Audio By Carbonatix
The news this past weekend was shocking: The owners of the Rocky Mountain Diner, a fixture in downtown Denver for two decades, had been unable to come to a lease agreement with the space’s owner, attorney Frances Konciljia, and on Friday had gotten an eviction notice: The restaurant had to be out in ten days.
It was gone in two. At 4 p.m. Sunday, the Rocky Mountain Diner closed its doors for good — and the lamentations over the loss of the restaurant, and especially its fried chicken, started almost immediately. Wrote Dack:
Let’s hope that the greedy landlord, looking to cash in on a golden goose, finds out that she is now raising a turkey.
Konciljia reportedly wants to put her own restaurant in the space. And it’s quite a space: the first floor of the Ghost Building, designed by William Lang and built in 1891. In 1979, when the then-Public Service Co. wanted it destroyed before it would sign its own twenty-year lease, preservationists dismantled the historic building from its original site at 15th and Glenarm streets and moved it, stone by stone — all 1,495 of them, according to Konciljia’s website — and rebuilt on the corner of 18th and Stout streets six years later.
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The owners of the Diner plan to rebuild the Rocky Mountain Diner in a new location, too, and are currently looking for a place.
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