An Urban Explorer Gone

The company kept growing — and diversifying. Under Charles Gates Jr., the company invested in Learjet, and also got into the development business in Colorado Springs. At the Denver facility, Gates created a health center complete with doctors and dentists. In 1971, the company opened a $21 million tire plant in Littleton, which could crank out 3,000 tires daily. But that facility was closed just three years later, when Gates discontinued tire production altogether. By then it had expanded into myriad products such as plastic bottles, cassettes and battery casings.

In 1996, what was by then known as the Gates Corporation was subsumed by Tomkins PLC, a British conglomerate, ending 85 years of family ownership. The company chose to maintain an administrative headquarters in Denver, but moved it to a new office building at the edge of the Platte Valley, which is reserved for upper-echelon management. The South Broadway facility was shuttered.

Topp has only fond memories of the company from which he receives a pension check every month, though it now comes stamped with the name of the British firm that purchased Gates. And he still recalls the Christmas party that Gates held every year at the Denver Coliseum, where all the children of employees would get presents. His daughter is a grown woman now, with a grown daughter of her own.

A few years ago, he was even able to go inside the old plant, when that granddaughter worked on the horror movie filmed in the basement. "It was just the basement floor," he remembers. "Not one machine was left from the tire division. Nothing. Thirty years."

It was a pit. A big, fucking pit. The floor just dropped away into a ten-foot wide abyss, and then started again level and sturdy on the other side. They heard yelling, and screamed their friend's name.

Mike pulled out his phone and called for help. He was the dweeby red-headed kid no one would talk to in middle school — but Johnny had marched right up to him and announced, "Hi. I'm John Polzin." The only boy in a family of three sisters, from then on Johnny regarded Mike as his brother.

While Mike made his frantic calls, Adam decided to climb down into the shaft. They didn't have a flashlight; they hadn't thought they'd need one. Adam made it down one level, then another. The shaft went farther. Five feet below basement grade, thirty feet down, he finally reached the bottom and stepped into water that came up to his shins. He felt around and found Johnny. His friend was still breathing. Adam remembers that the water smelled grimy, like corrosion and stale air.

Adam is thin and bookish and looks younger than his 24 years. One of his first memories of Johnny is the time that Johnny helped him make soup. They didn't live together then; Adam had just joined a mutual friend over at Johnny's house for dinner and offered to help. Johnny seemed to know what he was doing — he'd taken cooking classes — so Adam asked for instructions. How big should he cut the carrots? What about the potatoes? Spices?

"I don't know, man," Johnny had answered. "Do it however you want."

But he didn't say it like he didn't care how Adam made the soup. He said it like it was more important that Adam do the soup his own way, whatever way that was. Adam had never thought of it like that.

"I felt that same kind of push from him," Adam says now. "I saw him encouraging people and myself and everybody else to do what they wanted to do and not worry about what people told them. Just follow whatever you think is right."

Johnny was like that about everything. Last year, after seeing some tap dancers at Boulder's Dinner Theatre, he'd asked his sisters to get him lessons for Christmas. But when he showed up at the Arvada Center in his brand-new tap shoes, he was the only student who wasn't a girl under the age of ten. His sisters suspect there may have been a class recital, but he refused to clue them in on the date and time.