Jim Lorentz crossed paths with the American Motel in Wheat Ridge many times — whether as a cop hauling out a domestic violence suspect, as a diner downing comfort food in the restaurant or as a guest in the Elvis suite on his wedding night.
The retired 43-year Wheat Ridge police officer was no stranger to the legendary outpost, which has long had a giant American flag and an eye-catching red welcome awning just off Interstate 70 at Kipling Street.
“When I started (as a police officer), it was a nice place,” Lorentz said, referring to a period in the early 1980s when the American Motel operated as a Ramada Inn. “It had a ballroom that was always rented. It was very popular.”
That was a long time ago. More recently, the American Motel was known for its rock-bottom room rate and a reputation as a magnet for criminal activity. It also gave down-on-their-luck folks a place they could afford to stay for a while.
That storied past has given way to boards on the ground-floor windows and asbestos removal trucks stationed around the building. The motel closed in July and its date with the wrecking ball approaches, likely in mid-October, with plans to replace it with an apartment complex.
As the end approaches, Lorentz is among people who spoke to The Denver Post about the motel’s history.
In its better days, it had an Elvis Suite to commemorate the King’s overnight stop there during a 1976 visit to Colorado. On the ground floor was a ballroom and the Red Balloon Lounge — also known as the Red Balloon Saloon — where some of the millions of people who drove past the five-story building over the decades might have stopped in for a drink or two.
In a 1975 restaurant review in the now-defunct suburban Journal-Sentinel newspaper, the critic gushed about the crepes, crab omelettes, filet mignon and veal cordon bleu that could be had at the newly opened Ramada Inn, not to mention the Colorado trout, shrimp tempura and shrimp scampi dishes.
After a drink and music from Alex and the Band (a five-member band that “includes two cute chicks”) at the Red Balloon Lounge, the new venue was deemed “top-notch.”
“And to think, it’s all there in Wheat Ridge, Colo.,” the review concluded.
In the late 1980s, the Ramada Inn became the American Motel — and gradually an appreciably rougher establishment.
There have been thousands of police calls for service to the motel, ranging from drug deals to human trafficking to shootings and beatings to a 2011 cold case murder.
“It kind of became the opposite of what it was,” said Lorentz, 66.
The motel, with the fixed $32.95-and-up per-night price tag built into its giant lighted sign, became a home for people with few other choices for shelter.
“It was aged and it wasn’t that well taken care of,” said Cassie Ratliff, the chief impact officer with the nonprofit human services agency Family Tree who helped people living at the motel find new homes. “People were desperate, and they accepted that.”
Now, with demolition scheduled next month, the American Motel will forever leave its high-visibility perch at the heavily traveled west metro highway interchange. And after it crashes to the ground, all that will be left are the memories of what was and what could have been.
“It was such a fun place to dance,” said Bonnie Botham, a longtime Wheat Ridge resident who was a DJ for a Denver radio station back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, using the on-air name Jennifer Page. “On New Year’s Eve, you’d dance and get a room for the night. It was an elegant time.”
Crime down since regs enacted
Tony Sherman, owner of Terrapin Investments, bought the property in 2023 for $9 million. Don White, a co-owner of the American Motel for nearly 40 years until he sold it to Sherman, didn’t return a request for an interview left with his secretary. The hotel’s longtime manager, reached by The Post, also declined to comment.
Sherman, an Aspen resident who has spent years in the hotel business, said he initially considered revamping the American Motel into a new hotel property, but he got no takers.
Instead, he inked a deal to sell the property to Trinsic Residential Group. On the 5-acre site, Trinsic plans to build an apartment complex with outdoor courtyards, a rooftop lounge, an indoor fitness center and a dog park.
The transaction will close as soon as demolition is complete, Sherman said.
Sherman said he hasn’t seen a lot of problems in the short time he has owned the American Motel. Sure, he said, it was no Ritz-Carlton. But it wasn’t as bad as some have said.
“It was a place for folks to rest their weary heads as they traveled into the great American West,” he said.
According to online reviews, however, a restful night was not always a common experience at the American Motel. Reviews on Google reveal a proponderance of negative grades, with complaints about the smell, the cleanliness, the noise and — in one case — a dead rat in the room.
On a Reddit thread created after the motel closed in July, the reaction was brutal.
“They can’t do that. Where am I supposed to get my crack and hookers?” joked one commenter.
Another person welcomed the news.
“Wheat Ridge (police) will be finally able to enjoy their coffee ‘n donuts without another callout to the (American Motel) den of iniquity,” the comment read.
Police Chief Chris Murtha said nine hotels in the city — many of them clustered around the Kipling and I-70 interchange — for years accounted for 10% of all police calls in the city of 32,000. The American Motel was at the top of the heap.
According to data provided by the city, the American Motel had anywhere from 30% to 35% of all calls for service among hotels in the city during the high-crime years of 2020 to 2022. Calls at the motel peaked in 2020 at 2,497, out of 7,030 calls to all Wheat Ridge hotels that year.
When he joined the police department in 2020, Murtha said, his baptismal experience on the job was a January fatal shooting of an armed man by Lakewood police following a two-hour standoff at the motel.
“That was my introduction to the American Motel — not a great first impression,” he said.
Residents gave him an earful about all the criminal activity around the hotels in that area — also including the Apple Inn, a Motel 6 and a Holiday Inn Express — during his first months on the job. The city responded by passing a hotel licensing ordinance in 2021 that tightened the rules on overnight stays, especially long-term stays.
Hotel-related police calls have been cut in half, the city says, while crime in the area is down nearly 30% since the new regulations went into effect. Calls for service at the city’s hotels dropped from a peak of 7,030 five years ago to 1,395 last year.
Those regulations likely played a major part in convincing White, the long-time American Motel owner, to sell the property after nearly four decades in business. While he wouldn’t talk to The Post for this story, White wrote a letter to the Wheat Ridge City Council in October 2021 as the new rules were being debated. He expressed his fear that he wouldn’t be able to afford the expense of implementing the new requirements.
He also provided a fierce defense of a motel that he felt had been unfairly judged.
“It was a Ramada Inn back then and mostly empty,” he wrote, explaining that just 17 of 137 rooms were occupied at the time he took it over in 1986. He insisted the motel’s best days were long past.
“Since then, we have re-branded and focused on providing a comfortable place to stay at an affordable price. Some guests stay weeks. Others stay months or even years.”
By the time of the letter, he wrote, 90% of rooms were consistently reserved.
White wrote that he had sunk $600,000 into improvements in the two previous years and hired private security. But he was up against larger societal forces.
“In recent years, we’ve seen a marked increase in homelessness and loitering in the area,” White wrote. “We are seeing a lot of people who suffer from substance abuse and mental health issues gathering in the area and on our property. We diligently ask them to leave, but they inevitably return.”
‘Rebirth of Wheat Ridge’
After the city’s new hotel licensing rules went into effect, Wheat Ridge asked Family Tree to help move families who had been living at the American Motel. It took about a year and a half to move 18 people from the motel to new housing.
Family Tree’s Ratliff said her organization knocked on every door in the American Motel offering help.
“We worked with a lot of seniors who were living there,” she said. “They saw it as their only option.”
The people Family Tree helped, she said, were just trying to survive in a region with a stubbornly sky-high housing market, she said.
“The people who were living there were not committing the crimes,” Ratliff said. “They were the ones calling for help from law enforcement.”
Even though Murtha, the police chief, acknowledges that the American Motel is “iconic” and “a big visual representation of Wheat Ridge” for decades, he says it’s time to move on.
“I think it’s really a rebirth of Wheat Ridge — a rebranding,” he said of the upcoming redevelopment at the site. “It’s an opportunity for the city of Wheat Ridge.”
Some feel little joy at the prospect of yet more expensive apartments in an already-overpriced housing market, while others bemoan the imminent loss of a piece of the city’s gritty character. It’s a building that has stood for nearly as long as Wheat Ridge has been a city.
As for the iconic blue and red sign that reads “AMERICAN MOTEL $32.95 UP” — seen by millions of motorists and passersby — Sherman says he has no interest in hanging on to it as a keepsake.
“If you want it, you can have it,” he said.