In the summer of 2015, Denver commercial real estate developer Kenneth Wolf, along with Jeff Osaka, a 2014 James Beard semifinalist and chef-owner of the forthcoming Osaka Ramen, scheduled to open in January at 2611 Walnut St., plan to unveil The Market at the H.H. Tammen Building, a 12,000-square-foot culinary emporium and food hall, which will share space with Nocturne Jazz & Supper Club and hausdesign, an award-winning design firm that crafts state-of-the-art kitchens.

The Market, at 2669 Larimer St., will stretch across two-thirds of the ground floor space currently occupied by Motorsports Gallery – and, for years, was home to the H.H. Tammen Curio Company, a business that manufactured and sold Native American crafts for more than 45 years. The founder of that company, Harry Haye Tammen, was also one of the original owners of The Denver Post.

Modeled after urbanized food culture favorites like Oakland’s Rockridge Market Hall, The Market at the H.H. Tammen Building will feature thirteen food-and-beverage merchants, including a rotisserie, deli, salumi and cheese shop, produce and flower market, retail fish market, ice cream parlor, bakery, coffee house, candy store, butchery, wine bar, dry goods market and dessert emporium. While seating will be limited within the individual spaces, the quarters will provide a common seating area and two patios that face the front of the historic building.

“Think of it as an airy and wide open food hall set up as a gourmet marketplace, where each vendor offers guests something that they can eat onsite, or take on the go,” said Wolf, adding that the reasoning behind launching the Market stems from the absence of a fully developed culinary core in the RiNo neighborhood. “I live six blocks away from here, and I’ve noticed that what’s really lacking in this neighborhood is a gourmet marketplace – a one-stop culinary immersion experience, where you can buy fresh-baked bread, have a glass of wine, buy your groceries, get an ice cream cone and pick up a couple of steaks or some great seafood for dinner. The goal is to make this corridor the signature core for people who want to eat, drink and shop without having to go out of their way to do so.”

Wolf and Osaka are currently soliciting vendors interested in leasing the available spaces, all of which are between 328 and 1,234 square feet and offer three- or five-year leasing terms. “We’re carrying on H.H. Tammen’s vision with a community market that features fresh and local produce, wine and coffee, meats and cheeses, dry goods and baked goods all under one historic roof, and we think this is going to be an incredibly dynamic mix of vendors, all of whom will have the ability to run their businesses as owner,” Wolf said.

For more information about leasing vendor spaces, contact Osaka at 303-319-0948, or Wolf at 303-292-3193.

The Denver Press Club Board of Directors has named famed gossip columnist and reporter Norm Clarke as the recipient of the 21st Annual Damon Runyon Award.

Clarke will accept the award at a banquet in his honor on April 24 at the Denver Marriott City Center. Social hour begins at 6 p.m. and the dinner starts at 7.

Clarke is the man to read in Las Vegas, as he covers all the hot news about entertainers, hotels, casinos and big shots that make Las Vegas such a  dynamic city.

The Montana native started his journalism career as a sportswriter and later joined The Associated Press in Cincinnati. He was AP’s coordinator of coverage for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984. He joined The Rocky Mountain News in 1984 and broke the story that Denver and Miami were being awarded National League expansion franchises. In 1978, Clarke was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, along with the coverage team he headed, for the Willow Island (Va.) disaster.

After 15 years at The Rocky Mountain News, Clarke took his man-about-town column to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999.

Tickets cost $115 each and can be purchased online at www.blacktie-colorado.com. Tickets cost $90 each for members of the Denver Press Club, Denver Woman’s Press Club, Colorado Press Women, the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Colorado Association of Black Journalists and the Colorado chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.

Sponsor tables of 10 cost $5,000 (gold), $3,000 (silver) and $1,000 (bronze).

This event is open to everyone. In addition, DPC offers a $25 ticket to attend the VIP reception at the club from 5-6 p.m.

Each year, the club presents the Runyon award to a journalist whose work best exemplifies the vivid writing style of Damon Runyon, an early member of the Denver Press Club in 1906-07.

Runyon wrote for The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News before going on to fame and glory in New York City as one of the best-read columnists of his day. His collection of short stories, “Guys and Dolls,” later became the basis for the famous musical.

Previous recipients of the award include Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, Molly Ivins, Herb Caen, Pete Hamill, Ted Turner, Maureen Dowd, Tom Brokaw, David Halberstam, Ed Bradley, Carl Hiaasen, Seymour Hersh, George Will, Bob Costas, Tim Russert, Rick Reilly, P.J. O’Rourke, Anna Quindlen, Mike Lupica, Frank Deford and Katie Couric.

For more information, contact Bruce Goldberg at 303-369-4088.

Eavesdropping on two employees at an Englewood business after a tough afternoon at work: “I may skip Bible study after work and go straight to the bar.”
“I may join you, at the bar, not Bible study.”

The streets and buildings of Downtown Denver will light up for the holidays during the center city’s Grand Illumination starting at 6 p.m. Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of sparkling lights and entertainment will mark the festive occasion from Denver Union Station to the City and County Building, including the 16th Street Mall, Skyline Park, the D&F Tower and more. The following details the places to enjoy the illumination of Downtown Denver.

Light the Lights City and County Building – One of the holiday season’s longest running traditions, the 9NEWS Light the Lights event, takes place at the City and County Building, when one of the most popular holiday lighting displays in the region will once again transform this historic building.

Performers will entertain the crowd from 6 to 7 p.m., including MIX, The University of Colorado Denver’s elite a cappella group; CU Buffoons, the oldest a cappella group at the University of Colorado at Boulder and SOAR, a youth and adult choir offering the opportunity for at-risk youth to be mentored by adult performers. Benjamin Wood, baritone with the Boulder Opera Company, will perform the finale.

The City and County Building lighting display is entirely lit with LED lights and uses an estimated one-third of the energy it did in previous years. The building will be illuminated at 5:45 p.m. nightly through Jan. 25.

A dramatic light display set to holiday music will play at 5:45 p.m. each night.   At 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, volunteers will play holiday tunes from the historic bell tower. A special bell session will play at 7:14 p.m. Dec. 24 for the “Bells for Peace” organization as part of an effort to have bells around the world play “Silent Night” to honor the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Eve truce during World War I. Bells in each country will be played at 7:14 p.m. in their respective time zone.

Denver Union Station – Beginning at 6 p.m., there will be special events at Denver Union Station, presented by LoDo District, Inc. and sponsored, in part, by Comcast.  Entertainment will include local a cappella singers, the Mistletones, a visit from Dinger Claus (the Colorado Rockies Mascot decked out in holiday uniform) and much more. At 6:30 p.m., a countdown will mark the lighting of a 35-foot Douglas-fir tree. Sparkling lights also will illuminate the historic Denver Union Station in the heart of Lower Downtown.

16th Street Mall – More than 100,000 energy-efficient LED lights will turn the 16th Street Mall into a beautiful promenade, lighting more than 200 trees along the 1.25 mile length of the Mall.  Highlights along the 16th Street Mall include Denver’s historic D&F Tower, adorned with LED lights, wreaths and bows and Skyline Park featuring trees with more than 50,000 lights.

14th Street – Along 14th Street, more than 180 trees will be decorated with nearly 25,000 white LED lights, enhanced by more than 32,000 brightly colored LED lights in trees on Curtis (green and blue)  California (red, gold and orange), and Larimer streets (green and purple).

Two of Downtown Denver’s major retail destinations, Larimer Square and the Denver Pavilions, will be illuminated with festive décor and will host holiday entertainment and special events throughout the season. The sparkling canopy display over Larimer Square features nearly 4,000 lights.

In addition to the lights, visitors to Grand Illumination can sing along with the Jingle Singers who will be playing five colorfully painted pianos along the 16th Street Mall as part of the Your Keys to the City program.

Grand Illumination is a collective effort of the Downtown Denver Partnership, the Downtown Denver Business Improvement District, Downtown Denver Events, Inc., 9NEWS, the City & County of Denver, the LoDo District, Inc., Comcast and the Regional Transportation District.

For an unprecedented third year in a row, the BMW Championship was named the PGA TOUR’s Tournament of the Year at the TOUR’s Tournament Meetings on Thursday in La Quinta, Calif.

The award was one of three earned by the 2014 BMW Championship, which also won the “Best On-Site Staging” and “Best Advertising Campaign/Promotional Idea” awards for this year’s tournament at Cherry Hills Country Club.

Conducted by the Western Golf Association, the 2014 BMW Championship continued to raise awareness and support for the Evans Scholars Foundation, the WGA’s 84-year-old sister organization which has been sending caddies to college since 1930.

The penultimate event in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, the BMW Championship was one of the top attended tournaments on the PGA TOUR in 2014, attracting more than 125,000 spectators to Cherry Hills.

“On behalf of the PGA TOUR, I am delighted to congratulate the BMW Championship for the special recognition it has received with these three awards,” said Andy Pazder, PGA TOUR executive vice-president and chief of operations. “The tournament staff should be extremely proud of its hard work and for being recognized as the PGA TOUR Tournament of the Year for the third consecutive season.”

Benchmarks achieved by the BMW Championship in 2014 – in the areas of revenue growth, charity integration, event advertising, host club and community support, title sponsor integration and player and caddie hospitality – were all significant factors in the event being named Tournament of the Year, TOUR officials said.

On Black Friday this Friday, buy regularly priced tickets to a December show at Lone Tree Arts Center and get a $10 ticket to see “Conjure”, a lighthearted comedy about a magician who must, with the help of the audience, bring back his loving, dead assistant to perform the magic show of a lifetime.

To qualify for the special deal, patrons must buy tickets in person or via phone at 720-509-1000 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, noon to 6 p.m. Saturday and from 2 to 9 p.m. Sunday.

December shows:

Dec. 3 – Cowboy Christmas with Sons & Brothers and Buckaroo Poet Waddie Mitchell;

Dec. 7 – Big Band Christmas with the CJRO;

Dec. 11 – Colorado Symphony: Holiday Brass;

Dec. 13 and 14 – Nutcracker by Classical Ballet of Colorado;

Dec. 18 to 24 – Home for the Holidays;

Dec. 27 and 28 – Conjure.

The Lone Tree Arts Center is located at 10075 Commons St. in Lone Tree. Visit www.lonetreeartscenter.org or call 720-509-1000 for more information.

Zagat, the national publication and website whose editorial team curates the best restaurants and nightspots in 18 cities worldwide, recently released its picks for The 12 Hottest Bakeries Around the U.S.

And among that coveted 12 is Maria Empanada, an Argentinean bakery in Platt Park. Here’s what the editors said: 

“At this captivating Platt Park Argentinean bakery, which opened in spring, owner Lorena Cantarovici turns out the city’s most celebrated empanadas, their gold-tinged crusts enveloping everything from olives and scrambled eggs to sweet corn and spinach. And that’s not all: her tartas and Spanish tortillas are objects of beauty too, as are the sweet medialunas and dulce de leche roll cake.

“Must-Order: Our advice would be to order one of everything, but the classic ground beef, egg, pepper and olive empanada, medialunas (the Argentinean equivalent of a croissant) and the creamy spinach tarta are highlights.

Maria Empanada is located at 1298 S. Broadway; www.mariaempanada.com; 303-934-2221.

See the rest of Zagat’s Hottest Bakeries at www.zagat.com/b/the-12-hottest-new-bakeries-around-the-u.s#10.

The Southwest Rink at Skyline Park, sponsored by Southwest Airlines, opened Tuesday for Denver residents and visitors to take to the ice.

The Rink is located near the intersection of 16th and Arapahoe streets next to the historic Daniels & Fisher Tower.

The Southwest Rink is free to skate, with $2 skate rentals, and is open through Feb. 16.  Visit www.southwestrink.com for rink hours of operation, programming and special events.

Rockmount Ranch Wear’s retail store at 1626 Wazee St. has long been a celebrity magnet for rock ‘n roll royalty who make a visit mandatory during Denver gigs.

Saturday was no exception when The Pretenders stopped by while on tour. They picked up some shorts and invited the Rockmount gang to the gig at the Paramount Theater.

Rockmount Ranch Wear owner Steve Weil, right, with members of the band, The Pretenders.