On the Green Mile
By Eric Peterson
For a place called Grandma's House, the atmosphere is a little tenser than one might expect.
The antique store turned collaborative brewery on the south side of Denver has a standing room crowd on this crisp November evening. All of the local TV affiliates and newspapers have reporters on the scene to cover the debate over a new merchants association of the southern side of the city.
On one side of the room: the antique merchants and other members of the longstanding South Broadway Antique Row Association.
Across from them are the founders of the proposed Green Mile on Broadway Association, a group backed largely by the many marijuana dispensaries that line the two final miles of Broadway before it plunges into suburban Englewood.
The conversation gets somewhat contentious. "The long-haired, tattooed, stinky types, they don't buy," says one antique dealer indignantly.
But the night's not without its conciliatory moments. "Everybody wants something a little different," observes Mike Roth, one of the owners of Herman's Hideaway, a longstanding music venue and bar that's nearby. He suggests a compromise.
After the meeting, an onlooker describes the affair as "us versus them." And one side seems to have a decided advantage, she adds. "It's the Green Mile and the Antique 500 Yards."
The Antique Row organization has been around since the late 1980s and operates on an annual budget of about $6,500. Dues are $175 a year.
For the Green Mile, Cullen says dispensaries could have dues of $2,000 a month, with a target annual budget of $200,000 or more.
Beyond the hype
The Green Mile/Antique Row debate is just a microcosm of the change in Denver in recent years.
The city -- well known for having more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks since 2011 -- has been in countless headlines since it became the site of the world's first legal sale of recreational marijuana on Jan. 1, 2014.
Hoopla aside, what is the broader impact of legalization in city limits and beyond?
For the police, not too much.
The top concern of residents in 2014 was stoned driving, according to a Denver Post poll. One third of respondents thought the state's reputation has suffered due to legalization.
There's also debate over the impact on kids, but there's little evidence that usage is up among those under the legal age of 21. And the effect on the overall crime rate is likewise at worst a wash, with Denver's murder rate and auto fatalities dropping notably in 2014.
The other perceived downsides are byproducts of some of the newcomers drawn to Denver by legal weed. There's been an observable uptick in homelessness and a higher rate of unemployment among 20-somethings.
Upsides include increased tax revenues, to the tune of $60 million for the state and about $10 million more for the city, a good bit of which will go into education, and it's hard to argue that legalization didn't lure a wave of entrepreneurs along with other transplants.
One of the leaders of the push for the Green Mile association, Tim Cullen owns Evergreen Apothecary on South Broadway with Ralph Morgan. The pair owns another Denver dispensary, Colorado Harvest Company, about a mile to the west.
The pair are also the founders of O.penVAPE, a company that makes cannabis-oil vaporizers. "It's just gone ballistic," says Cullen of O.penVape, which has grown from six to 100 employees in the last three years and expanded the brand to nine states.
Morgan and Cullen commissioned University of Denver's Jack Strauss to do an economic impact study for their dispensaries, with nearly 50 employees and about $12 million in sales between them.
Strauss found that the combined economic impact of the two stores was seven times the average retail store or restaurant in the metro area. Tax revenue from just these two stores totaled $1.07 million for the state and $390,000 for the city -- 10 times the average retail establishment or restaurant -- and payroll was eight times the average.
"We always felt we were having an impact," says Cullen. "We sure do pay a lot of taxes and we sure do employ a lot of people.
Denver City Councilman Chris Nevitt's district encompasses the "Green Mile” stretch of South Broadway. "During the Great Recession, two things saved our ass," he says. "One was the enormous investments the city was making in bond-funded projects. The other was marijuana."
Property owners that were looking at insolvency had a new class of business as a market, and it kept many of them from from defaulting on loans for retail and industrial space.
"That can only be good for Denver," says Nevitt. He estimates that the industry created "tens of thousands" of jobs for Denver when the city needed them most. "They are primary jobs -- they take seeds and fertilizer and water and create marijuana -- and we need that."
"We have really led the way for not just the country, but the entire world, by embracing a for-profit business model for marijuana," says Nevitt. "I think that's been absolutely key for our success. We've said, 'This is a business, we need to regulate it like a business.' That has been spectacularly successful."
Nonprofit co-ops and caregivers, a holdover from medical marijuana, feed the black market, he argues. "Everything that's gone wrong has been on the margins. There's not as much accountability and transparency and regulation. We have no idea how much marijuana is being produced and where it's going."
Adds Nevitt, "The for-profit model is totally transparent and totally accountable."
Nevitt says Washington state's model might be preferable in not bifurcating medical and recreational marijuana, but government overreach is helping fuel the black market in the Pacific Northwest.
"We didn't put a limit on how many there could be," he says. "The market will equilibrate, but it's important for government to let the market run its course. If you distort it, you don't know what it is."
"Another dimension is all of the ancillary intellectual property and other products," says Nevitt. "They're manufacturing and distributing child-proof packaging. They're creating a virtual commodities exchange. People have patents pending on extraction machinery. That's where Colorado is really going to come out ahead."
Take Dixie Elixirs in northwest Denver. The company built a new facility in 2014 that CEO Tripp Keber calls "one of the industry's most state-of-the-art extraction facilities," complete with an exhibit hall and a R&D lab.
Dixie grew by 500 percent in 2014 and doubled its staff to 50 employees and consultants, and spent a lot on outside contractors building its $4 million facility, not to mention spending on everything from graphic design to ingredients for its cannabis-infused beverages and edibles.
"All of that IP -- the packaging, the extraction, the dosing platforms -- everybody is looking to us," says Keber, calling Denver "the incubator" for states that will legalize in the future.
As Nevitt puts it, "When everybody is digging for gold, it's great to be in the pick-and-shovel business. The only people who know how to run a legal marijuana business are in Colorado."
The next frontier
Cullen and Morgan are now going into business with two dispensaries in Aurora, just east of Denver and the third most populous city in Colorado.
Aurora has a different model than Denver's relatively laissez-faire approach, with six wards that can have up to four licensed recreational dispensaries each.
Kim Kreimeyer, a senior planner with the City of Aurora, says government officials "approached it in a really conservative and measured way." The prime concerns have been "the odor and the number," Kreimeyer says, noting a that the city zero-tolerance smell policy for both retail and grow operations. Of the latter, "Denver seems extremely saturated."
As of early 2015, six recreational marijuana dispensaries had opened their doors in Aurora and they're already proving a catalyst for revitalization, says Kreimeyer. One of the recreational license-holders took over a former Arby's that "had sat vacant for about five years," she explains. "Another one is going to to turn an old transmission shop into a retail location. That's happening all over town."
Once all 24 stores are up and running, annual city revenues are forecast to hit nearly $2 million, but early per-store sales beat projections by 35 percent. "They're doing very well," says Kreimeyer.
Some challenges have arisen with the rollout, like shopping centers that decided against dispensaries after leases were signed. Kreimeyer says that Aurora decided to have a dedicated marijuana team as opposed to Denver's cross-departmental model. "They are doing business as normal," she says. "We actually have an integrated system. We only have certain building-plan reviewers looking at them. It's a specialized team looking at marijuana."
Kreimeyer says the legal home grows present the biggest problem to the city. "There's no oversight. It seems to have created a difficulty for our police department and our ability to manage that."
Dispensaries are handicapped by federal banking law, so the buildings must be landlord-owned or else the dispensary has to buy it outright. That makes real estate pretty hard to find, says Cullen. In response, he's started Harvest Consulting Group to help startups navigate the fledgling industry.
"The rollout of this is a lot like liquor," he notes. "After Prohibition, it was a states' rights issue. To my knowledge, no state has said, 'You're doing this right.’ Every state has to reinvent the wheel."
For example, medical marijuana is out in Washington, but remains in Colorado. Colorado's pot shops are vertically integrated and largely grow their own wares, but Washington keeps growing and selling separate.
"I could talk about a lot of things Colorado did right, and I could talk about a lot of things Colorado did wrong," says Cullen. "Local approval has been critical” -- by which communities can reject recreational marijuana sales if they so choose.
But banking and taxes remain trouble spots for the entire industry, regardless of geography. "We have banking, but it's expensive," says Cullen. It's 60 miles south of Denver in Pueblo and the large amounts of cash require an armed guard and an armored truck. "It costs me $1,000 to make a deposit."
Taxes are thorny due to Section 280 E of the IRS code. It says that no deductions may be taken for federally illegal activities, so Cullen doesn't deduct any business expenses on labor costs, real estate and marketing and advertising.
Cullen says legalization in Colorado is a harbinger of national change and Oklahoma and Nebraska's lawsuit is "the beginning of the end," especially with as many as 10 states looking at legal marijuana on the ballot in 2016. "I bet it goes a lot like gay marriage did," he predicts.
Dixie's Keber echoes that sentiment, noting that the marijuana industry in Denver has gone from a political "persona non grata” to a target sector for candidates. "We just had a candidate for city council visit when he was out shaking hands and kissing babies," he says. "That's a real shift in political ideology."
"We saw great success in 2014," Keber notes. "We can pour that back into the political community and create an environment that's even more conducive to success."
Back on the Green Mile
When the first medical marijuana dispensaries opened on South Broadway in 2008, this was a much different area. The street was pockmarked with potholes and the old trolley tracks, merely buried in blacktop after the trolley discontinued service in 1950, acted as a levee during rainstorms. The condition of the street carried over to the sidewalk, cracked or worse. Denver Public Works embarked on a $28 million street project that was completed in 2013.
But the project coincided with the birth of the Green Mile. One medical marijuana dispensary snowballed to about 20 by 2012, when Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. When recreational sale officially became legal on Jan. 1, 2014, many of them became recreational marijuana facilities.
Developer Jon Cook owns numerous storefronts on South Broadway, including several currently leased to dispensaries. "In '08, there were a lot of vacancies," he says, calling the five-year road project and recession "growing pains” for the tenants. "Now it's blue skies and smooth sailing."
Cook says rents on South Broadway have increased by 25 percent since the road project's completion in 2013, but he notes that they were artificially low during construction and that dispensaries pay a premium due to their banking difficulties.
Today there are about 20 recreational and medical dispensaries on this two-mile stretch south of Interstate 25, making it the area with the highest concentration of legal marijuana dispensaries on the planet. There were once dozens of antique dealers here. Now there's a fraction of that.
South Broadway "is vastly different," Cullen adds, estimating that 25 percent of the storefronts were vacant when Evergreen opened as a medical marijuana (MMJ) dispensary in 2009. There was disruptive construction ("We opened with a 12-foot pile of dirt in front of the store," he says), followed by a recession.
"They've cleaned up a lot of the buildings," says Cullen. "It's brought a lot of traffic down Broadway."
There are more pedestrians and no potholes. Sidewalks are wider. The storefronts are less likely to be vacant or dilapidated.
With the dispensaries, other businesses have hung shingles on South Broadway, including Derbyille, a roller-derby shop; two small breweries in Former Future Brewing Co. and Grandma's House; two coffee shops in Corvus Coffee and Strange Grounds; La Cour Art Bar & Bistro; and Cabal Enterprises, a gallery and artists incubator. Several restaurants are in the works.
"There's a pretty wide range of businesses that have opened down here," says Rusty Staff, owner of DecorAsian, a furniture and antique store that opened on South Broadway in 2009.
Staff says there's more foot traffic and he's made sales to numerous dispensary customers. "And I've made a lot of big sales to pot shop owners," he adds.
Some of the antique dealers have having trouble keeping up with rising rents -- several have closed since 2013 -- but it's hard to argue that legal recreational marijuana has been bad for the neighborhood as a whole.
And coming soon are thousands of apartments and a big slate of other development projects nearby. Cullen says the area epitomizes the concept of "live, work, play," noting, "People are going to move here."
But it needs a name. Its reputation is starting to snowball. It's not at all uncommon to see tourists taking selfies in front of one of the dispensaries on the so-called Green Mile. "I didn't choose the name," Cullen is quick to note. "That name came about organically."
Whether it's the Green Mile, Antique Row, The Row, SoBo, BISON or Gates remains to be seen. "I'm a little on the fence," Cullen admits. "If it's the name that's the issue, I'm not married to the name. I'm totally sensitive to what people in the neighborhood want. Haight-Ashbury is not cool because it's called Haight-Ashbury. What matters is a collective effort to market the area."
Or, as Cook puts it, "Why can't we all just get along?"
Efforts to establish the Green Mile on Broadway Association have been put on hold. Cullen plans to restart the push by spring 2015. He's registered the group as a 503(c)(6) and put a few thousand dollars into marketing efforts
But nothing could match the amount of press the clash with Antique Row attracted. "It ran as an international story," says Cullen. "I've been on The Today Show twice. It got more publicity for the Green Mile than I could have ever paid for."
At the second neighborhood meeting at Grandma's House, the budget disparity between the Green Mile and Antique Row presents a stumbling block.
"Where in the world are we going to get that kind of money?" one of the antique dealers protests.
Cullen proposes a tiered system -- maybe $2,000 a monthly dues for pot shops, $1,000 for bars and restaurants and $500 for antique shops and other stores. "We can make this a destination for everybody," he says. Staff, for one, says he'll give it a good look.
Someone else speaks up in the spirit of cooperation. "We just need to get this custard pie nailed to the wall."
For a place called Grandma's House, the atmosphere is a little tenser than one might expect.
The antique store turned collaborative brewery on the south side of Denver has a standing room crowd on this crisp November evening. All of the local TV affiliates and newspapers have reporters on the scene to cover the debate over a new merchants association of the southern side of the city.
On one side of the room: the antique merchants and other members of the longstanding South Broadway Antique Row Association.
Across from them are the founders of the proposed Green Mile on Broadway Association, a group backed largely by the many marijuana dispensaries that line the two final miles of Broadway before it plunges into suburban Englewood.
The conversation gets somewhat contentious. "The long-haired, tattooed, stinky types, they don't buy," says one antique dealer indignantly.
But the night's not without its conciliatory moments. "Everybody wants something a little different," observes Mike Roth, one of the owners of Herman's Hideaway, a longstanding music venue and bar that's nearby. He suggests a compromise.
After the meeting, an onlooker describes the affair as "us versus them." And one side seems to have a decided advantage, she adds. "It's the Green Mile and the Antique 500 Yards."
The Antique Row organization has been around since the late 1980s and operates on an annual budget of about $6,500. Dues are $175 a year.
For the Green Mile, Cullen says dispensaries could have dues of $2,000 a month, with a target annual budget of $200,000 or more.
Beyond the hype
The Green Mile/Antique Row debate is just a microcosm of the change in Denver in recent years.
The city -- well known for having more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks since 2011 -- has been in countless headlines since it became the site of the world's first legal sale of recreational marijuana on Jan. 1, 2014.
Hoopla aside, what is the broader impact of legalization in city limits and beyond?
For the police, not too much.
The top concern of residents in 2014 was stoned driving, according to a Denver Post poll. One third of respondents thought the state's reputation has suffered due to legalization.
There's also debate over the impact on kids, but there's little evidence that usage is up among those under the legal age of 21. And the effect on the overall crime rate is likewise at worst a wash, with Denver's murder rate and auto fatalities dropping notably in 2014.
The other perceived downsides are byproducts of some of the newcomers drawn to Denver by legal weed. There's been an observable uptick in homelessness and a higher rate of unemployment among 20-somethings.
Upsides include increased tax revenues, to the tune of $60 million for the state and about $10 million more for the city, a good bit of which will go into education, and it's hard to argue that legalization didn't lure a wave of entrepreneurs along with other transplants.
One of the leaders of the push for the Green Mile association, Tim Cullen owns Evergreen Apothecary on South Broadway with Ralph Morgan. The pair owns another Denver dispensary, Colorado Harvest Company, about a mile to the west.
The pair are also the founders of O.penVAPE, a company that makes cannabis-oil vaporizers. "It's just gone ballistic," says Cullen of O.penVape, which has grown from six to 100 employees in the last three years and expanded the brand to nine states.
Morgan and Cullen commissioned University of Denver's Jack Strauss to do an economic impact study for their dispensaries, with nearly 50 employees and about $12 million in sales between them.
Strauss found that the combined economic impact of the two stores was seven times the average retail store or restaurant in the metro area. Tax revenue from just these two stores totaled $1.07 million for the state and $390,000 for the city -- 10 times the average retail establishment or restaurant -- and payroll was eight times the average.
"We always felt we were having an impact," says Cullen. "We sure do pay a lot of taxes and we sure do employ a lot of people.
Denver City Councilman Chris Nevitt's district encompasses the "Green Mile” stretch of South Broadway. "During the Great Recession, two things saved our ass," he says. "One was the enormous investments the city was making in bond-funded projects. The other was marijuana."
Property owners that were looking at insolvency had a new class of business as a market, and it kept many of them from from defaulting on loans for retail and industrial space.
"That can only be good for Denver," says Nevitt. He estimates that the industry created "tens of thousands" of jobs for Denver when the city needed them most. "They are primary jobs -- they take seeds and fertilizer and water and create marijuana -- and we need that."
"We have really led the way for not just the country, but the entire world, by embracing a for-profit business model for marijuana," says Nevitt. "I think that's been absolutely key for our success. We've said, 'This is a business, we need to regulate it like a business.' That has been spectacularly successful."
Nonprofit co-ops and caregivers, a holdover from medical marijuana, feed the black market, he argues. "Everything that's gone wrong has been on the margins. There's not as much accountability and transparency and regulation. We have no idea how much marijuana is being produced and where it's going."
Adds Nevitt, "The for-profit model is totally transparent and totally accountable."
Nevitt says Washington state's model might be preferable in not bifurcating medical and recreational marijuana, but government overreach is helping fuel the black market in the Pacific Northwest.
"We didn't put a limit on how many there could be," he says. "The market will equilibrate, but it's important for government to let the market run its course. If you distort it, you don't know what it is."
"Another dimension is all of the ancillary intellectual property and other products," says Nevitt. "They're manufacturing and distributing child-proof packaging. They're creating a virtual commodities exchange. People have patents pending on extraction machinery. That's where Colorado is really going to come out ahead."
Take Dixie Elixirs in northwest Denver. The company built a new facility in 2014 that CEO Tripp Keber calls "one of the industry's most state-of-the-art extraction facilities," complete with an exhibit hall and a R&D lab.
Dixie grew by 500 percent in 2014 and doubled its staff to 50 employees and consultants, and spent a lot on outside contractors building its $4 million facility, not to mention spending on everything from graphic design to ingredients for its cannabis-infused beverages and edibles.
"All of that IP -- the packaging, the extraction, the dosing platforms -- everybody is looking to us," says Keber, calling Denver "the incubator" for states that will legalize in the future.
As Nevitt puts it, "When everybody is digging for gold, it's great to be in the pick-and-shovel business. The only people who know how to run a legal marijuana business are in Colorado."
The next frontier
Cullen and Morgan are now going into business with two dispensaries in Aurora, just east of Denver and the third most populous city in Colorado.
Aurora has a different model than Denver's relatively laissez-faire approach, with six wards that can have up to four licensed recreational dispensaries each.
Kim Kreimeyer, a senior planner with the City of Aurora, says government officials "approached it in a really conservative and measured way." The prime concerns have been "the odor and the number," Kreimeyer says, noting a that the city zero-tolerance smell policy for both retail and grow operations. Of the latter, "Denver seems extremely saturated."
As of early 2015, six recreational marijuana dispensaries had opened their doors in Aurora and they're already proving a catalyst for revitalization, says Kreimeyer. One of the recreational license-holders took over a former Arby's that "had sat vacant for about five years," she explains. "Another one is going to to turn an old transmission shop into a retail location. That's happening all over town."
Once all 24 stores are up and running, annual city revenues are forecast to hit nearly $2 million, but early per-store sales beat projections by 35 percent. "They're doing very well," says Kreimeyer.
Some challenges have arisen with the rollout, like shopping centers that decided against dispensaries after leases were signed. Kreimeyer says that Aurora decided to have a dedicated marijuana team as opposed to Denver's cross-departmental model. "They are doing business as normal," she says. "We actually have an integrated system. We only have certain building-plan reviewers looking at them. It's a specialized team looking at marijuana."
Kreimeyer says the legal home grows present the biggest problem to the city. "There's no oversight. It seems to have created a difficulty for our police department and our ability to manage that."
Dispensaries are handicapped by federal banking law, so the buildings must be landlord-owned or else the dispensary has to buy it outright. That makes real estate pretty hard to find, says Cullen. In response, he's started Harvest Consulting Group to help startups navigate the fledgling industry.
"The rollout of this is a lot like liquor," he notes. "After Prohibition, it was a states' rights issue. To my knowledge, no state has said, 'You're doing this right.’ Every state has to reinvent the wheel."
For example, medical marijuana is out in Washington, but remains in Colorado. Colorado's pot shops are vertically integrated and largely grow their own wares, but Washington keeps growing and selling separate.
"I could talk about a lot of things Colorado did right, and I could talk about a lot of things Colorado did wrong," says Cullen. "Local approval has been critical” -- by which communities can reject recreational marijuana sales if they so choose.
But banking and taxes remain trouble spots for the entire industry, regardless of geography. "We have banking, but it's expensive," says Cullen. It's 60 miles south of Denver in Pueblo and the large amounts of cash require an armed guard and an armored truck. "It costs me $1,000 to make a deposit."
Taxes are thorny due to Section 280 E of the IRS code. It says that no deductions may be taken for federally illegal activities, so Cullen doesn't deduct any business expenses on labor costs, real estate and marketing and advertising.
Cullen says legalization in Colorado is a harbinger of national change and Oklahoma and Nebraska's lawsuit is "the beginning of the end," especially with as many as 10 states looking at legal marijuana on the ballot in 2016. "I bet it goes a lot like gay marriage did," he predicts.
Dixie's Keber echoes that sentiment, noting that the marijuana industry in Denver has gone from a political "persona non grata” to a target sector for candidates. "We just had a candidate for city council visit when he was out shaking hands and kissing babies," he says. "That's a real shift in political ideology."
"We saw great success in 2014," Keber notes. "We can pour that back into the political community and create an environment that's even more conducive to success."
Back on the Green Mile
When the first medical marijuana dispensaries opened on South Broadway in 2008, this was a much different area. The street was pockmarked with potholes and the old trolley tracks, merely buried in blacktop after the trolley discontinued service in 1950, acted as a levee during rainstorms. The condition of the street carried over to the sidewalk, cracked or worse. Denver Public Works embarked on a $28 million street project that was completed in 2013.
But the project coincided with the birth of the Green Mile. One medical marijuana dispensary snowballed to about 20 by 2012, when Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. When recreational sale officially became legal on Jan. 1, 2014, many of them became recreational marijuana facilities.
Developer Jon Cook owns numerous storefronts on South Broadway, including several currently leased to dispensaries. "In '08, there were a lot of vacancies," he says, calling the five-year road project and recession "growing pains” for the tenants. "Now it's blue skies and smooth sailing."
Cook says rents on South Broadway have increased by 25 percent since the road project's completion in 2013, but he notes that they were artificially low during construction and that dispensaries pay a premium due to their banking difficulties.
Today there are about 20 recreational and medical dispensaries on this two-mile stretch south of Interstate 25, making it the area with the highest concentration of legal marijuana dispensaries on the planet. There were once dozens of antique dealers here. Now there's a fraction of that.
South Broadway "is vastly different," Cullen adds, estimating that 25 percent of the storefronts were vacant when Evergreen opened as a medical marijuana (MMJ) dispensary in 2009. There was disruptive construction ("We opened with a 12-foot pile of dirt in front of the store," he says), followed by a recession.
"They've cleaned up a lot of the buildings," says Cullen. "It's brought a lot of traffic down Broadway."
There are more pedestrians and no potholes. Sidewalks are wider. The storefronts are less likely to be vacant or dilapidated.
With the dispensaries, other businesses have hung shingles on South Broadway, including Derbyille, a roller-derby shop; two small breweries in Former Future Brewing Co. and Grandma's House; two coffee shops in Corvus Coffee and Strange Grounds; La Cour Art Bar & Bistro; and Cabal Enterprises, a gallery and artists incubator. Several restaurants are in the works.
"There's a pretty wide range of businesses that have opened down here," says Rusty Staff, owner of DecorAsian, a furniture and antique store that opened on South Broadway in 2009.
Staff says there's more foot traffic and he's made sales to numerous dispensary customers. "And I've made a lot of big sales to pot shop owners," he adds.
Some of the antique dealers have having trouble keeping up with rising rents -- several have closed since 2013 -- but it's hard to argue that legal recreational marijuana has been bad for the neighborhood as a whole.
And coming soon are thousands of apartments and a big slate of other development projects nearby. Cullen says the area epitomizes the concept of "live, work, play," noting, "People are going to move here."
But it needs a name. Its reputation is starting to snowball. It's not at all uncommon to see tourists taking selfies in front of one of the dispensaries on the so-called Green Mile. "I didn't choose the name," Cullen is quick to note. "That name came about organically."
Whether it's the Green Mile, Antique Row, The Row, SoBo, BISON or Gates remains to be seen. "I'm a little on the fence," Cullen admits. "If it's the name that's the issue, I'm not married to the name. I'm totally sensitive to what people in the neighborhood want. Haight-Ashbury is not cool because it's called Haight-Ashbury. What matters is a collective effort to market the area."
Or, as Cook puts it, "Why can't we all just get along?"
Efforts to establish the Green Mile on Broadway Association have been put on hold. Cullen plans to restart the push by spring 2015. He's registered the group as a 503(c)(6) and put a few thousand dollars into marketing efforts
But nothing could match the amount of press the clash with Antique Row attracted. "It ran as an international story," says Cullen. "I've been on The Today Show twice. It got more publicity for the Green Mile than I could have ever paid for."
At the second neighborhood meeting at Grandma's House, the budget disparity between the Green Mile and Antique Row presents a stumbling block.
"Where in the world are we going to get that kind of money?" one of the antique dealers protests.
Cullen proposes a tiered system -- maybe $2,000 a monthly dues for pot shops, $1,000 for bars and restaurants and $500 for antique shops and other stores. "We can make this a destination for everybody," he says. Staff, for one, says he'll give it a good look.
Someone else speaks up in the spirit of cooperation. "We just need to get this custard pie nailed to the wall."