Lo-Fidelity: Owl wall disappears, “Who-who” noticed?

The other day while scooping the loop through town, I noticed the Owl Cigar wall was gone. The void had the instantaneous effect of conjuring ghostly memories of Aspen’s past for me, a foggy place I still do some of my best work. I recalled an old, local coloring book with a page depicting the Owl Cigar wall.  

One year, per my suggestion, our family took a Christmas card picture in front of the Owl Cigar wall — undoubtedly inspired by the aforementioned coloring book. I came across the portrait the other day while perusing old scrapbooks. I had long bushy sideburns, was wearing a straw cowboy hat from COOP, and holding a baby. The only thing missing was a cigar in my mouth.

My fondest memories of the Owl Cigar wall lay buried within the confines of the Crystal Palace building — an old dinner theatre my mom was obsessed with. She wrangled our family there on a fairly regular basis to see the show. When you grow up in a household in Aspen where your mom is obsessed with show-tunes, musicals, and opera, you were being taken to the Crystal Palace whether you pretended to like it or not. 

I fondly remember the funny political and pop culture-based skits and the big rave-up piano finale by the owner, Mead Metcalf aka “Aspen’s Music Man,” who sang a jovial ditty about a guy with a “lump of peanut butter on his chin” that always brought the house down. 

Like restaurants often do in fickle Aspen, the Crystal Palace closed. The last hurrah of the Crystal Palace building for me was when there was a pop-up Asian restaurant in the alley called Tanuki that served incredible dumplings, ribs, fried chicken, and overstuffed egg rolls. There was something devious about procuring takeout food in an Aspen alley that felt like a drug deal.

I was at a random apartment in Aspen when suddenly it occurred to me I’d been gazing at an old panel of stained glass that used to hang in the Crystal Palace. “Nice score,” I commented to the owner.

You could tell the Owl Cigar wall was doomed from the start of the latest saga. When the entire building was scrapped, but the wall was being propped up by structural steel I-beams, I was dubious about its future. I inspected the wall while rambling down the sidewalk one day this summer. I’m no engineer, but the poor old brick and mortar Owl Cigar wall made the Leaning Tower of Pisa look structurally sound. 

The Historical Preservation Committee ordeal to save the wall was regrettable. A stand-alone wall is an apt metaphor for many things built up then torn down Aspen. Finally, the Owl wall succumbed to obsolescence.   

When I first read that a company called Restoration Hardware was going to build a new hotel at the old Crystal Palace site, I thought to myself, “Restoration Hardware? How practical. What do they do? Refurbish old table saws, straighten-out bent nails, and ‘restore’ old hardware and such?” Call me a bumpkin, but I’d literally never heard of the artist known as “RH.” 

Upon further investigation of what Restoration Hardware did, does, and planned to do here, you know what my response was? “That’ll never work here.” There was no vibe, no buzz. As far as I was concerned, the concept was DOA. The longer the building sits, the colder the corpse gets. There was more excitement in town “Giuseppe Wong’s” opened.

As I drove by the Crystal Palace building and saw clear through the concrete skeleton, a light bulb went on inside my dim-lit head. Restoration Hardware may’ve inadvertently stumbled into a new disruptive business model: DIY tourism. 

Here’s how it works: A developer buys a parcel destined to be a hotel, drags their feet on getting the project finished, then gets their customers to come in — for a discounted nightly rate — and complete the project. I bet they could get a hotel finished in one ski season. I can hear the convincing sales pitch by a reservation agent now … “We have a downtown 3^rd floor corner suite with 360 panoramic views, a space heater, and a manageable stack of drywall that needs to be hung.” 

I’ll bet you a box of bubble-gum cigars there’s plenty of skilled carpenters and tradesmen around the world that would love to bring their family to Aspen for a vacation and get some work done at the same time. “Honey, my legs are smoked from skiing Snowmass yesterday. Why don’t you bring the kids over to Buttermilk? I’m gonna take the day off skiing and do some plumbing and duct-work here at hotel.”

Not only would DIY tourism get all of these abandoned downtown core projects finished in a jiff, I bet we’d see a lot less construction traffic. City council will be all-over this. Let’s put our tourists to work for us. Before you know it, there’ll be a DIY tourist/artist out there in coveralls painting a new Owl Cigar mural on a freshly masoned brick wall. 

Contact Lorenzo via email at suityourself@sopris.net.