborhood even exists,” says Karle Seydel, an urban planner credited by downtown residents with being the first to float the term NoDo.
“Back then, North Downtown was not even on the map,” he says. “It was the forgotten side of downtown Denver.”
Seydel’s challenges with that acronym may not bode well for the new RiNo neighborhood, or River North Art Districts.
So what makes neighborhood branding work? Lower Manhattan was one of the first areas of New York City to refer to where people lived. Still, New Yorkers rarely referred to that neighborhood as “SoHo” before city officials designated it an historic district in the 1973. And that was only after the “boho” crowd deemed SoHo a fun place to be.
Back home, Dick Kreck was the first Denverite to use Denver’s most familiar neighborhood acronym: LoDo.
“I think it stuck because it is an identifiable, defined area,” says the longtime Denver Post columnist. “These other places are creations of their inhabitants, trying to give their neighborhoods identity that doesn’t exist.
“Most of these ‘names’ are doomed,” Kreck says. “Call their creators LoCo.”
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
