Each of their faces, about 50 or 60 of them, went blank. More than a few gasped. It is, after all, what happens when you show up prepped for a fight, and the other guy simply lies down.
A fight it had promised to be, so much so that city workers moved the hearing from a second-floor room to the vast lobby of the Wellington E. Webb building.
I walked in and sidled up next to Shannon Conners, 39, who has lived in Northeast Park Hill for 10 years. For weeks she had carried petitions around the neighborhood.
“People I had spoken to had such a sense of hopelessness that things were never going to change,” she said. “But they were willing to put their name on a piece of paper, so I feel a sense of obligation to stand with them.”
And that would be in fierce opposition to an application to rebuild the Park Hill Liquors store that Bok Yang Kim and her husband operated for three years in the Holly Square Shopping Center until a fire lit by angry gang members demolished it in May.
Denver’s Excise and Licenses Department scheduled the hearing to get neighborhood input.
Celia Fauntleroy, 65, a retired federal worker, sat silently, her arms folded in her lap, as the crowd shuffled in.
“You should have seen the neighborhood in 1961,” she said. “It was wonderful. . . . We had a hardware store and a dime store — a real neighborhood. And now, she (Kim) wants to bring the riffraff and the hoodlums back.”
It was clear the deck was stacked against Kim, her husband and their application. In a show of hands, all but maybe 10 people had come to oppose the liquor store. Kim and her husband winced.
Holly Square, even before the fire, was a bit of a hardscrabble place. No one truly wept over its violent demise.
In its place, residents want the charter school that the nonprofit Urban Land Conservancy has expressed an interest in building — a no-crime, hoodlum-less alternative to what they fear a liquor store would bring.
Over the past six weeks, Conners and other residents have taken to the streets with their petitions, gathering about 450 signatures ahead of Wednesday night’s meeting.
There are already six liquor stores within 1.2 miles of the Kims’ proposed store, residents said.
What does it say about how their neighborhood is perceived, residents asked, that the first business seeking to return is a liquor store?
The hand count taken, Robert Dill, the Kims’ attorney, walked to the microphone. The couple, he said, was withdrawing their application.
No one moved.
“My clients are withdrawing their application at this location until the community supports it,” he repeated.
The Kims were rushed by residents who moments earlier had sought to battle them. Sitting wide-eyed, seemingly stunned in their chairs, the couple shook each hand that was thrust at them.
“They just had time to think about it,” said Dill, who grew up in the Holly Square area.
“They had wanted to stay in the community and be a service but, obviously, things have changed,” he said. “It is why they made this decision.”
I think I detected a tear in Fauntleroy’s eye as she walked out of the Webb building, a neighbor’s arm wrapped around her shoulder.
There might be hope yet for this city.
Bill Johnson’s column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
