By Pete Stidman, Wax Trax News | When the first car hit our family business at 13th and Washington, I was 9 years old. I was still playing records on my Fisher Price turntable – Disney’s “Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House” was my jam.
The last near miss was this last Saturday, taking out one of the crash bollards in front of the store, the ones we had to occupy the mayor’s office to get, the ones that the city removed the month before because they wanted a “pedestrian priority area.” Somehow, inviting cars onto the sidewalk didn’t seem like something pedestrians (aka all lovers of Wax Trax) would want.
Our store hasn’t been hit once, it’s been hit three times, and in the six years I’ve been back home in Denver, two bollards and one street light have been knocked over. That means without the crash protection we now have the store would have been hit three more times!!!
Our next move is to don mohawks and animal skins and blowtorch a couple of motorcycles and rocket launchers together like George freakin’ Miller.
Generally, when cars keep slamming into legacy businesses, that’s the cue for the mayor to walk in like a hero and figure out how to protect them, maybe by slowing traffic down. But instead, the only option that has been given to us, three years after providing the city an easy long-term solution, is to keep harassing the mayor’s office to get the bollards fixed. We’re getting good at that, and they’re getting good at responding. But bollards stop cars, they don’t stop people from speeding — the true problem.
Read the rest of the crash saga on 13th here.
https://wastedenergy.co/2026/05/06/yet-another-crash-threatens-wax-trax/?mc_cid=0637f86bef&mc_eid=84acb4f0d3
