12 APRIL 17-23, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | supposed to be the alternative for a bar. People are turning away from drinking in this day and age, and we have food trucks, video games and music.” Pure Elevations didn’t have quite as dra- matic a road to opening as Tetra, but founder and co-owner Rebecca Marroquin still hit her fair share of bumps in the road. And she sees more ahead. Marroquin and her business partner started pursuing a hospitality license after leasing a small property at 185 South Santa Fe Drive two years ago. Unlike Tetra, Pure also has a license for cannabis sales, so guests can’t bring their own products inside, and Marroquin has applied for a food license so she can serve fresh and non-packaged food. “With the taxes, licensing fees, owner fees, insurance fees, the costs of products — at the price point of cannabis and the way the industry going right now, it’s hard to sell cannabis and make money off it,” she says. The longtime massage therapist worried she would have to close Pure after a slow fi rst couple of months, but she says traffi c has picked up since the place was featured in a popular social media video. The fi nancial outlook has improved, but Marroquin still sees spa offerings such as hair, massage, skin and other self-care services as Pure’s main path to profi ts. “Our niche is the whole cannabis thing. That’s what helps us stand out as a spa and makes us different. That enables us to make revenue off cannabis products, too, but if it were only for the lounge portion, I don’t think we’d be successful. It’s very, very hard. We make all of our money off services, and that’s kind of how we want it. We keep our cannabis prices as low as possible — and it’s still not that low. I mean, $20 for a joint is a lot if you’re from Colorado...most people would rather spend that money on an experience.” Creating that experience isn’t all that easy, although she’s making progress. Pure is located next to train tracks, and the cannabis lounge portion is located on the outdoor patio. According to Marroquin, the building was the best place she could fi nd given her budget and Denver’s cannabis hospitality location restrictions, which prohibit licensed venues from being within 1,000 feet of any daycare center, drug treatment center or city-owned park, pool or recreation center, as well as any other hospitality licensees. Since opening seven months ago, Mar- roquin has added more plants outside, renovated Pure’s pampering areas with soundproofing insulation, and bought noise-canceling headphones for people who want them while hanging outside. The new potrepreneur believes those efforts, along with pursuing a presence on social media and hosting events such as “high tea” and a Galentine’s Day gathering, have created word-of-mouth buzz and momentum. “People are already coming to Denver just to visit us,” Marroquin says. “It’s such a hard market and I’m glad we’re able to break through. I just hope more people do, too, so we have more of a tourism market.” Cannabis tourism has been on a slow and steady decline in Colorado as more states legalize. Around 700 people visited the Cof- fee Joint on 4/20 in 2018, the fi rst year it was open, Tsalyuk recalls. This year, she says she’s “ready for the excitement, but it’s not anything like what we saw before.” Benjamin agrees. “We’re not seeing as many tourists coming in for Colorado’s aura of cannabis anymore with New York, California, Las Vegas and more big cities on board,” he says. “I’ve defi nitely seen a decline in cannabis- related tourism. And with the industry as a whole hurting right now, a lot of brands and businesses are moving out of Colorado or shutting down completely because of how bad things are.” Colorado dispensary sales hit a seven-year low in 2024 while wholesale prices hit some of their cheapest prices ever, according to the state Department of Revenue. Dur- ing Colorado’s cannabis reces- sion, now going on four years, hundreds of dispensaries, growing operations, extraction labs and other businesses have closed. Still, there is a thirst for brands to reach new or former customers outside of the dispensary, Benjamin contends. “Everyone is trying to survive and rebrand themselves and trying to fi nd business mod- els that work. Not get rich, but stabilize their business in the current industry, because it’s not the cash grab it once was,” he says. Patterson Inn owner Chris Chiari was the fi rst person to apply for a cannabis use permit after Denver opted into the new program in 2021, and is now almost four years into his effort to open a cannabis-friendly space. The longtime cannabis legalization advocate bought the Patterson Inn, an old Victorian mansion located at 420 East Eleventh Av- enue, in 2018 with the intention of someday allowing guests to roast a bone or two. After rezoning his property so that he could apply for a bring-your-own-cannabis hospitality license, Chiari spent over two years renovating a carriage house on the property into a small cannabis lounge for his hotel. He was looking for a new indoor HVAC system that would meet Denver’s indoor ventilation requirements when a pipe burst inside the Patterson’s bar, the 12 Spirits Tavern, requiring new plumbing and fl ooring in that part of the hotel. A registered National Landmark dating back to the 1800s that appears on Cap Hill ghost tours, the Patterson isn’t exactly a new build with modern foundations. With a major renovation on the way, Chiari used the burst pipe as an opportunity to redo the layout of his amenities. He reopened the 12 Spirits, named after the ghosts said to still haunt the property, in the carriage house, and moved his cannabis plans to the basement. Chiari hopes to open the cannabis lounge this summer, but won’t make any announce- ment “until I have the permit in my hand,” he says. Even then, he’s tempering expec- tations. “I’m deep into this. I’ve been consuming a long time, been in this space a long time. I’ve smoked in a lot of places I should or shouldn’t have...but I don’t know how many people who consume like me really need a cannabis lounge beyond a special or novelty event,” he admits. “As a commercial destina- tion, I still don’t know if it’s going to work, but by pairing it with another business as an ancillary attraction, cannabis could be a unique amenity.” The basement space in which Chiari plans to host cannabis users, where for- mer mansion owner and United States Senator Thomas Patterson smoked cigars with guests, can comfortably accommo- date around 25 people, according to Chiari. The nine-suite hotel also offers an upscale, munchies-inspired menu that includes milk- shakes, Rice Krispies-inspired bars made with Cheetos and Goldfi sh, and “pigeon wings” made of chickpeas. Chiari envisions hotel guests being able to walk freely between the cannabis lounge and his tavern, and he plans on offering entry and memberships to locals. He hopes that allowing cannabis consumption will bring more people to weekend brunches and more corporate gatherings to the hotel. “My confi dence in this is I only need to attract one more room-night per day to generate positive cash fl ow, and that’s before I serve a milkshake, slop tarts or pigeon wings,” he says. “It’s going to be intimate, but the hotel is an intimate space. I’m not looking to make a cannabis destination for every consumer but, fi rst and foremost, I’m trying to make a destination for the cannabis traveler.” A cannabis traveler and a traveler who uses cannabis are two different things, how- ever. Because of the Slow Burn continued from page 10 The Patterson Inn, a boutique hotel in Capitol Hill, plans to add a cannabis lounge. A man takes a dab of rosin at one of Stephen Woolf’s food and cannabis painting events. THOMAS MITCHELL JACQUELINE COLLINS continued on page 14
