In Denver’s Five Points, jazz is the recipe for sparking a comeback on historic Welton Street

Story first appeared in:

Devante Jackson-Brown is sweating a little as he stands over his smoker, the heat and sweet smoke surrounding him while he flips chicken wings and stirs a vat of black-eyed pea stew with collard greens outside a brewery on a warm September night. 

The jazz band playing at Spangalang tonight is setting up on an outdoor stage, and a crowd begins to gather in the beer garden. 

Up the block, kids are drawing with chalk on the sidewalk outside Duke’s chopped-cheese and burger stand while their parents jam out to a three-man band of two electric guitarists and a drummer. And a few blocks to the south, Risë Jones is opening a bottle of French wine as she shifts from the daytime crowd to a nighttime one at her TeaLee’s Tea House and Bookstore. 

It’s the first Friday of the month on Welton Street in Five Points, a corridor rooted in Denver’s vibrant jazz scene and troubled history of segregation and redlining. Five Points is battling its reputation as a neighborhood without much to offer by amplifying the past to chart its future.

That plan includes the recently reintroduced First Friday Five Points Jazz Hop, when the corridor fills with people who come for the jerk chicken at Welton Street Cafe or the gazpacho at TeaLee’s, then zigzag from restaurant to park to bar to listen to a collection of bands overlapping at multiple venues. It’s not an attempt to recreate the Roaring ’20s, when the neighborhood was called the “Harlem of the West” and its jazz scene centered around the Rossonian Hotel, which had a club so legendary that it led to performances from such luminaries as Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.

This is something else. 

“People come to Five Points and they want the Five Points of the 1920s,” said Norman Harris, who grew up in the neighborhood and is now the executive director of the Five Points Business Improvement District. “We’re creating what we’re becoming.”

On the first Friday night in September, Harris was outside his Spangalang Brewery, solving the last-minute problems of a small-business owner and answering parking questions from the band members of Buckner FunkenJazz. “There is a guy smoking chicken wings. There is a guy with an Ethiopian food truck on the street,” Harris said, looking across his beer garden near the spot where five streets meet at a single intersection. “It creates this magnet, this anchor for people to come together. The music is the connector, the vibration that keeps people in.” 

It seems like it’s working. 

Rosa Kaufman, sipping a drink at the Spangalang bar, came to hear some jazz and do some swing dancing with her husband, Glen, after learning about First Friday from a TikTok influencer who puts together a video roundup of weekend events around Denver. The couple live in Parker, and Rosa is originally from Puerto Rico and loves live music. “I’d never heard of it,” she said. “We just like to get away from the same spot.”

The couple almost bought a condo in Five Points about eight years ago, but they were deterred by the light rail line so close to their front door. “Our Realtor told us how this area was growing and becoming more coveted,” Rosa said. “The condo was amazing. However, the light rail in front of it was not a good view.”

The corridor along Welton Street, between 20th and 30th streets, is the Main Street of Five Points. 

As Black-owned businesses have moved away or closed, including the Neat Stuff gift shop and the restaurant Moods Beats Potions, the corridor has revived efforts to return to its ethnic roots. The Five Points-Whittier area was Denver’s first predominantly Black neighborhood, formed as racist zoning and loaning practices pushed Blacks into the area. 

By the 1920s, 90% of Denver’s Black population lived within the bounds of the Five Points and Whittier neighborhoods. Decades of redlining practices followed, then Five Points went through a dramatic population drop beginning in the 1960s as Civil Rights laws ended some discriminatory practices and people moved out, mainly to Park Hill and Aurora. What came next was increased crime and overall economic decline as historic buildings — not just in Five Points but throughout downtown Denver — were torn down to make way for affordable housing and parking lots. 

Recovery from that time is still a work in progress. For the Five Points Business Improvement District, the goal today is to support Black-owned businesses to open or to stay open, and to make the area a place that attracts people from the rest of the city to shop, eat and listen to live music. Also on the agenda: Get rid of the light-rail line that runs down Welton Street, considered by many as a disruption to businesses, pedestrians and restaurant patios.

At its core, Five Points is a Black neighborhood, a place that Black visitors from across the country sought out when they were in Denver, said Cleo Parker Robinson, who lived in the Rossonian Hotel as a girl growing up in the Jim Crow segregation era. She wants the neighborhood to feel more like that again, like coming home. 

“They knew they would find a Black community,” said Robinson, 77, founder of the internationally known Cleo Parker Robinson Dance studio and ensemble in Five Points. “They know where to get their haircut. They know where they could get their soul food. They knew how to move. They felt at home.

“We need that. We need that place.”

It’s about finding the right balance between supporting Black-owned businesses and welcoming non-Black-owned businesses, Robinson said. The neighborhood needs diversity to thrive, including businesses that are not Black-owned but still hire hyperlocally and get involved in supporting the community, she said. It also includes Black-owned businesses that draw just as many white people to shop, dine and listen as people of color. 

Robinson described the mornings when she meets her son, following her yoga class and his Zumba workout, at Mimosas, a Black-owned business that serves brunch cocktails, fried green tomatoes and “Five Points porridge,” and where the crowd is diverse. “They need an entryway of learning about each other and caring about each other and knowing about each other,” she said. 

Five Points wants a Main Street vibe, more like Larimer Square

Harris, head of the Business Improvement District, is the fifth generation of his family to grow up in the neighborhood. He spent his childhood summers working for his grandfather, Norman Harris Sr., a pioneer of Five Points. The older Harris owned a liquor store at 24th and Welton and developed a 22-unit apartment complex at 26th and Welton that is home to veterans and people with low incomes. 

As a teenager, Harris would listen as local business owners and neighbors stopped by his grandfather’s store to chat, often about a recurring hope. “They had this dream and vision that there would be this wave of wealth that was going to come to Five Points,” he said. “And so many of those folks, their families don’t hold their properties anymore. That has just not happened.” 

It’s one of the main parts of his job, seeking funding and brainstorming ways to stop losing Black-owned businesses on Welton Street. He helps secure funding through the Denver Economic Development and Opportunity, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority, and the state Office of Economic Development, trying to “re-prioritize the Welton corridor in the hearts and minds of city and state agencies.” But bigger than that, more overarching, are his plans to draw people back to the neighborhood — or for the first time — through cultural events. 

The Denver Arts & Venues threw in a $225,000 grant for the area’s music scene, which helped put on the First Friday jazz nights. The monthly event had a brief start before it was crushed by the COVID pandemic, then returned this summer. It runs through December and will begin again in the spring. 

This summer’s Juneteenth Music Festival, marking the day in 1865 when the Union Army announced in Galveston, Texas, that enslaved people were free, drew 16,000 people to the Welton Street corridor. Community leaders in the past decade have worked to make the “cultural anchor” of the neighborhood as popular and meaningful as it once was  — including for people who grew up in Five Points and attended as children but don’t live there anymore. The district rebranded the event in 2012 as a music festival, which attracted thousands more people. 

“What we also are doing is we’re serving as a magnet and bringing people back who may have been displaced to enjoy the offerings that the businesses and people of this neighborhood provide,” Harris said.  

And if voters in November pass the Vibrant Denver Bond, a nearly $1 billion package to pay for everything from transportation projects and housing to skate parks and concert halls to housing, Harris is ready to fight for Five Points. The project list for the bond includes upgrades to the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library at 24th and Welton, but “I argue that this corridor needs a much larger share,” he said. 

For decades, the city has invested in bigger ways in other parts of the city, including 16th Street, instead of Five Points, which has created a “compounding effect” that stifles economic prosperity, Harris said. “And then we wonder why it’s tough for a business to open or for us to attract businesses. There is still quite a high percentage of African American-owned property along Welton, but my goal is to put a stop to that cycle and to figure out how to address the deprioritization of investing in this corridor at the city and state level.

“We need to continue to tell our story, to become even more noisy. What we have to do is get the attention of our city.” 

As for the light rail, a coalition is growing to fight its return. 

The L line was shut down for the summer of 2024 for safety upgrades, then closed again in August as part of a Regional Transportation District reconstruction project. Five Points business and community leaders have asked RTD not to bother spending more money on upgrades because they don’t want the line down Welton Street to reopen at all. 

RTD opened the L line in 1994, built on a promise of connecting Five Points to the rest of the city and helping make the neighborhood a destination. Instead, say many residents and business owners, it’s led to decreased business, especially for those on the east side of Welton. The one-way vehicle traffic has led to traffic speeding down the street, fewer trees to provide shade, and made it nearly impossible to have outdoor seating, Harris said. 

What they want is a “Main Street design” with wider sidewalks, two-way traffic, trees and planters of flowers, and patio dining. The Business Improvement District has pitched an idea similar to Larimer Square, a pedestrian-friendly area on the other end of downtown Denver where restaurant patios extend into the street.

Return of Welton Street’s most famous cafe helps create a “destination”

Fathima Dickerson, owner of the Five Points staple Welton Street Cafe, remembers that as a teenage girl, she would pick out three outfits to wear to the Juneteenth celebration, which back then lasted three days. “All your friends would go,” she said. “Of course you wanted to see your favorite crush. We would be at Juneteenth for the whole entire weekend. And you waited a whole year for Juneteenth.”

The memories are infused with funnel cakes, snowcones, hot dogs and turkey legs. 

Dickerson, 38, recalls those celebrations with “a lot more Black businesses and a lot more Black people down here.” She grew up inside her family’s cafe, got her hair done at a beauty shop in Five Points, spent her money at the ice cream shop, and played basketball and volleyball at the rec center with other kids from the area.

She also recalls spending way more time inside the cafe than she did wandering the streets, and how the dogs of the neighborhood would chase her when she walked home. “Back in the day you could not walk out of the house without getting chased by a dog,” she said, laughing. 

“Five Points does have the negative history of the drug dealers and the gangbangers. I’m not going to dismiss that and say it wasn’t real. It was. It may have been the reason that when I was in Five Points, I was inside.”

The Welton Street corridor, within about six blocks of multiple homeless shelters, soup kitchens and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ Stout Street Health Center, still has its problems. The 10-block corridor has stretches with shuttered storefronts, and Sonny Lawson Park, about midway down the Welton corridor, was shut down for a month in summer 2024 because of drug deals, violence and vandalism.

Now, though, people bring their camping chairs, blankets and picnics to the park to hear jazz on First Fridays. About 100 people, with dogs next to their chairs or kids through the playground, spread out on the park’s grassy hillside on a recent jazz night, listening to Fedora Swing play in the plaza between the park and the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, a branch of the Denver Public Library.

“It’s always been happening, and it’s always been fulfilling to a person’s spirit,” said James D. Chapman Jr., a 63-year-old artist who grew up in the neighborhood and was selling T-shirts printed with his sketch of the historic Rossonian Hotel and a street car on Welton. “It’s a beautiful place.”

A toddler in tiny pink Crocs danced while her parents clapped and the crowd sang “Does that make me crazy?” during the band’s Gnarls Barkley cover. Many in the crowd were from the nearby Curtis Park neighborhood, which planted flowers and spiffed up the courtyard between the park and the library, called Cousins Plaza.

For Dickerson, who was several blocks away managing a busy Welton Street Cafe, jazz nights are proof that Five Points is changing. “Now, Five Points is a destination point,” she said. “People are coming from out of Five Points now.” 

Dickerson, who grew up a few blocks east of Five Points in the Whittier neighborhood and graduated from Denver East High School, is one of those people who seems to know everyone in northeast Denver. This year, she served as the grand marshal of Juneteenth, waving from a sporty car at everyone she knew in the crowd.

The honor followed the 2024 return of the Welton Street Cafe to Welton Street, with a new, light-filled dining room decorated in yellow and blue for its Caribbean roots but with the same jerk chicken dinners and fried okra. When the restaurant, which originally opened in 1986, shut its doors in 2022, it “felt like a funeral” as people dropped off cards and flowers, Dickerson said. “That was my childhood home that closed.” 

She sold her soul food at pop-ups around the city until she was able to come home, about a block from the previous location. During the pop-up period, “People were hitting us up left and right: Can you come to Aurora? Can you come to Arvada?” Dickerson said. “We can’t be Welton Street Cafe in Arvada.”

The tables were packed on First Friday jazz night, while servers delivered plates of fried chicken and boxed up peach cobber to go.

“I’m just glad we have a space that we can hold community for every generation,” Dickerson said. “We feed a lot of families, grandma to mom to kids. It’s important that we support these spaces.”

“You make a way out of no way”

Jones opened her teahouse advertising an “afro-centric atmosphere” in 2018 to reclaim part of the past.

“African American people were being so displaced out of Five Points that we weren’t present, we weren’t visible,” said Jones, who lived just east of Five Points as a child and moved to Park Hill in the 1960s.

TeaLee’s, named after her grandmother, is filled with Black art and books, with space in the basement to hold jazz concerts and book signings. But at times, she said, the only Black people in the restaurant are Jones and her staff. It puzzles her when customers are struck by the fact that all the art is Black, because they likely don’t take much notice when all the art in a Mexican restaurant is Mexican. 

In the daytime, Jones’ customers sip South African tea blends and nibble scones. At night, the menu transitions to wine and cocktails, and a rotating menu that recently included butternut squash soup with BBQ chicken sliders and coleslaw. 

Like so many others in the neighborhood, Jones, 69, is working to hold onto the old while creating something new. “There is a struggle because people want something that is old instead of something that is new, but who doesn’t hold onto history?” she asked. “As generations go by, and you keep telling the story, you feel the energy and the spirit of it.”

It hurts, too, to think about all that was lost — the shoe shine parlor and the pool hall, a men’s clothing store, the Petal Shop that sold flowers. Many were built as a business at the front and a house at the back, Jones said. 

Historical markers along Welton Street tell the story of the corridor, points of interest for visitors on jazz nights to read as the next era is taking shape. Jones wants them to soak up what the neighborhood stands for while they buy a plate of food for the soul and listen to the sounds of saxophones and electric guitars drifting down the street.

“It represents pride, survival, self-determination,” she said. “It represents community that has always existed in the face of adversity. You make a way out of the adversity that you have to deal with. You make a way out of no way.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.