LOOK: Demolition of Former Cheyenne Pizza Hut Begins

Monday (June 14, 2021) saw the beginning of the demolition of the former Pizza Hut on Lincolnway in Cheyenne. The long-vacant building will be demolished, along with the neighboring former Poor Richards building, to make way for a new restaurant and coffee shop.

After closing and moving to a new location in the early 2010s, the building was briefly the home of a garden and nursery store. The restaurant next door, Poor Richards, closed in 2020. That now-vacant building will also be demolished.

According to the City of Cheyenne, the two lots on the block of Lincolnway between Carbon and Converse Avenues in Cheyenne will become home to a new Culver's restaurant location and a coffee shop named Human Bean.

The local Culver's franchise has one established location in Cheyenne, on Del Range near the Frontier Mall. This will be the first Human Bean location in Cheyenne, there are locations in Laramie and northern Colorado.

CLASSIC CHEYENNE: The Cole Shopping Center

In December of 2020, Blue Federal Credit Union completed its new headquarters at the corner of Converse and Pershing in Cheyenne. Well, it’s not so much a ‘corner’ as it is the smooth edge of a roundabout, but anyway. Before Blue FCU built its new campus, the site was at one time a premier shopping destination for Cheyenne. From the 1950s through 2016 it was Cheyenne's Cole Shopping Center.

Local businessman Frank Cole bought the land that would become a Cheyenne gathering place in the 1950s when the corner of Converse and Pershing was the edge of town. Starting in 1952, three different Safeway grocery stores called the Cole home over its half-century of existence. A plethora of other stores served the neighborhood too. From the movie theater to Blockbuster; there was the Cole Department Store, the fabric store, the East Branch of the Carnegie Library, and so much more.

As Cheyenne grew and changed, the Shopping Center fell into decline. Stores closed and new ones didn't take their places. The anchor of the area, Safeway, closed for good in 2016 with much of the rest following. In 2018 the buildings were demolished and the new construction began.

The Cole was so integral to the neighborhood that when we asked on social media for folks’ memories we were flooded with hundreds of responses.

Check out many of those memories below, along with several pictures of the Cole Shopping Center, mostly from near the end in the twenty-teens.