Public service announcement: In 2009, Gateaux (1160 Speer) celebrates its 10th anniversary by donating 10 percent of cookie sales to a different charity each month. In June, they’re giving money to Work Options for Women. Go buy some cookies and help women enter gainful employment in the culinary field. (Gateaux’s iced sugar cookies, two of which are pictured here, are the absolute best I’ve ever had. Don’t miss them!)

***

As I wandered down 15th to Leela’s on Wednesday, my path was o’ershadowed by several massive buildings.

The Hyatt building is adorned with this quote from John Ruskin:

Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy which in the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side…

And then it just stopped at another wall.

I stopped too, to take this picture of two workers screwing, or unscrewing, panels into this tower. One of them shouted, “$10 a picture!”

At Champa and 15th, I noticed the texture of these two buildings next to each other. The one on the right is the Gas and Electric Building, which lights up beautifully at night.

And then I saw the sign, as the song goes. Or rather, I should say, the signs.

At 15th and Arapahoe, across from 4 restaurants (Le Château, formerly La Fondue; Hickory Prime Steak House; Lone Ranger Steakhouse; and My Express Grill and Café), rose this building. Just looking at the 12 cement balconies below the streetlight (still unfinished, I hope, surrounded by only a single railing, and difficult to make out in this picture) gave me the willies. Why is it that looking up can make me as afraid of heights as looking down?