Colfax Avenue is often described as one of America’s wickedest streets. Jack Kerouac wrote of its tawdry watering holes in “On The Road.” In the movie “Every Which Way But Loose,” Clint Eastwood’s character and his pet orangutan, Clyde, came here looking for action.

The broad, bustling thoroughfare is Denver’s most famous and notorious drag — a refuge for poets, addicts, hipsters and hustlers that has been the Rocky Mountains’ answer to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York. But while those neighborhoods have become gentrified, Colfax Avenue has largely retained its hardscrabble soul.

- New York Times: A Notorious Main Drag, in Line for Big Changes