17 MAY 15-21, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | The local CBS affi liate interviewed Hed- berg when the Organ Grinder opened in Denver. Hedberg was then the company’s engineer, and he told the reporter that there were 20-to-25 restaurants across the U.S. that featured pipe organs, mostly pizza joints. Denver’s organ was upcycled from Portland’s Paramount Theatre, which Nicholson says is a twin to Denver’s Paramount; it cost $350,000 to move and seven months to restore the organ. The nascent chain spared no expense at the time. Nicholson says the Denver spot was “universally regarded as having top-notch talent, and they even fl ew in musicians. They kept an apartment in Denver for visiting staff and performers.” Hedberg and his wife wound up buying the company in 1984. Nicholson has already interviewed some Denver residents who remember the Organ Grinder and is looking for people with more memories, and possibly photographs or home movies (the place closed long before mobile phones made video easy). While visit- ing on a solo barnstorming tour this month, camera in hand, he fi lmed Denver artist Andrew Novick, who grew up in Lakewood, has eaten at Casa Bonita over 300 times. While Novick remembers the Organ Grinder, he really raves about Vinh Xuong, the Vietnamese bakery and banh mi sandwich shop in Alameda Square where the Organ Grinder was once a landmark. “We fi lmed with that bak- ery behind him, because he knows the owner,” Nicholson says. The shopping center is also home to the area’s only Costco Business Center, the Great Wall Asian supermarket, some shops, and Asian and Latino restaurants, including the bakery with the best banh mi in town. Denver’s Organ Grinder building is long gone. The Portland Organ Grinder still stands, though modifi ed, and now houses a Chinese restaurant. “There seems to be a lot of cross-pollina- tion between Portland and Denver,” Nichol- son says. “One of my interview subjects who’s in the movie was at the Portland location on the night it closed, and he’s the co-founder of Voodoo Doughnuts.” Although there wasn’t a Casa Bonita in Portland (that chain was founded in Okla- homa), Nicholson says many people who remember the Organ Grinder in Denver recall it with the same fondness as they have for the original Casa Bonita, which opened in 1974 at 6715 West Colfax Avenue. (At the time, I was a junior at Alameda High School a few minutes down Wadsworth Boulevard from the gaudy Mexican restaurant, and my friends and I ate lunch there at least three times a week.) Like Casa Bonita, the Organ Grinder was always more about entertainment than the food; unlike the Organ Grinder, it’s still here — although now under the ownership of South Park’s creators. “I want to stress that this movie is about what a wonderful and wild and weird ex- perience it was to go to the Organ Grinder,” Nicholson says. “The drama is part of it, yeah, but this wild experience is really the focus of the movie.” He hopes to have the documentary done by next year and then show it at fi lm festivals; while the Sundance Film Festival once it moves to Boulder in 2027 might be too high a target to hit, he’s got his eye on the Denver Film Festival. “My hope is to tell the whole Organ Grinder story including the past, the pres- ent and future, because I’m doing this for the next generation, I want to leave the audience with some hope for what’s going on now. Can a place like this ever happen again? That’s a question we’re asking,” he says. “What attracts young people? I’ve in- terviewed a fi fteen-year-old organist and a seventeen-year-old who is repairing a pipe organ in Illinois in a restaurant. So I want to leave the audience with hope, and the sense that you can do something weird in your community as well.” And that might lead to a new era of organ nerds entertaining people in restaurants. Email the author at [email protected]. The Denver Organ Grinder in its heyday had long lines outside, and pipe organ performances inside. BOB NICHOLSON
