If you’re old enough, checking out the Home Depot along South Colorado Boulevard can flood you with memories that have nothing to do with wood and forced tools. Now the site of the Big Hardware Store, for decades it was the location of Walt Disney’s first charm that would draw everyone outside of Disneyland: Celebrity Lanes.
Originally an 80-lane bowling alley, Celebrity Lanes grew to surround an Olympic-sized swimming pool, water slides, restaurants, arcades, slot tracks, and bumper cars, all underneath the Celebrity Sports Center (and, later, the Celebrity Fun Center). . flag.
“It’s really fun for me to be 47 and still dream about it,” says Christine Saager-Cripps, who went to Celebrity’s nursery as a baby while her mother bowled.
The establishment opened in 1960 in Glendale, a small village of less than 500 inhabitants at the time. The call comes from the celebrities who invested: Walt and Roy Disney, comedians George Burns and Jack Benny, singer Bing Crosby and comedian Spike Jones. Several donors traveled to Denver for the opening in December 1959 and then went to the Brown Palace Hotel for a press conference. (A photo taken that day and published in Rocky Mountain News shows Walt Disney leaning against a piano while Benny plays the keys and Jones pretends to play the violin, a poker, and a bowling alley. )
Disneyland had opened five years earlier and Walt was looking for other family opportunities. “What they said at the time was that they had looked at several places (I don’t know what other cities they had looked at) that they thought were growing or had growth prospects and, after all, they chose Denver,” says David Forsyth, a local historian and writer for Denver who researched Celebrity for a book project.
Less than a year after the release of Celebrity, the Disney brothers had bought out the stake of their partners. Five years later, Walt died. Walt Disney World is still a long way off, but it left a legacy that included 81 films, the California theme park, and, of course, Celebrity, which welcomed its last visitors in June 1994 and was demolished the following March. Three decades later, he asked locals to share their favorite memories of the place.
The initial version of Celebrity was a bowling alley with an L-shaped design. One side had 44 lanes; the other, 36. Prominent sponsors invested more than $1 million to equip the tracks, trucking 58 miles of wood and 350 gallons of a special lacquer to coat the wood, according to media reports at the time. The newly formed Professional Bowling Association, founded in 1958, then held tournaments there. For its second anniversary, a group of Disney actors, including Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, attended the unveiling of the Walt Disney Trophy, which annually honors the most productive bowler.
In the beginning, Celebrity also boasted an ice cream parlor, a coffee shop, an English pub, 8 pool tables, a barbershop, an attractive lounge, and, as the Rocky Mountain News described it, “a large, sunny nursery with shiny new toys. “” “. Matrix games, puzzles and books.
“I think my mom was in 4 leagues on Celebrity when I was little, so she was there all the time,” says John Chapman, who grew up in Denver. “So, me too. I spent a lot of time in this daycare. One of my proudest days as a child was, despite everything, being a little emancipated. Once you turn seven, you can wander around Celebrity on your own.
“It was like a big clubhouse for kids like us,” said Andrew Hudson, who lived about a mile away. “I even smell the smell of wax from the bowling alleys and the greasy chips from the small stall to eat there. It was simply this magical position to pass the time.
It was an equally formative position for many famous painters, including Terry Shakespeare, who met his wife when she was transferred from a lifeguard at the pool to a cashier at the bowling alley, where he painted. “It was big enough that you couldn’t get to it. I know other painters from other departments,” says Shakespeare, who eventually became an animator, whose assignments include paintings for Disney parks.
The Olympic-sized swimming pool opened in 1961 with nine lanes, five diving forums and 500,000 gallons of water. It’s the state’s largest indoor pool, giant enough for Celebrity to host regattas there, where giant enthusiasts push the force for small boats. One year, Celebrity even hosted an underwater poker tournament involving local divers.
“They gave me my Swimming Merit Badge and my Lifesaving Merit Badge for the Boy Scouts,” says Ron Naeve, who grew up near Celebrity. “You had to go through a tourniquet to this pool of disinfectant to get your feet to be in the pool. “
Andy Coffman, who also grew up in southeast Denver, says the pool is his favorite celebrity attraction: “I can still smell the place. “»
“There’s one sure smell that everyone tends to remember: all the chlorine,” says Noah Lopata, administrator of Facebook’s 1,000-member organization “Strange Celebrity Sports Center. “”They liked to chlorinate everything very strongly. “
Jenn Goldberg, who can walk to Celebrity from her home, took swimming lessons there with her younger sister.
“The most productive thing about swim lessons at Celebrity is that when you’re done swimming, you get unlimited rides on the slide,” he says. “Those slides were amazing. “
Called Dolphin, Barracuda and Shark, the three slides were added after Disney sold Celebrity in 1979 to a Denver investor organization. The slides, visible from the street, took users from the outside of the building to the indoor pool, and their tops were covered in transparent plexiglass.
“It didn’t matter if there was a foot of snow outside — you could still come in and swim and play and have a smart time,” says Forsyth, of Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park and Sloan’s Lake Amusement Park. : The lost history of Manhattan Beach in Denver. There weren’t many indoor pools in Denver at the time. They were part of a club where you had to be a member to join [the few that existed]. On Celebrity, you didn’t have to do that. It was simply this. Indoor position open all year round for fun.
Andrew Hudson, who as a teenager worked as a busboy at the Village Inn attached to Celebrity, remembers the arcades. “Man, my brother, me and our friends in the community would do anything to spend a quarter of a day going to the Celebrity Sports Center,” he says. “We were going through the trash looking for aluminum cans to go back. We’d knock on doors and say we were on a scavenger hunt for record albums, and then we’d go to the record store and sell our albums. Rake the leaves and do small jobs. But all that to feed our pinball addiction at the Celebrity Sports Center.
Celebrity’s basement contained bumper cars, pinball machines, the newest video games, and a row of Skee-Ball hallways, in which praise tickets were handed out.
“I played Skee-Ball—hours of Skee-Ball,” says Saager-Cripps. She wound up with thousands of unredeemed tickets. “I always thought I should take them over and cash them in for a big teddy bear or something like that. But you know, I was 16 years old. I had better things to do.”
Jerry Oleson’s big draw was the Celebrity slot track, added in the mid-1960s. More than 13,000 square feet of slot area dedicated to slot cars and riders can simply rent time on the tracks. Now treasurer of the Rocky Mountain Slot Car Club, Oleson worked at Celebrity in the early 1970s, first as a lifeguard and then in the slot car business.
By the mid-1990s, time and wear and tear had taken a toll on Celebrity, and rather than invest further in the establishment, its owners closed the doors.
Steve Almquist, who lived within walking distance of Celebrity as a child, admits to sneaking into the construction before demolition began. He says he snooped around the game area where he and his friends played Skee-Ball, racking up additional problems with bank shots. And there, on the wall, he said, he discovered a sign that now hangs in his Ohio home: NO BANK INTERRUPTION.
Now three decades gone, Celebrity lives only in hearts and minds—and, for some, in the aisles of that Home Depot. “Every single time I go there, I can see it,” Coffman says. “I can see the slides. I can see the building. I can see it all. It’s there for me.”
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