An Intriguing Building, and Part of Denver History

I spent most of yesterday running multiple errands in Denver with my friend JB, and on the way from errand #1 to errand #2 I spied this amazing mid-century building on Federal and Ohio. I made JB pull a u-turn and park the car so I could get a picture of it. Obviously it's a carniceria now, but I figured it probably started as something else entirely, and I was right. I posted a picture of it in the Oldskool Denver group on Facebook, and within minutes I was getting tons of responses. It turns out this distinctive Googie style building was part of a chain of convenience stores in the Denver area, originally called Auto Mart, with a business model much like 7-11's. Auto Mart soon changed its moniker to Big Top after a renaming contest (perhaps inspired by the circus tent-like roofline of its buildings), and ultimately there were 15 or 16 locations around Denver, about 8 to 10 of which still exist. Big Top was bought out in 1967 and rechristened UtoteM. It was still the same business model, though, and carried on in that vein for a few more years.

Many of the comments on my Facebook post reminisced about the heydey of Big Top/UtoteM, and it was nice reading all the little personal anecdotes. The Oldskool Denver group is great for that! There's a similar Facebook group for Colorado Springs longtime residents, called Old Pics of Colorado Springs, and threads like this happen in that group daily, too.

A couple of the comments also included links to info about Big Top/UtoteM, so if you want to know more, click HERE and HERE. Of note, the dates vary slightly based on who wrote the article, and also the number of locations. But the gist of it is that this chain started around 1958 or '59 and ended up with roughly 15 locations, was bought out and renamed around 1967, and sometime in the 1970s the chain was either bought out again, went under, or dispersed in some way. Depending on which article you're reading, about 8 or 10 locations still survive, most of which house businesses, although two of them are now apparently derelict.

At any rate, I have never seen one of these before despite all the time I have spent in Denver over the years, so this was a great find! I'm so glad that some of these unique buildings still live on and house small businesses, and also live on as happy memories for many old timer Denverites.