Looking Back on Glendale’s Celebrity Sports Center

If you’re old enough, a glimpse of the Home Depot along South Colorado Boulevard may flood you with memories that have nothing to do with lumber and power tools. Now the site of the big-box hardware store, the locale for decades was the home of Walt Disney’s first crowd-pleasing attraction outside of Disneyland: Celebrity Lanes.

Initially an 80-lane bowling alley, Celebrity Lanes grew to encompass an Olympic-size pool, water slides, restaurants, arcades, slot-car tracks, and bumper cars—all beneath the Celebrity Sports Center (and, later, Celebrity Fun Center) banner.

“It’s very funny to me that I’m 47 years old and I still have dreams about it,” says Christine Saager-Cripps, who was dropped off at Celebrity’s nursery as an infant while her mother bowled.

The attraction opened in 1960 in Glendale, a tiny hamlet of fewer than 500 people at the time. The name stemmed from the celebrities who invested: Walt and Roy Disney, comedians George Burns and Jack Benny, crooner Bing Crosby, and comic bandleader Spike Jones. Several backers flew into Denver for the December 1959 groundbreaking then made their ways to the Brown Palace Hotel for a press conference. (A photo taken that day and published in the Rocky Mountain News shows Walt Disney leaning against a piano while Benny plinks at the keys and Jones pretends to play the violin using a fireplace poker and a bowling pin.)

Disneyland had opened five years earlier, and Walt was looking for other family-friendly opportunities. “What they said at the time was that they had looked at several places—I don’t know what other cities they’d looked at—that they thought were fast-growing or had potential for growth, and they just eventually settled on Denver,” says David Forsyth, a Denver native, historian, and author who’s researched Celebrity for a book project.

Within a year of Celebrity’s opening, the Disney brothers had bought out their partners. Five years later, Walt died. Walt Disney World was still years away, but he 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 torn down the following March. Three decades later, we asked locals to recount their favorite memories of the place.

Bowling

Celebrity’s initial iteration was as a bowling alley with an L-shaped design. One side featured 44 lanes; the other, 36. The famous backers invested more than $1 million to equip the lanes, trucking in 58 miles of lumber and 350 gallons of a special lacquer to coat the wood, according to news accounts at the time. The fledgling Professional Bowling Association, which had formed in 1958, later held tournaments there. For its second anniversary, a gathering of Disney actors, including Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, visited for the unveiling of the Walt Disney trophy that was given annually to the top bowler.

Early on, Celebrity also featured an ice cream parlor, a coffeeshop, an English pub, eight pool tables, a barber shop, a beauty salon, and, as the Rocky Mountain News described it, “a large and sunlit nursery with gleaming new toys, games, puzzles, and books.”

“My mom, I think she was in four leagues at Celebrity when I was little, so she was there all the time,” says John Chapman, who grew up in Denver. “Consequently, so was I. I spent a lot of time in that daycare. One of the proudest days for me as a little kid was finally being sort of emancipated. Once you turned seven, you could roam around Celebrity by yourself.”

“It was just like a big clubhouse for kids like us,” says Andrew Hudson, who lived about a mile away. “I can even remember the smells of the wax from the bowling alleys and the greasy fries coming from the little diner that was in there. It was just this magical place to hang out.”

It was an equally formative place for many of Celebrity’s employees, including Terry Shakespeare, who met his wife when she was transferred from lifeguarding at the pool to being a cashier in the bowling area, where he worked. “It was big enough where you really couldn’t get to know other employees in other departments,” says Shakespeare, who eventually became an animator whose gigs have included work for the Disney parks.

Swimming

The Olympic-size pool opened in 1961 with nine lanes, five diving boards, and 500,000 gallons of water. The largest indoor pool in the state, it was big enough for Celebrity to hold regattas, where large fans provided wind power for the small boats. Celebrity even hosted an underwater poker tournament featuring local scuba divers one year.

“I got my swimming merit badge and my life-saving merit badge there for Boy Scouts,” says Ron Naeve, who grew up near Celebrity. “You had to step through a turnstile into this pool of disinfectant so your feet would get disinfected when you went from the locker room to the pool area.”

Andy Coffman, who also grew up in southeast Denver, says the pool was his favorite Celebrity attraction: “I can still smell the place.”

“There’s a certain smell about it that everybody tends to remember: all the chlorine,” says Noah Lopata, administrator of the 1,000-member “I miss Celebrity Sports Center” Facebook group. “They liked to really heavily chlorinate everything.”

Jenn Goldberg, who could walk to Celebrity from her home, took swimming lessons there along with her younger sister.

“The best thing about going to swim lessons at Celebrity was that when you were done with your swimming, you got unlimited rides on the slide,” she says. “Those slides were so awesome.”

Named the Dolphin, the Barracuda, and the Shark, the three chutes were added after Disney sold Celebrity in 1979 to a group of Denver investors. The slides, visible from the street, carried riders from outside the building into the indoor pool, and their tops were encased in clear plexiglass.

“It didn’t matter if there was a foot of snow outside—you could still go inside and swim, play games, and have a good time,” says Forsyth, the author of Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park and The Amusement Park at Sloan’s Lake: The Lost History of Denver’s Manhattan Beach. “There weren’t a lot of indoor pools in Denver at the time. They were part of a club or you had to be a member to go [to the few that existed]. At Celebrity, you didn’t have to do that. It was just this year-round indoor place to go have fun.”

Fun Center

Andrew Hudson, who as a teenager worked as a busboy at the Village Inn attached to Celebrity, recalls the arcade rooms. “Man, my brother and I and our friends in the neighborhood, we would do just about anything to try and get a day’s worth of quarters to go to Celebrity Sports Center,” he says. “We were dumpster diving for aluminum cans to turn in. We would go knocking on doors, saying we were on a scavenger hunt looking for record albums, and then we’d go down to the record store and sell our albums. Raking leaves and doing odd jobs. But it was all to feed our pinball addiction down at Celebrity Sports Center.”

The basement of Celebrity contained bumper cars, pinball machines, the latest video games, and a row of Skee-Ball lanes, which would dispense prize tickets.

“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.”

The big draw for Jerry Oleson was the slot-car raceway Celebrity added in the mid-1960s. More than 13,000 square feet of space was devoted to slot cars, and racers could rent time on the tracks. Now the 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 area.

By the mid-1990s, time and wear and tear had caught up with Celebrity, and rather than invest more into the facility, its owners decided to close the doors.

Steve Almquist, who lived within walking distance of Celebrity as a child, admits to sneaking into the building before demolition began. He says he nosed through the arcade space where he and his pals would play Skee-Ball, racking up extra points with bank shots. And there on the wall, he says, he found a sign that now hangs in his Ohio home: NO BANK SHOTS.

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.”