Music in the air

Sarah Haas, Central City. Standing in an empty lot outside Central City’s historic Teller House, Jeremy Fey spreads his arms and looks into an imaginary crowd.

“This is where the stage will end and the rest of it will be filled with 3,200 people,” he says.

The parking lot will be the main stage of Central Jazz, the revival of the Central City Jazz Festival which ran from 1976 to 1992, coming back to life on June 9, 2018. The event will feature four stages in various locations throughout town and boasts some of the biggest jazz-funk bands in the country, like the supergroup NOLA Central All-Stars and the iconic Jerry Garcia Band.

The main man behind the festival, and the one spanning his arms like wings, is Jeremy Fey, son of famed rock concert promoter Barry Fey. During his career, Barry is credited with bringing Red Rocks to life, saving the Colorado Symphony Orchestra from death and was crowned with the promoter of the year awards from Billboard.

After his death in 2013, his sons carried on his legacy, with their own styles of course, notably Tyler Fey, who now runs his father’s company, Feyline, and Jeremy, who lives in Central City with big ideas for the humble town of 700, that all starts with Central Jazz.

For Jeremy the June festival is “a proof of concept” for a much larger vision of the cultural and economic development of Central City. Through the festival he aims to show the potential of the town, to leverage its historic assets and charming character into a display of what it could become — a thriving arts scene replete with venues, artists’ studios and fine dining.

Fey also hopes the festival helps to find and confront the town’s limitations, like a lack of hotel rooms, food and grocery, and an abundance of empty storefronts. He looks at them not as obstacles, but as opportunities.

For months Central City’s Council has been mulling over similar questions of the town’s health by asking what they call the “chicken-and-egg-problem” of how to create more foot traffic in town without more businesses and vice versa.

The conundrum was publicly breached on December 29, 2017, as City Council gathered for a special work session to begin a rebranding effort for the City. At that meeting, like every other meeting, Jeremy Fey listened on from the crowd.

From the center of the table, Mayor Kathryn Heider started off by commending the city for its growth into maturity over the last decades, especially recently. With a healthy 2017 on the books and a surplus 2018 budget lying ahead, she believes the city is ready for the next step in its maturation — a diversification in its revenue streams to decrease its reliance on casino revenue, currently 85 percent of its income.

“We have a class and a culture here that I think gets forgotten about,” Heider said. “We have history museums, art galleries, the Central City Opera. We are at the gateway to the Rockies, with bike and hiking trails. We need to make all of that help our town come to life.”

Although unanimous in support of this call to action, council members seemed a bit stumped on how to proceed, except for continuing to pursue the city’s rebranding effort through a consultation company.

From his seat in the second row Fey was unfazed and unsatisfied and so offered that the city ought to focus on revitalizing industry through business to business marketing, creating collaborations and putting on events to attract people and yes, money, to the town. Although a relative newcomer to Central City, Fey’s comment brought the room to attention.

He’s only been there for two years, living with his wife and two year old daughter, but already he’s famous in the town of 700, some might say notorious. Earlier today, he had a pop in visit from the mayor and now, walking the streets, he seems to know just about everybody. He makes a quip about a sharply dressed man smoking a cigar, nods familiarly to a guy on the corner. He seems to have the key to every empty historic building in town.

He walks into them easily, as if he was always meant to be here wandering around inside of them and unsettling their dust covered grandeur. Fey’s excitement is palpable in peppy stride and demeanor as he walks up broken escalators and ebulliently talks about the histories and potentials held in the empty rooms.

Each thought he offers as if a couplet. First a note about the ghosts that linger, as if he can still hear Bob Dylan singing from the stage of the second floor. Next a promise of an anonymous future singer that will sit in precisely that same spot. That is if, and only if, he is successful in attracting developers to pay to fix the leaks in the ceiling and clean the flies from the window sills.

It’s hard to imagine that the developers he tours around are not swept away by the beautiful imaginations he paints of the life still left in these rooms. Central Jazz is an indication of his early successes, as big city folk are flocking to the town for the event. And so comes his notoriety.

Back on the street he elicits a holler from a friend across the way telling Fey he’s a hated man in town and he’s only half joking. Fey represents change and in any small town, “change” can be a dirty word. Especially so in Central City, where 26 years ago the legalization of gambling promised the town “salvation.” It wasn’t until 1992, which is coincidentally the same year Central City Jazz Festival folded, that gambling became legal in Central City.

An article from that year in the New York Times tells the story of the conversion to gaming by way of a biop of Chris Hemmeter, the last guy to come from out of town promising change.

Hemmeter was a Los Angeles-based businessman who bought a 10,000-square-foot parking lot in Central City in order to build a $12 million casino and restaurant complex.

Like Fey, Hemmeter was well liked by locals, one of whom was quoted as calling him “good people.” They hoped he could restore the town that was “falling down around [their ears]” to the splendor it enjoyed during the gold rush, when it was hailed as the “richest square mile on earth.”

“Gambling was seen as the salvation -- a way to preserve the town’s Victorian heritage, while modernizing its antique water system and roads,” writes Mary Billard for the New York Times. “The $1,000 licensing fees the city is collecting per gambling device or table annually is expected to push its budget from $230,000 in 1991 to $2.5 million [in 1992], with an $800,000 surplus.”

Initially, the plan was exceedingly successful. Mary Demers, with the Gilpin County Historical Society, recounts that just after the casinos opened in 1992, it was common to have lines that wrapped around the buildings to get in to play $5 blackjack tables.

“Over time that faded though,” she says. “I guess the novelty went away. People went and gambled in Black Hawk or in the bigger, newer casinos. Casinos and other tenants left and now we have all these beautiful, historic buildings sitting unused.”

In 2018 the numbers are in and the city has, indeed, been saved by the influx of money brought in by casinos, as promised, but, as far as salvation is concerned, some might say the city is still looking to reclaim its soul.

If anyone knows soul searching, it’s Jeremy Fey whose arrival in Central City began in 2013 with the death of his father.

“In his suicide note he wrote to me “Jeremy, come home,” Fey says. “There was something about that time, place, what had happened that, at the age of 40-something, I was finally able to stop traveling in search of myself. I was ready to embrace Colorado as my home and to start being myself.

“When I was growing up we would always come to Central City so when Tyler suggested I might find myself here, it felt…” Fey stops to search for the word and finds a question instead:

“Did I find my calling?”

With tears in his eyes Fey talks about the deep love he has for Central City and how it has allowed him to pursue what he considers really important, kindness, as his life’s work.

A typical developer would look at a place like Central City and see it in terms of its costs and its benefits and with a dogged pursuit for the bottom line. Fey, on the other hand, sees the city personified, a living entity in need of love and care. He hopes that he can steward collaboration between Central City’s residents and government, building owners and businessmen, insiders and outsiders, to breathe new life, new soul, into its still beating heart.

“All I’m trying to do is bring out what already exists,” Fey says. “All of this, my ideas about this place, they aren’t wild imaginations, it’s all already here.”