Between Osceola and Perry streets on West Colfax, amid the car lots, gas stations and boarded-up buildings, lies an island of richly diverse flora, fauna and enterprise ruled over by the Rose Lady.
Deborah Orban-Rosen has taken a block of interconnected brown-brick storefronts on Denver’s long, seedy speedway and, in the last few years, turned it into a one-family economic recovery plan.
“I just listen to people in the neighborhood. I fill the voids,” said the 50-year-old Orban-Rosen, her brows arching over kohl-blue eye shadow.
“There’s a stigma on West Colfax,” she said. “Some people say it’s bad. I don’t see what they’re looking at. To me it’s a great neighborhood, a hard-working neighborhood of survivors.”
Orban-Rosen’s personal strip mall, awash in murals of rose-bearing cherubs, is now home to the $5 haircut, $25 tattoo, $8.99 rose bouquet and $495 cremation — not to overlook the bail bonds, hookah lounge, notary service, cellphone store, nail salon, money wire and the fine-chocolates counter in a nook of the florist shop.
Chocolate sales constitute the college fund for her 5-year-old live-in granddaughter and primary distraction, the irrepressible, ever-tugging-at-the-sleeve Ezari.
“I didn’t set out to open all these businesses. They just happened. . . . Now I need them all, every single business,” said Orban-Rosen while fishing for quarters to buy Ezari video-game time in the hookah lounge.
Then the Rose Lady took a drag on a hookah pipe of coconut-flavored tobacco, or shisha, and recounted her history.
Deli became a florist shop
The Denver native got her start in business selling single roses, table to table, in bars and restaurants. She stored her delicate inventory on one shelf of a soda cooler in an Osceola Street gas station.
Later she would partner, first in business and friendship and later in marriage, with Gerald Rosen, now 63, whose family once owned a delicatessen in what had been a thriving Jewish neighborhood.
Upon the retirement of Rosen’s mother, Gerald and Deborah converted the deli. Their new stock-in-trade was a reasonably priced bouquet of roses.
In recent years the Rosens struggled to withstand the hurricane-strength forces buffeting their business — rising fuel costs, vanishing growers and big-box competition. The King Soopers grocery chain could sell flowers even more cheaply than they could.
To survive, Orban-Rosen figured she would have to diversify with a capital “D” — and throw away her wristwatch.
“My day never begins and it never ends. It’s continuous,” Orban-Rosen said in a brisk, evenly pitched voice evocative of military personnel.
“I get bail-bond calls all night. Whatever time people see me on the street, they know I’ll open for them.”
Orban-Rosen runs an army of helpers. When she rents space to a new hair stylist, nail tech or tattoo artist, they sometimes ask her what hours they should keep.
“So,” she said, “I ask them: ‘Do you want to drive a Volkswagen or a Jaguar?’ ”
“She believed in my dream”
One entrepreneur under her wings, 29-year-old Tech Mitchell, has made a name for himself as an artist in hair. He shaves intricate designs onto craniums at Rose Lady kinds of prices, a fraction of that charged at trendier spots.
“She’s an animal, a workaholic,” Mitchell said admiringly of Orban-Rosen. “She’s helped out a lot of people who couldn’t get help other places. She believed in my dream.”
For Orban-Rosen’s 25-year-old daughter, Daniele Duncan, the youngest of three girls, her mother’s fierce work ethic has been a double-edged sword, teaching her independence but sometimes wearing her out.
“It’s difficult not to talkd business with her,” Duncan said.
In mid-July, the Rose Lady left her kingdom on Colfax for two weeks in Hawaii with her mother and sister, the first major departure in five years.
“Maybe I’ll do some soul searching,” she said. “I need another business on this block.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
