DENVER — Outside of the books sold at BookBar, the Denver book and wine shop collects so many donations from the community, owner Nicole Sullivan had to go searching for a new space.
She needed a place to facilitate the donations and to house the nonprofit arm of her shop, BookGive.
First, Sullivan searched for warehouses, but she settled on a better place to fill up with books.
“It smells like motor oil!” Sullivan laughed, standing inside the empty service station at the corner of 49th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard. “It’s a very nostalgic smell for me because I grew up with my dad working on cars.”
Sullivan is the new owner of the old building and all its quirks.
“The used oil bin over here which I will keep because I think it’s cool,” Sullivan said, showing off the sink blackened by decades of motor oil.
Sullivan said she purchased the Regis 66 service station last week from owners who’d run the shop since 1970 and were ready to retire. Sullivan said the place started as a gas station in the 1920s and the current building was built in 1944.
“I think it would be a shame to just take all of that history and all of that service and everything that this place has meant to the community and just scrape it,” Sullivan said.
The old shop still needs a power wash and a paint job. Sullivan also envisions a mural.
“A head being opened up, a giant book opened and knowledge spilling into someone’s head and it says ‘fill ‘er up’,” Sullivan described.
Sullivan hopes to open BookGive Service Station sometime this fall, and it won’t just be a storage space for books and BookBar's bookmobile.
Sullivan wants the service station to be a community space where people can browse for books without feeling pressure to buy. She likened it to a food bank for books.
It’ll be a new chapter in the story of an old building that will continue offering full-service to the community.
“We’re all filling ourselves up with knowledge,” Sullivan said. “I think that’s the goal.”
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