A smattering of pedestrians hurried past mostly closed shops along Denver’s normally crowded 16th Street Mall on Wednesday afternoon.
Maggiano’s Little Italy was still open at about 4 p.m. The small bar was crowded and a few tables in the restaurant were occupied.
Janine Halloway, who is moving to Lower Downtown from Los Angeles, stopped in after the moving company that was supposed to deliver furniture to her new loft cancelled.
“I am having a glass of wine, and we are going to get some take-out and go back to my friend’s house,” she said.
“There were people coming in and we had a staff here so we stayed open this afternoon,” said Josh Mayo, Maggiano’s general manager.
But business was less than half its normal volume and six rooms that normally are booked for private parties sat empty throughout the day, Mayo said.
“This will be a big chunk out of our normal sales,” he said, noting that he was planning on closing the restaurant at 5 p.m.
A Starbucks that normally stays open until 10 p.m. also was closing at 5 p.m. The shop served only about one-quarter the customers it normally serves, an employee said.
A handful of people, only a few of whom were actually eating, sat at tables at a McDonald’s. Most of those behind the counter about 4 p.m., when the store was preparing to close, were shift workers who should have gone home in the early afternoon, said Jorge Martinez, the manager. Four workers who were supposed to take the afternoon shift didn’t make it to work, he said.
At Jimmy Johns sandwich shop, employees were making large orders of sandwiches for companies that were feeding people working through the evening.
“It is a lot slower, but our catering business is larger than average,” said Katy Richards, the shop manager.
The crew of five people had made about 400 sandwiches through 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, only about half of them for walk-in customers. Normally the shop makes about 800 sandwiches in the same period, and 600 of them are purchased by walk-in customers, Richards said.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
