The More Things Change
The happy blur of the teenage years makes pinpointing a date difficult, but the image is clear in my memory: I was standing at the corner of 14th and Larimer streets staring up at a full-size vintage Cadillac suspended over the entryway to a restaurant. As a 17- or 18-year-old visiting Denver from Atlanta, I didn’t know that Cadillac Ranch was a chain or that the building that housed it was erected in 1993 instead of the late 1800s, like many of the edifices on Larimer Square were. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care, because I was completely captivated by the blocklong throwback to the Mile High City’s early days. Roughly 25 years later, Cadillac Ranch is gone (replaced by Tamayo in 2001), as are many of the other restaurants…
