Beat Generation-themed gelato shop moving into Neal Cassady childhood home
The shop's summer opening will celebrate Cassady's formative influence on 20th century counterculture.
admin
He only lived there for a year, but Beat Generation muse Neal Cassady left his mark on 2558 Champa St. in Denver.
The 400-square-foot building, sandwiched between two brick houses, was a two-chair barbershop in the early 1930s, with the Cassady family crammed into a lean-to on the back. There, young Cassady — future spark of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the Beat Generation’s 1950s and ’60s movement at large — pretended to sail the seas with his sister, or played Col. and Mrs. Lindbergh in the plucky Spirit of St. Louis, as Cassady wrote in his 1971 memoir, “The First Third.”
Now the building will join the scant commercial storefronts along that stretch of Champa (including the popular Curtis Park Deli) as a gelato shop called Cassadys. It comes courtesy of John Hayden and Keith Pryor, who own another shop, Thick’s Gelato and Chocolates, about a mile away at 3339 N. Downing St.
Metro-area natives Hayden and Pryor, who moved into the neighborhood in 1995, were drawn to the structure, which had sat boarded up for decades and had been listed as one of Denver’s “neglected and derelict buildings” since 1999.
“It was such a cute, strange little shop, just attached to the side of this house. We thought that if we could ever save that little building, we would love to,” Hayden said.
Despite him only living there a year, Cassady’s connections to the building are far from tenuous. He and his mother Maude moved across the street to a boarding house known as The Snowden in 1933, after his father (also named Neal) left the family.
“Neal described the tenants as jazz musicians and prostitutes, and a few pious women with children, like his mother,” said Hayden, also a Curtis Park and Five Points realtor who gives Beat history tours of the area.
“… They rocked the joint night and day, for the place had a noise mania,” Cassady wrote. “The air seemed always filled with assorted yelping catcalls, shouted curses, frightened screams and, topping all in my mind, those exciting feminine whoops of laughter. There was hardly a moment that something untoward wasn’t happening… ”
The Snowden is gone now, having been replaced by a condo development at 2563 Champa St. That makes the former barbershop across the road an even more vital connection to Cassady’s youth.
The chance to take it over arrived via Hayden’s client Sean Bennet, who bought the tiny space and the house next door. Hayden, and Pryor, a contractor, snatched up 2558 Champa St. for $150,000 about five years ago. The pandemic slowed their plans to revitalize it, but they’ve recently sped up after investing another $70,000 for a new roof, a shored-up eastern wall, a tiny patio (where the Cassady family’s lean-to sat), and mechanical upgrades to save the sinking floor due to a major water leak.
A handsome, aqua-tile wall with Art Deco shapes now adds depth to the back, while brass fixtures and a pair of skylights will spread natural light more evenly.
Cassadys won’t just offer a tiny retail counter of sweet treats. Hayden and Pryor have been in touch with Cassady’s middle child, Jami Cassady Rato, who’s given them her blessing to use the family name, as she told The Denver Post in an interview. Hayden and Pryor are already planning to sell Beat memorabilia alongside gelato, such as iconic Beat books and poetry, art and photos.
They also hope to hang portraits of Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs on the bare walls — painted by Cassady’s wife, Carolyn, who attended art classes at the University of Denver — and eventually shepherd the collection into a prominent local art museum.
Much of their Beat knowledge comes from Mark Bliesner, a Denver historian who for years organized the annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash, as well as conversations with the Cassady family. There’s a trove of lesser-known books that shed more light on the legends, Hayden said. Neal’s wife Carolyn wrote one called “Off the Road,” which offers a woman’s perspective on a largely male cultural movement — and which is often not flattering to Cassady or Kerouac.
Still, Cassadys gelato shop will be a celebration of Neal’s life, Hayden and Pryor said, however tightly laid out. Out back, a fence will soon hug the tiny porch where visitors will still be able to see the lines on the brick where the lean-to’s roof was formerly affixed. They were inspired to use the space more efficiently after a recent trip to Vietnam, Hayden said.
While most of the neighborhood dates back to the 1880s, the houses that surround the Cassadys space were built in the 1920s, in the familiar Denver Square style that at the time was a departure from the Victorian mansions in the area — many of which later turned into boarding houses.
Cassadys’ location suggests high visibility and foot traffic, with people streaming back and forth from Welton Street — along the Five Points neighborhood corridor — to a busy stretch of Larimer Street in the River North Art District.
“We have a separate fortune from downtown,” Hayden said when asked about the business troubles just a mile to the west. “We need a vibrant downtown, but our ecosystem is separate, and we’ve performed better despite downtown’s recent woes.”
“This space really reflects Denver in terms of our boom and bust economies,” Pryor said. “You repurpose and use spaces based on which cycle you’re in. That’s very Denver, and this is ground zero for how that occurred.”
Even demo’ing the space, which Pryor did as a general contractor, reveals a lot about Denvr’s evolution, dredging up piles of decades-old newspapers and generations of random tchotchkes and signs of domestic life.
“In other cities, little bitty spaces like this are usually in commercial districts,” Hayden said. “But this is a very mixed spot, to this day, with Curtis Park Deli, low-income apartments, intact grand mansions, million-dollar townhomes, artists studios and single-family dwellings all sharing the same space.”
Cassadys owners hope their shop will be humming along by 2026, which coincides with what would have been Cassady’s 100th birthday.
“Neal was so influential, and the way he spoke and wrote was influenced by growing up in Five Points and being around a diversity of people and cultures,” Hayden said. “He had friends who were Mexican and Asian and African-American all living together in that community, and that wouldn’t have existed if he had grown up anywhere else. That makes this a passion for us, not just a gelato shop.”
