Celebrity Sports Center (CSC or Celebrity's) was a family-oriented entertainment business and landmark in metropolitan Denver. Celebrity's was located in Glendale, Colorado

Glendale, Colorado

The city of Glendale is a Home Rule Municipality located in an exclave of Arapahoe County, Colorado, United States. The population was 4,547 at the 2000 census. The entire city is surrounded on all sides by the City and County of Denver. Therefore, as a municipal entity, it is also an enclave...

 at 888 South Colorado Boulevard

Colorado State Highway 2

State Highway 2 is a state highway of the U.S. state of Colorado. It runs for approximately north–south entirely within the urbanized environment of the Denver Metropolitan Area. It is one of the major north–south thoroughfares of east Denver, where it is known as Colorado Boulevard.-Route...

 near East Kentucky Avenue. It opened in 1960 and operated continuously for 34 years before closing in 1994. The original investors included Walt Disney, his brother Roy

Roy Disney

Roy Disney may refer to:* Roy O. Disney , Walt Disney's elder brother and the financier of his efforts* Roy E. Disney , his son, director emeritus of The Walt Disney Company...

, Jack Benny

Jack Benny

Jack Benny was an American comedian, vaudevillian, and actor for radio, television, and film...

, Bing Crosby

Bing Crosby

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....

, George Burns

George Burns

George Burns , born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, television and movies, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became...

, Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton was an English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director.-Early life and career:...

, Burl Ives

Burl Ives

Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives was an American actor, writer and folk music singer. As an actor, Ives's work included comedies, dramas, and voice work in theater, television, and motion pictures. Music critic John Rockwell said, "Ives's voice .....

, Art Linkletter

Art Linkletter

Arthur Gordon "Art" Linkletter was a Canadian-born American radio and television personality. He was the host of House Party, which ran on CBS radio and television for 25 years, and People Are Funny, on NBC radio-TV for 19 years...

, John Payne

John Payne (actor)

John Payne was an American film actor who is mainly remembered as a singer in 20th Century Fox musical films, and for his leading roles in Miracle on 34th Street and the NBC western television series The Restless Gun.-Background:Payne was born in Roanoke, Virginia...

, Spike Jones

Spike Jones

Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers cartoon characters, performed a drunken, hiccuping verse for 1942's "Clink! Clink! Another Drink"...

 and Jim and Marion Jordan

Fibber McGee and Molly

Fibber McGee and Molly was an American radio comedy series which maintained its popularity over decades. It premiered on NBC in 1935 and continued until its demise in 1959, long after radio had ceased to be the dominant form of entertainment in American popular culture.-Husband and wife in real...

 (Fibber McGee and Molly).

There are some sources that suggest Walt Disney Company used the business as a training facility for its employees prior to deployment to Disney World.

Walt Disney and the original investors built the Celebrity's complex at a cost of $6 million. The bowling lanes opened first in 1960 and the rest of the center opened in 1961.

In 1979, a group of private investors led by Bob Leavitt and Neil Griffin purchased Celebrity's for $1.9 million. The three signature water slides that were visible from outside of the building were added after Leavitt/Griffin purchase.

In the early 1990s, Celebrity's was losing money and apparently in need of significant maintenance. In 1994, the complex was sold to Acquisition Corporation of the Rockies for $10.8 million, a subsidiary of Trammell Crow Company

Trammell Crow Company

Trammell Crow Company is a Dallas-based real estate development, investment and operations company founded by the late Trammell Crow, and operated as an independent subsidiary of CB Richard Ellis. It was founded by Trammell Crow in 1948 and purchased in late 2006...

. The new owner demolished Celebrity's by March, 1995. Today the 7.1 acres (28,732.7 m²) site is a Home Depot store and retail space.

Features

Celebrity's was home to 80 bowling lanes, more than 300 video games spread across three arcades, a 50-meter pool with three water slides, a billiard room, a full-service restaurant, bumper-car rides and a shooting gallery.

Bowling

In the spring of 1991, the Celebrity Sports Center played host to the $125,000 Celebrity Denver Open for the Professional Bowlers Association Tour from May 21 thru May 25. The final round of the tournament was televised live on ESPN. Left-hander John Mazza would go into the TV Finals with a 299 pin lead over the 2nd place qualifier Parker Bohn III. Curtis Odom qualified 3rd, Bryan Goebel 4th, and Mike Shady would take the 5th and final seed. The opening match saw Mike Shady squeak out a narrow victory over 4th seed Bryan Goebel with a score of 184-173. He followed up that victory with a 212-199 win over Curtis Odom, but he would fall to Parker Bohn III in the 3rd match of the show 226-204. In the championship match, Parker Bohn III was simply unable to find a consistent line to the pocket to score. As a result, he was defeated easily by the number 1 seed John Mazza, who threw 10 out of 12 possible strikes in a lopsided 269-190 victory to win the first place prize of $18,000. It was the first and last time the PBA Tour would visit the Celebrity Sports Center.http://www.pba.com/results/archives_detailed.asp?ID=522

Legacy

CSC still evokes fond memories from many metropolitan Denver natives. The Denver Post called Celebrity Sports Center a "huge indoor funland," a landmark "uniquely Denver," and noted its demolition left a "void...that cannot be filled." Some tributes to CSC can still be found online. One such tribute even notes that CSC souvenirs and paraphernalia continue to appear on auction websites from time to time, and seem to sell for high prices.

Patrons often remember the iconic sign that stood outside Celebrity's. At least one of the 14-point stars from the sign has been preserved. Today it is used as a winter holiday decoration at the Lumber Baron Inn & Gardens in Denver, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

The City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...

.

Additionally, the old bowling lanes at Celebrity's were preserved. Those lanes were reused during the restoration of the nineteenth-century Oxford Hotel

Oxford Hotel (Denver, Colorado)

The Oxford Hotel in Denver, Colorado was built in 1891. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979....

in downtown Denver and now serve as the hotel's ballroom floor.

Early plans for the redevelopment of the site included a brass plaque to be "mounted somewhere on the new site to commemorate Celebrity's existence as the entertainment mecca that it was." The fate of this proposed plaque is unclear.