The following is not an official episode of upcoming bottlerag.org podcast Denver Life This. “Standing at the Spanish Gate,” is a project contributor Magnolia Mulqueen put together in 2022. The project was Mulqueen’s first venture into the realm of podcasting. Despite her lack of experience with the medium, Mulqueen found the whole process invaluable.
The project focuses on the lives of three Denver residents, specifically, their lives as young adults leading up to their witnessing if the Spanish Gate Apartment Fire of 2003. Although this project does not officially count as an episode of Denver Life This, the podcast draws direct inspiration from it.
Transcript:
One night in late December 2003, the western building of the Spanish Gates apartment complex caught fire and burned to the ground. Hundreds of residents were temporarily evacuated from the other building, hundreds more were displaced from their homes permanently, losing all of their belongings in the process, and tragically one life, the life of Nancy Zeigler was lost.
Among the residents who were temporarily displaced were my mother, my father and myself. The following clips are taken from interviews I have done with my mother and her two friends who were present the night of The Spanish Gates Apartment Fire.
Bios and Background
My name is Tessera Wade
I was born in Denver, Colorado. I grew up in my early childhood in a couple other places, but I’m from Denver.
My parents were kind of narcissistic, abusive drug users when I was born.
My family was chaotic. My parents were pretty young when they got together. I’m the only child that they had together, or at all. My parents fought for custody quite a bit. My dad ended up winning the custody fight. My dad got clean and gave up using drugs, but he was still pretty abusive growing up. My mom was an alcoholic and suffered from a lot of the sort of personality issues that are associated with alcoholism.
I grew up in southwest Baltimore, Maryland, and also Gunnison, Colorado. My parents had split custody. I grew up in two different places and then mostly in Gunnison. I lived there until I was 11, and then I moved to Kansas for a year and that was pretty awful. Then I moved back to Denver at about 12/13 years old, and I’ve lived here ever since.
Gunnison is probably the place that I associate most closely with my childhood. I have the clearest memories of Gunnison, and it was a really great place to be, like, an elementary-school-aged kid. There was a lot of freedom, just a lot of bike riding. I didn’t have a ton of friends. Um, I was, you know, I had some behavioral problems associated with my upbringing and just kind of being a little-smarty-pants-know-it-all doesn’t really endear you to other kids. And then Kansas was really hard because my dad was in graduate school and he got really depressed and he went to bed for almost a year. And I was not cared for during that time. And I actually failed the sixth grade because he wouldn’t take me to school. And then when we got back to Denver, I was pretty disillusioned with the whole public school thing, so I kind of turned into a pretty bad kid there for a while.
My name’s David Williams.
I’m a military brat, originally, so born in New Orleans… then my family moved all around the south, mostly around army/military bases. Mama had an eye for a man in uniform. And so, before I came to Denver in 1997, the longest place that I had- the longest residence I had maintained was in a middle-of-nowhere town in Missouri called Rolla. Their slogan from the Chamber of Commerce is “Rolla Missouri, the middle of everywhere,” And I’m like, that’s a lie, that’s flagrant false advertising. And yet in 1997, I came out here to Denver to visit my father for a summer, and I just never went back to that nasty small town.
So my teen years, that’s really when I got to start living out loud. That’s really when I got to fully be David in the way that I wanted to do it.
So after moving out here in 1997, you know, I was starting in seventh grade and I really got a, a reset. I got to redefine myself, to draw a distinction from the person that I had to be in that small town. And I didn’t change anything materially or functionally about who I was as an individual. I just got to be like, “Oh, hey, new school. No one knows me here? I’m just going to be me right now, right here.”
My name is Eris Weiss.
I was born in fairly central Denver, and at the time when I was born, my parents lived in a southeast part of Denver, a house that they ended up purchasing together.
I am transgender and my childhood at this point is colored with lots of little memories of things that go, “Oh, I was transgender and didn’t know” or big gaps of time that I don’t remember at all. I have some weird memory gaps, largely, I believe, associated with not really understanding myself and also the way that I kind of approached my gender.
A lot of how being transgender resulted in dysphoria for me as a form of dysphoria called dissociative dysphoria, which is basically a disconnection from your sense of self, which leads to me being able to form memories the best.
I was frequently put in accelerated classes. I don’t know how positive that actually is for human beings, and I have complicated opinions about that now. I did the usual sort of gifted kid track for a lot of school in different sort of programs like that. And then for high school, I went to a magnet school called Denver School of the Arts, which was focused on artistic pursuits and talents. And I went into high school with a focus on creative writing. So it wasn’t quite the same sort of thing as like gifted and talented programs, but it still kind of was…
South-East Denver, the quadrant of the city South of Exposition and East of Broadway is home to three pubic high schools and several more middle schools. The atmosphere is anything but quaint, especially in a world before social media and cell phones. Nevertheless, there was still a certain social web of friends-of-friends that connected the teens across the area. Tessera, Eris, and David share how they came to know each other and what their teen years were like.
Tessera: In the seventh grade, your dad and I had an elective class together- He and I had a gym class together, and I found him after we dressed out. He was sliding slowly down the walls of one of the gyms. And I came up to Daniel and decided to tell him about how terrible Alien 4 (Alien: Resurrection) had been….It was terrible. It’s a terrible movie. Like The Alien Queen is trying to impress Ripley and…gives birth to some sort of scary human-xenomorph. I don’t know. It’s awful.
We had Home Economics together and we shared a kitchen, the management of a kitchen together. We were in the same kitchen. And we got to know each other a little bit better. And he became part of sort of a little clique of friends that we had. We all sat together at lunch.
I know that David Williams and I were initially introduced through Amber _____ because Amber ____ and I had gone to school together in the seventh grade. And we were close friends. And then in the eighth grade, she had gone to another school called Grant. And David and Amber went to Grant together. And we had been introduced that way originally. And then I had seen him around southeast Denver a couple of times, and I had recognized him, but we didn’t really become close friends until close to the end of the eighth grade, when we were introduced to each other- or the beginning of the ninth.. end of the eighth grade, and we were introduced to each other again through Abby___ and Abby and I were also good friends, and she was going to the Denver School of the Arts, and David at that point was also going to the Denver School of the Arts.
David: Your mother and I actually met twice. The first time I was cutting class from Baker Middle School. So I was on Broadway and I was catching the number 0 bus with a homegirl of mine, her name is Amber- Oh, no, we weren’t cutting class together! We cut class individually. I got on the 0 bus and she was sitting at the back of the bus with your mother. And I was like, “Oh my God! Amber, hey!” And we ended up riding the 0 down to catch the 1. And then we took the one to Cherry Creek Mall and we wandered around.
After that, we didn’t really talk for about a year. Like, we just didn’t encounter one another, you know, before cell phones, before being super connected and in the way that we are.
Then my eighth-grade year at the Shakespeare Festival, I ended up connecting with this chick named Abby ____. That year we both ended up going to Denver School of the Arts. She was a creative writing major. I was a vocal major, and she was friends with your mother. And so, like, I went to hang out at Abby’s house one day, it was just after school ended my eighth grade year, so…1999 actually. So I went to Abby’s house and we basically had the basement to ourselves and “oh, well, you know, I’m going to introduce you to my bestie, Tessera” and Tessera and I look at each other and are like, “We’ve already met!” Like, This is amazing. And I met your dad that same day.
Tessera: My teenage years, as other people understand them, were brief, I didn’t have a lot of respect for authority because I had abusive parents. And because of some of the abuse that endured, I was also pretty sexually precocious. And at 14 years old, uh, just about this time of year, 23 years ago, I found out I was pregnant. And, uh, that kind of put the kibosh on more teenage years for me, after you- my daughter were born- I moved in with Daniel ____’s parents, Rita and Dan. I went to school for teen moms called Florence Crittenton for an accelerated year, my daughter used to come with me to school, And then my, uh, my junior and senior year, I went back to South High School, which would have been the home school for Rita and Dan’s address.
Eris and I didn’t become friends until high school. After Magnolia had been born. Magnolia was actually born on Daniel’s last day of school that year, and he was at a reformatory school for troubled young men, because he had been expelled from South High School for making violent threats against someone who was…well it doesn’t really matter. But Daniel went to the Denver School of the Arts starting in his sophomore year. And I don’t think Daniel and Eris became friends until Daniel was in his junior year. Because that was when Eris joined The Denver School of the Arts High School Program, cause they had a middle school program and a high school program. Eris was two years behind Daniel and I, but only a year younger.
Eris: My teenage years were complicated and there was a lot going on with me at the time that was very negative and very emotionally difficult for me to process that I basically didn’t process. I kind of retreated inside my head a lot or into other people with strong personalities and kind of existed in just sort of that same marginal shadows of getting in by sort of thing.
I had some good friends- not a ton of friends, but some good friends. And I was kind of embroiled in some of my friends personal life that was more complicated and more messy than it probably should have been. These friends were teen parents that I became friends with, both the mother and the father.
David: Okay so my mother, her name was Melody. She passed away when I was 15, so she passed in March of 2000. Um, and she was fierce and amazing. She was an unrepentant, unbridled, just force of nature. She lived hard. She loved hard.
She, much like myself, struggled with overindulgence, whether it be food, whether it be sex, um, what have you. She wanted it and she got it. And I truly love that about her. And any time I experience a moment of joy. I kind of feel her flaring up inside me, you know? Just the most wonderful person that I’ve ever met.
I was only at Denver School of the Arts for one year, and that was the year that my mother passed. And that was a difficult time. So they have very strident and stringent sort of standards. And I didn’t live up to them, so I didn’t get to go back for my sophomore year. And that’s when I went over to South because that’s my home school, basically.
I didn’t miss the art school setting because I found a place where I got to be like the Alpha Theater kid, you know? And yeah, I did two plays a year every year that I was there. And I, you know, whether I got a lead or a character part, it didn’t matter. I was just loving it.
Did I cut class? Did I often not go to school? Yeah. Did that graduate a year late? Yeah. It just means I got to do two more plays as far as I was concerned. And that’s what was important.
Pictured: Magnolia and Tessera
Pictured: David Williams and Magnolia
In 2003, three years after I was born, three years after she moved from home, Tessera graduated high school
I graduated from high school a week before I turned 18. And a week after I turned 18, I signed my first lease.
Tessera: The Spanish Gate apartment building was located in Glendale, Colorado, which is a tiny little city, that is part of Arapahoe County, but it is a tiny little city that is surrounded on all sides by Denver.
Eris: It’s a tiny little postage stamp of a city that’s surrounded by Denver. Different county than Denver. Different government than Denver. And ultimately, not very important, of a place just in terms of size. The history with it is in is interesting. And what it is now versus what it was then is very different as well.
David: I believe that Glendale was founded functionally as a tax shelter because there’s… odd financials going on over that way. But it was also the result of zoning. Like there’s, there’s a cluster of strip clubs, adult novelty shops, liquor stores, things of that nature over in that area.
Tessera: So just a little dot of Arapahoe County within Denver, it is one of the smallest little incorporated bits of the metropolitan area. It’s all within southeast Denver, between Colorado Boulevard and Leetsdale and between Alameda Avenue and about Louisiana. It’s not perfectly shaped.
Interesting things about Glendale: There’s only one house inside of Glendale that is a single-family residential home. Everything else is apartment complexes and businesses. Glendale is densely, densely populated. And it was kind of- it declared its independence or its city-dom, as opposed to being part of unincorporated Arapahoe County for financial reasons. It’s actually run by a Chamber of Commerce. And Glendale, it had a Tea Party political affiliation before kind of the Tea Party Republicans hit it big back in the mid-aughts. So it’s always been kind of business oriented.
My great-great-uncle Fred- I can’t remember his name. I think it was Kemp. I would have to look it up. But he was my dad’s mother’s aunt Mary’s husband was the first mayor of Glendale and was part of the push to create it as a city because he wanted to have liquor stores and sell fireworks.
Tessera: the Denver metro area and most places in Colorado are pretty strict about fireworks because of the fire danger of living in an alpine desert climate.
David: And I think it was just kind of founded like, “hey, we, we kind of need like this sceezy little hub here for Denver. We need our strippers, we need our porn stores, we need our bars and liquor stores, and we don’t need to be paying such a high tax rate”. It’s a kind of capitalist like Free for all sort of zone…is how I view Glendale.
Eris: One of the bigger sources of income for Glendale was a strip bar called Shotgun Willie’s or the Target. The Target was sort of the biggest part of the economy, for sure. Glendale So it had this kind of like seedy reputation
David: 43And then over time, of course, housing built up and it’s all the cheapest, shittiest apartments. There’s an ongoing- for like decades now- bedbug epidemic all up in Glendale.
Eris: It was there a lot of very affordable apartments that came with. With that affordability came a lot of problems with them. They were fairly low-quality places overall.
Tessera: Glendale being very small, it didn’t have a lot of city infrastructure. So there were two police stations in Glendale, a main police station that was actually pretty close to our apartment complex. And then the other satellite police station is inside of the super target on Colorado Boulevard. They actually even have like a suspect retention facility in there, as I understand it. And then we lived across the street from kind of a park area, like catty-corner from this park area. You could see the police station and the firehouse was kind of attached to that police station.
There weren’t building codes. Even now, the building codes in Glendale are more lax than you find in surrounding Denver. And the way that they’re zoned is more business-friendly, which is, you know, you can’t find a big box store with that kind of Super Target footprint inside of Denver. But you can find them right outside of Denver, in Lakewood, in Glendale, in Aurora. And our apartments were built shortly after the city became incorporated as a city. And there were about three years in there where the Glendale city did not have any building codes at all. So the buildings that were built were not being approved for being structurally sound. No regulation or anything like that.
The Apartment
Tessera: I was looking for, you know, a two-bedroom apartment so that you would have your own room. Your dad was working part-time as a manager at Dominoes. And, you know, we had some money coming in from cost of living loans for school and rent was so much cheaper back then. It was like $800 for a two-bedroom apartment- or 700, something like that. But still, my grandfather- your great-grandfather- had to cosign that lease.
We signed the lease at the Spanish Gate apartment building, and there were two buildings on the property, and we got an apartment all the way on the fifth floor in the east corner.
Eris: I had been in worse apartments, but not very many. They were pretty rundown and they were low-income apartments. They felt like low-income apartments. They perfectly fit with that early character of Glendale just being kind of slummy
Tessera: It was an interesting apartment.
David: That apartment wasn’t that great, but it was. It was filled with great things.
Tessera: But, you know, it was the first apartment and it seemed, it seemed okay at first. It was a little platonic family. Me and Daniel and our child, Magnolia, and her drum set. Our housewarming party was your third birthday. I made a cake that was guitar-shaped, which is the only time I’ve ever tried to shape a cake.
I was going to school at Metropolitan State College. It’s now called Metropolitan State University. Daniel, my partner, was also going to school at the Colorado School of Mines for Physics, and he was working at the Domino’s that he had worked at through high school.
Eris: I would have been probably, say a junior in high school, since I graduated 05′ in back in the spring, so junior in high school, working at Domino’s and living mostly with my mother.
David: I was renting a room from an older couple who were the parents of a dear friend of mine, and they lived like right next to South. And so most of my day was committed to working various coffee shops, like I did Peaberry, I did Starbucks, I did all kinds of things. I was kind of a career barista by the age of 15. I was renting a room, but really not trying to stay in that room. I just wanted to be out and I wanted to be with people as much as I could.
Tessera: To a certain extent, Daniel and I were trying to kind of come into an adulthood that we didn’t- we weren’t really entitled to yet. So we were like having friends over for dinners and things like that.
David: I was there probably, at minimum, once a week. It was really cool to go over to my friend’s house because they had their own apartment and we could be the silly little children that we still were. But with an air of maturity.
Oh, your mother and I made some amazing beef stew one night, and I don’t know why it still sticks in my mind, but…it was so fun! Just cooking with your mother. I can’t imagine a more boring thing than, like, “let’s cook some soup,” you know? But it was so special and it was so fun because, like, because look at us, we’re like grown folks.
Not because the apartment itself was anything special. It was more the feeling of maturity and freedom.
Eris: I would say I visited Daniel, Tessera and Magnolia in those apartments fairly regularly, maybe 2 to 4 times a month.
I remember, and I think this was it would have been either late May or early June of the same year. Where I was over helping Tessera, who was making a cake for Magnolia’s birthday. The cake was in the shape of a guitar. It was one of those where were like you made a sheet pancake, and there was a pattern where you could cut out a guitar from it and form it from the pieces. And then I said, So it looks like a guitar. And it was helping to put that together. And it had pink icing. I remember it had pink. I think the reason I remember that and pink icing is, as to kind of characterize the type of friendship that I had with Tessera…she stole my shoe, filled my shoe with pink icing and then threw it off the balcony. I have fond, and also not fond memories about the experience of coming down to collect my shoe.
Tessera: Daniel was pretty straight-edge and was not interested in having like a party or anything. You know, we had the kid in the group of friends.
David: Our goofy buffoonery together, none of it was drug-fueled or substance based. It was all just coasting on a natural high. You would naturally assume that “oh, it must be a den of sin. They must be doing drugs in there,” but yeah, we were just sober dorks enjoying each other’s company.
Tessera: You know, just that whole apartment is just marred by fires in every direction. In the fall, we had a problem where when the heat came on, we had the thermostat was sitting on top of the duct for our heater. And so the thermostat would sense the temperature of the apartment at like ten degrees above what the actual air temperature was. So it was hard to keep the apartment warm. And when we complained to the office, they sent someone in to fix it.
Three weeks later, after they came up and fixed our thermostat, a small fire started inside that wall because their fix for the problem was to just disconnect the wire that of heat from the thermostat. And it, like, there was like an overheating situation and like a little electrical fire happened back there, but it was quickly kind of sensed and put out.
Tessera expanded on one specific incident in the apartment that occured that previous summer.
Tessera: It was right before the 4th of July. I was going to see, one of the X-Men movies had just come out, and I was out with my dad and my cousins were in town. Daniel was watching Magnolia and…I got home and I had left my keys at home, but I didn’t think it was a big deal because Daniel was going to be home. There was no plans for anyone to go anywhere. But I got up to my apartment and the door was locked and I knocked on the door and no one answered. And I could hear my phone, because at the time we had a landline phone, because people still had landlines in 2003, I could hear my phone was ringing off the hook like it was ringing continuously. And I’m knocking on the door and I went back downstairs and one of the leasing office employees was sitting on the stoop in front of my apartment building.
And I asked him, you know, “hey, can you let me in? I’m locked out of my apartment”. And it was a $10 fee if you needed to be let in. But I was like, “I don’t have ten bucks. Can you just do me a solid this time?” And the guy was like, “Yeah, I’m out here waiting for the fire department if they want to come talk to me about something to do with fireworks. But as long as we’re quick, it should be fine”. So he went upstairs with me, and thankfully we did have an elevator (I got trapped on that elevator a couple of times too), but we went up the elevator and then they let us in to the apartment and my family was gone. And at this point, like, I have anxiety. So I was kind of worried that like, my family had been killed by an ax murderer while I was at the movies. And it’s the middle of the day. It’s not late at night. And I go towards the phone, which is still ringing, and it stops right before I can get to it. And I turn around and I’m crying because I’m worried. I don’t know what’s going on. I didn’t have a cell phone, Daniel didn’t have a cell phone. And my dad came into the apartment and he saw that I was crying and he was like, “It’s going to be okay”. And I was like, “I don’t know where anyone is”.
Well, Daniel’s mother, Rita, had gotten a hold of my father because Daniel had gotten severely burned. He got second-degree burns over 20% of his body that afternoon. And if I had been in a clearer state of mind coming into my apartment, I would have noticed some things. My apartment smelled like singed carpeting, there was like greasy stuff all over the telephone. So I took off from my apartment. My dad and I left for the hospital, and we went to CU hospital.
So his claim was that the firework had been launched from somewhere else and come in through our open balcony doors into our bedroom and when he had bent down to catch it went off and it had burned the insides of both of his arms from his fingertips up past the insides of his elbows, and then one of his legs from like the top of his foot all the way up to his knee, and then his other leg just across his thigh, like the front of his thigh. All of it was burnt, just terribly burned, because he had knelt down and burned into our carpeting, in the living room was the outline of his foot and his knee that was charred into that carpet forever. And his beard was singed off to his chin and his eyelashes were singed short. He managed to keep his eyebrows, but he was wrapped up like a mummy.
I put my faith in it at the time because he was my partner and my spouse. But in retrospect, I know that he asked my father to hide some illegal fireworks for him immediately after that happened. And the Glendale Fire Department at the time said that for the angle of entry into our apartment, to have been such that it launched into our bedroom without hitting our ceiling, it would have actually had to have come from inside of the flowing water of the Cherry Creek.
In his state of shock instead of calling the ambulance or the fire department. First, he decided to vacuum because apparently, his thought process was that in the forest you bury a campfire and vacuuming is somehow also like burying things.
I don’t know.
And then he had called his father, Dan Sr.. And Dan Sr. had come and picked up him and you, and on the way from our apartment down to his parent’s house, which was maybe a 10 or 15-minute drive, the blisters, which were really deep, had started to raise. And when he got down to his parent’s house, his mom kind of took charge, Dad put him in the bathtub under some cool running water, Mom called the ambulance from their house. And this actually saved him because if he had called the ambulance from our address, he would have gone to an Arapahoe County hospital. And the burn wards of the Arapahoe County hospitals were not as advanced as the burn ward at CU. They were still scrubbing burned tissue off with, like, an S.O.S. pad. It was gross.
So he went to CU. And I remember the blister on the top of his foot was the size of a tennis ball. And so that summer I learned burn care. And it was pretty scary.
Less than six months after Daniel was burned by the firework, just after Christmas, the Spanish Gate Apartment Fire erupted.
Tessera: As I kind of alluded to previously, Daniel and I were kind of trying to own an adulthood that we weren’t really old enough to claim. So we wanted to have people over for dinners and things like that. So we had a couple of friends over for a holiday party, ostensibly for a holiday dinner. So we had a small group.
Eris: It was a post Christmas like friends-ish get together thing. It was it was the group of us, me, Tessera, Daniel, Magnolia and…David Williams.
Tessera: Of course, Magnolia was the star of the show. She was the only kid that any of her friends had, like, you know, that sort of relationship with. Nobody else that we knew had a three-year-old wandering around.
I remember David came and we had a little gift exchange and I think-I don’t remember- I think I had gotten for him something called “Pope Soap on a Rope,” and David thought that was hilarious because David and Eris were both Jewish. Eris comes by Judaism similar to the way that I do, in that half of Eris’s family is Jewish and half is not– But David Williams is a practicing Jewish man. And so we had our little holiday get-together in our kind of drafty apartment. You know, the draftiness was made much worse because those apartments had fireplaces, which never ceases to amaze me. At the time I thought it was pretty spiffy.
It was getting towards later evening
Magnolia had already gone to bed at that point. It was gosh, probably 10:00 at night or so when we first noticed that something was not right.
Eris: Pleasant, fun and lighthearted conversation? Up until the fire alarms started going off.
David: It did come to our attention like there was lights flashing outside and we could kind of see it through the balcony, like sliding glass door, you know, like just some red and blue flashes. And I feel so dumb because we pieced all these individual details together very slowly, almost comically slowly
Tessera: As I mentioned, there were some electrical problems in the apartment. One of the things that had happened previously is our bathroom fan had shorted out because we had a tendency to leave that fan on… because you take a shower and you had to have the fan on, otherwise it was a sauna. So the fan would sometimes get left on and the fan had shorted out at one point and we were all sitting around just talking and joking. And I noticed there was a smell before Eris or David had said anything. And I was like, “It smells like something’s burning.”
David: Does it smell like someone’s, like, barbecuing?
Tessera: And I asked Daniel to go check in the bathroom, to see if the fan had burned out again. And he went in there and he came back out and he said, “No, the fan is not on. It’s fine in there”.
David: I do know that we had registered that there was sirens at one point, but that’s just Glendale. There’s always sirens, you know, so you just kind of put it out of your mind and ignore it.
Tessera: I said, “Yeah, but it smells like burning, right?” he was like, “Yeah, it does”. I said, “Well, maybe the downstairs neighbors have a fire in their fireplace, and that’s what I’m smelling”. And he’s like, “Well, maybe.” And then he went out on the balcony and came back in directly with a very seriously astonished look on his face. And he said, “the building next door is on fire.”
The building next door is on fire.
Eris: It’s kind of funny how long it took for anyone to notice, the building next door to us at the apartment complex, the Spanish gate was on fire. And not just a little fire, a huge fire. And here we were in an apartment that literally faced the building was on fire just having, like a friendly meal together while smoke slowly filled up the apartment and at a slow enough rate that no one had really noticed as of yet.
The entire building was pretty much on fire.
David: That building is fully fucking on fire.
Tessera: The building..the four center units of this building were just fire. It would have been six apartments across the bottom and it’s five stories tall and the second-floor center, two units and the third-floor center, two units were an inferno, just spitting flames, an inferno. And we stood and watched.
We stood and watched.
David: We were high up. We had like a really, I don’t want to say a good vantage point, but it was easy to see what was happening from where we were.
Tessera: I think at some point your dad called 9-1-1 that night. And by the time he called, there were already trucks en route. But, the Glendale Fire Department didn’t respond to the fire despite the fact that you could see the Glendale house from the apartment complex. Glendale has received so many false calls, so many, so many false alarms from that building that they declined to respond. And by the time Denver arrived, the center of the building was gutted out. And it was..unstoppable. This fire at that point.
Eris: They were exceptionally slow to respond. The fire department for Glendale was on the other side of a park that was catty-corner, the apartment complex, you had the apartment that we were in, and then southwest of it in the same line was a building that burned down. And then across the street, catty-corner was the park and the fire department was on the souther– excuse me, the western side of that park in the middle. So it was a grand total of…six-ish blocks away.
The fire was in full effect and the fire department had not yet arrived. If I’m remembering right something like… thirty-ish minutes to get there to get six blocks and the Denver Fire Department beat them there.
Tessera: And we watched it and it was a bitterly cold night that night. It was the kind of cold that Denver gets before a snowstorm when all of the moisture is leached out of the atmosphere and the sky has no cloud cover to hold on to any kind of heat. It was clear and frigid and the Denver trucks arrived. There were three Denver trucks and they started trying to control the fire and we were not yet being evacuated.
Eris: When we were watching one of the stacks where fireplace chimneys for the apartments…like the stacks of chimneys collapsed into the complex itself. So there wasn’t really a sense, particularly of whether it would be salvaged, but more so when it entirely collapse before they put the fire out?
Tessera: Your dad and I made the call that we were going to sit tight because, I mean, I’m sure, you know, with that happening, crowds milling around, just sort of undirected by the fire department. But also, I mean, it was just…it was like watching a train accident. You couldn’t look away from this fire.
Eris: It did not feel particularly real. There was a real sense of disaffection from it. Part of it was just sort of a surreality of the situation, I think. And how often are you by an apartment building as it’s burning to the ground? Also I think a lot of it had to do with being a teenager.
Tessera: Daniel went and got Magnolia from her bedroom and we stood on the balcony, all five of us and we watched it burn and burn and burn. And the fire just tore that building up because there were no firewalls, there were no brakes, there was no fire retardant slate between the apartment complexes. They just… went up like kindling.
And we were watching as this building was consumed. We were watching the friable asbestos and the copper wires that burned green.
David: There was a person who died is my understanding, and they were trapped on their balcony. And I do recall watching a whole section of that building collapse.
Tessera: While we were watching… the column of balconies that were opposite from where we were standing- those balconies pancaked. There was a ladder truck trying to get up to the top floor of those balconies and those balconies pancaked just BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM… all the way down, just what flattened down into the earth.
David: I knew I knew someone had died. I saw it fall and something just kind of clicked in my head and told me that yeah, something terrible happened and someone suffered and die.
Eris: I was in high school. I’m sure at the time, from everything going on with me and everything else, one thought that I probably should have had was about if there was anyone still in the building and worrying about that. But I confess I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was more like, “Wow, I’ve never seen a fire that close.” And there was something kind of enrapturing in seeing it– it’s not– “beautiful” is the wrong word for it, but it does kind of tickle your brain in a similar sort of way in this like sort of awe inspiring event of sorts.
David: I was in awe of what I was seeing. It was so scary. And if you even take a moment to consider, like so many people’s lives and livelihoods, their home is just going up in flames. Then the actual loss of life was devastating. There was nothing we could do but watch.
Eris: And then there was kind of a sense of being quite paralyzed by a little bit. We stayed on the balcony watching for far longer than we probably should have. We didn’t actually vacate until the fire department knocked on all the doors and said, “Get the hell out!”
Tessera: Right after that happened, maybe 10 minutes, 5 minutes later, we got a banging on the door. The fire department was evacuating us because the building’s roof was on fire. And because of how dry it was, they were very concerned that the fire would leap from one building to another.
We put Magnolia in a blanket. We didn’t take anything else with us. I think, you know, David and Eris took, you know, whatever they had with them. And your dad had his wallet. But I don’t even think I grabbed an I.D. or anything. We just walked out of the house. You know, when the fire department says “go,” you go.
Eris: When we left we first vacated to the parking lot. When we were outside, this was the middle of winter and it was pretty cold. And it became a battle of kind of comfort and as well as also was middle of the night. So people were starting to get tired. So there’s a level of comfort versus curiosity about what exactly was going to happen. And in the end, from when we left to comfort won out against the curiosity and we left before things were really resolved, they were still fighting the fire at the time we left, to my recollection.
Tessera: I should’ve changed shoes, at some point. That probably would have been wise because the shoes that I had on were really uncomfortable for walking in the cold.
David: Because of the way the fire trucks were arrayed and because of their need for hoses kind of snaking across a parking area, they weren’t letting anyone out. No one could drive out.
Eris: My car, which is in the parking lot, was not really accessible to me. The fire department and trucks and things like that were kind of between access between me and my car at all. And it was one of those where like I had I believe I had asked someone I may not have, I may have just been like, I’ll come back for that later. I believe I asked someone and they said, “No, you have to wait and come back later.” And we watched it from the parking lot.
Tessera: So, we bundled Magnolia up in a blanket. She was wearing footie pajamas. And I was dressed up. I had on little kitten heels and kahki skirt. We put on our coats and we went downstairs out the back side of the building. And we were kind of evacuated around the parking lot because the parking lot itself had become a hazard due to the amount of water that was being produced to fight the fire and how cold it was. It was freezing into sheets of ice.
Eris: I had to leave my car in the night and the complex, just because the fire department being there actually didn’t get my car back for a week or two until it was opened up in front for me to be able to, which was fine because in the middle of winter and also with them fighting the fire, it had six inches of ice with the ash in it frozen to the entirety of my car.
Tessera: I think for a little over a week Eris couldn’t get her car. Her car was in the parking lot. And luckily the place she had parked was far away enough from the other building, from the ruined building that had burned. But her car was frozen in eight inches of ice. And the garden-level units of the building I had lived in were flooded because the building that burned was upheld for us. And that was really the first time I had ever kind of stopped to think about how much damage the water from fighting a fire could cause.
My dad’s apartment was about four or five blocks away, and the five of us walked from our apartment up to my father’s apartment to stay the night. And by the time we got up there, I think it was probably about 2:00 or 2:30 in the morning.
Eris: By this time, it was very early in the morning. Probably, I think when we when we left, where we left and walked to my mother’s house, which my mother’s house was six or so blocks away, something like that. And I believe we arrived at her house at 3:30 in the morning.
After
Tessera: We were evacuated from our apartment complex for a little over a week. That evening or the next day, the Red Cross arrived on the scene and a Glendale Chamber of Commerce put everyone who had been evacuated up in hotels. So Daniel and I and Magnolia spent the night of New Year’s Eve, 2003 in the Loews Denver. We had dinner at the Bull and Bush. It was pretty good.
Eris: I’m not sure that the reality of the situation set in for me for a long time on it, just how bizarre this thing was. I think it took a couple of weeks, more of a sense of reality on it when I remember visiting Tessera and Daniel at another hotel that they had been set up in during the time while the Apartment was kind of off-limits because of working on the on the fire remains and things like that.
Tessera: The Red Cross had, you know, donated supplies. And, I didn’t want to take too much because our belongings were intact. So I picked out a pair of, like, Birkenstock sandals, which like fit around my foot, but didn’t fit me quite right. And like, they didn’t work. But for some reason, I kept those shoes for like a number of years, even though they were terribly uncomfortable. But otherwise, we didn’t have any of our belongings, any clothes or anything like that
Tessera: But about three days later, we were let into the apartment to get some essentials. And I took some pictures of the burned building and those pictures really look like a bomb had hit that building. It’s just a ruined, hulking mass. And the cars that were parked on the side of the parking lot right up against that property, a number of them were crushed by falling chimney stacks from the fireplaces in that building.
Tessera: The apartment had gotten quite cold because the utilities had been turned off. We were allowed back in sooner than some of the other people who lived in the building because the people in the garden-level units, their apartments were flooded, so we came back a little bit sooner.
Magnolia had a beta fish…a much loved but careworn baiter fish that had not come with us when we were evacuated. The fish bowl was in the kitchen. There were some ice crystals in the water and the fish was still like, clinging to life, like swimming around. But the fish was not quite right. It was swimming sideways, kind of. And I tried to feed the fish and the fish died of shock at seeing food, from what I could tell. So we lost the fish in that fire.
We wanted to know what had happened, what had caused the fire. You know, the coverage of the fire was astonishing. It was covered on both local news and in the local newspapers. And the fallout from that fire and the way the story unfolded actually took a couple of years to untangle the initial cause of the fire had been, gosh I don’t remember his name. He had been mad at some roommates, from what I understand. And they had a center garden-level unit. Now, the garden-level units in the building I lived in were underground, but they did not have any patio access. But the garden-level units for the building that burned had patio access with patio doors that opened onto a flat concrete patio that had like like half a railing around it. Like you could walk, from your patio doors, you could walk to anywhere, you could walk to the bus station, like there was no- nothing else.
Eris: Someone was angry at the apartment complex or angry with a partner or something like that, and they had propped a mattress up against the door and lit the mattress on fire and left.
Tessera: In some fit of rage he took a mattress and put it up against the front door of their apartment. So facing the internal hallway and lit it on fire and walked out the patio door and that’s what started the fire. And it was just in a prime position to destroy that whole building
We found out the next day that there was a woman, who’s younger than I am now, she was younger than I am now, named Nancy. I don’t remember her last name, but I remember her first name was Nancy, and she was a nurse and she was standing on the balconies when they pancaked, she was in the top floor, west, north corner that we were watching when the truck was trying to get a ladder up to her, and they just didn’t get up there in time. And…she was killed in the fall.
David: Poor Nancy. It’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my life.
Tessera: I sometimes have concern over the long-term health fallout for me, for Daniel, and for Magnolia, because the apartments were insulated with asbestos and friable asbestos is meant to burn completely and not leave partial fibers. But because of the way that the ruined building was left and the cleanup took probably three or four months. It was probably April before that building was completely gone. But I sometimes worry that we have asbestos exposure in our health records.
Eris: The fact that it happened is kind of an interesting footnote now in my life, more than it has been a deep affectation. I imagine it may have had a bigger effect on me if it impacted my health, which may end up being something that happens in my life. I don’t know if I end up with like mesothelioma or something like that in the in the next 20 or 30 years, I may have the fire to look out for that.
Tessera: We lived in that apartment for another year after the fire happened. We moved out December of 2004, and we moved into a rental house
David:They had all ozone, I don’t know, some manner of machine that pumped out ozone in order to remove the smoke smell. So you couldn’t be down on the basement level for more than a minute or so because otherwise you’d suffocate. It was… it was really interesting and kind of chilling and a grim reminder of what had happened every time we needed to be on the bottom level to like check the mail or whatever. There was always a hint of a smokey smell like. Regardless of their efforts, it wouldn’t go away.
Tessera: The one building changed it’s name to the Lexington. The building that had been burned was removed, sawed was put down, there was never anything else built there.
After we moved the Lexington, the remaining building that we had lived in was condemned because of property leans and because of a huge bust of like an Internet sex ring bust in that building. I guess something like 12 or 14 of the apartments were occupied by prostitutes and there was like a huge thing with the Glendale Police Force on that.
The other fallout from that fire was that the Glendale Fire Department was dismantled because Glendale had failed to respond to the alarms when they went off. By the time Denver got there it was too far gone to save anything. And Glendale I mean, Glendale could have gotten there- in a heartbeat they could have been there. They just didn’t. So the state of Colorado sued Glendale and dismantled their fire department. And it was taken over by Denver. And the Glendale firefighters had the option of re-applying to keep their positions at that same house, but they had to reapply according to Denver guidelines. And I remember watching them that summer. Everyone was training physically as hard as they could to pass the tests for the Denver Fire Department. And later, Eris’s mother, who worked as a tier two adjudication for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, took every one of their unemployment claims. Not one of them could pass the tests for Denver.
Eris: That was a truly horrendous smell that my car had for a long time of like deep, deep hickory. But once everything kind of settled on from it, a lot of it was just sort of back to normal after, shortly after that, it was time to go back to school because winter break was over, still in high school, and still had my job working at Domino’s to occupy my time. So, really kind of slightly back to normal for the rest of high school for me pretty quickly, once things were settled and Tessera and Daniel were back in the apartment, there was going to visit them. And somewhat shortly after all of this happened, they did move out from there into another place. So this was a house a bit further south and Denver one that I eventually moved into with them during my senior year of high school.
Tessera: The house was on Colorado Boulevard on a frontage road, and Dartmouth was a little white and green house that had a big backyard that was quite untamed and a big kitchen, which I loved. But it was not a situation which lasted very long. I had quite a bit of anxiety in that part of my life. There were some things going on with family members, some friends also that were pretty stressful for me. And Daniel and I were not made to last. Daniel had some anger problems. And I had some anxiety and some complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which made it difficult for me to sort of navigate unpredictable anger. So about six months after Daniel and I moved into that rental house, I left him.
When I left Daniel, I didn’t make the cleanest or most well-organized exit. Daniel and I fought bitterly in court for years.
Far After
Eris: Life has been very complicated and has had a lot of weird changes in it since then.
During that stretch of time. I had Tessera and Daniel broke up. I got involved with Tessera, I married Tessera. I divorced Tessera. I should have figured out myself and transitioned, legally changed my name and gender marker everywhere on it. Figured out who I was and got more comfortable with myself, met my partner, moved in with my partner, multiple job changes. And there was a point in time where I was working as an Uber driver and now I work for a retirement company helping people roll over their retirement plans. Life has taken me in a lot of interesting and weird places.
Tessera: I kind of cleaned the abusive people out of my own life. I no longer talk to my father and most of his family has chosen not to speak to me either. I went through a lot of intensive therapy in my twenties. I was on disability for a period of time. I reentered the workforce about four years ago. Right now I work for Comcast Effective in financial operations. I’m going back to school to get a degree in finance. I’m remarried to my husband, Robert. Uh, we have a nicer apartment. It seems like it’s probably not too flammable.
There was a fire right after the hockey game. The Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup. And I am a big hockey fan, but my city is stupid. And right after that happened, someone set one of the garages nearby on fire. Um, it was, it was interesting.
Right after we won the game, I went to take the dog outside, and my dog starts just like hacking and crying. Like “No, I don’t want to go.” I’m like, “Oh, it smells interesting out here.” And sure enough, there was a fire, a couple of buildings away, but it was easily contained and there wasn’t too much damage. We also- this apartment is also quite close to a firehouse. It’s actually just a couple of blocks away, like half a mile to the west metro firehouse is on Kipling. I drove past it every time I leave my house. Luckily, they didn’t assume that we had a false alarm. Nobody was hurt. Nobody’s whole house was ruined. And, you know, it was. It was the case of a miss-aimed firework, because this city cannot get over the fact that it is so flammable. But it was really like the opposite experience of the fire that happened at the Spanish Gate.
David: “I watched the building burn down. It was it was horrible.” It was really hard for all of us. And I don’t just mean my friend group. I mean everybody living in that complex and around it. It’s rough. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I think about it, it still feels important. I never wanted anyone to experience something like that.
Eris: It was definitely an interesting experience in high school, but I was a bit of a bystander at the time and I didn’t live in the apartment complex. I had friends that I visited regularly in the apartment complex
Tessera: When we had that fire in June, and Robert and Magnolia and our friend, Solen, they all wanted to go watch the fire. And I said, “I don’t ever need to watch another apartment fire. I’ve seen my fill of apartment complex fires in my life. I never need to see another one”. So, you know, in that sense of not ever having to see that kind of train accident again, I don’t wonder what it’s like anymore.
Author’s Notes
Throughout the process of interviewing, editing, and scripting, I’ve gone back and forth quite a bit when thinking about where exactly I stand in terms of this story. Originally, I had intended to keep myself as distant from the project as possible. I, as the interviewer, wanted to do everything I could to remain neutral, inconsequential. I wanted to separate the Magnolia from the story from the Magnolia doing the project.
Despite my efforts, I have found that to be impartial while constructing a project like this is far easier said than done. Not only because my interviewees often spoke to me in “yous” and “yours”, but also because as I listened, and re-listened, and read, and re-read each account, I started to become curious about my own memory. I began to wonder what I know I remember, and what I think I remember, keeping in mind that I was three and a half when this all happened.
I will say with confidence that I remember living at the Spanish Gate apartment. I remember the set up of the living room and the dining room. I remember the computer next to the kitchen. I remember my father’s foot prints singed into the carpet and I remember when the cousins visited that July because I remember us all going swimming together. I remember sitting on the living room floor and thinking my father looked like a mummy all bandaged up after coming home from the hospital. But I don’t remember the incident with the firework at all.
I don’t remember the night of the fire with clarity. That is to say, I don’t remember the dinner, but I remember being woken up. I remember because I was asleep not in my bed, but in a little tent on my floor. I remember that night my father read a book based off of the movie “Chicken Run,” to me, and I remember that because I can remember the book next to me in the tent.
I want to say I remember seeing the fire, but I don’t know. In my mind, I can see the flames. I can see myself standing on the balcony staring into something I couldn’t comprehend. I remember going outside and walking to my mother’s father’s house. I remember that my father was carrying me. And I think I remember waking up the next morning and playing with the set of blocks that they kept for me there.
I remember the hotel. I remember sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag. I remember watching the news footage on our TV when we were let back inside the apartment. And while I don’t know if I remember walking past the wreckage, I remember when it was no longer there.
This project has offered me a lot of room to reflect, on myself, on my memories. On the people around me. I can’t help but wonder what watching that sort of destruction did to my developing mind. If the pyromanic tendencies I harbored in my youth can be traced back to seeing that fire. But alas, I’m no psychologist. I’m not even a historian. I am just a girl, with project due next week.
Leave a Reply