Pipe Dream: Do You Remember the Organ Grinder?

Bob Richardson is a man on a mission. A lifelong mission, really. He was just a kid when his family went to a new pizza restaurant in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t your usual pizza place, though, not a Pizza Hut or a Domino's or a local by-the-slice joint.

He still remembers the heavenly sounds of an enormous pipe organ that filled the eatery’s modern glass architecture with incredibly intricate music.

“So the first Organ Grinder opened in 1973 when I was four years old in Portland," he recalls, "and my parents took me there, and my parents were both musical people. My mom played the piano. My dad had played in his high school orchestra and band, and he was a HiFi nut. So I was surrounded by music.

“But something about that experience just grabbed me, because it's not just that music is playing as entertainment. It’s that when you walk in the door, normally, if you're going to a cabaret show or nightclub or something, you're coming in the back of the house, there might even be a lobby, right? And then the stage is way up front. You walked in the Organ Grinder, and you are front and center stage. You are between the organist and the pipe organ. Everything's behind glass. You can see all the mechanical parts moving. Your body is shaking and the crowd's looking at you. So even waiting in line, which could be over an hour, was entertaining. It is literally shaking your body. And then, you know, you get your pizza order.”

The Organ Grinder was about the experience, not the food. “It was perfectly valid, middle-of-the road, family pizza, yeah,” Richardson says. “It was not a gourmet wood-fired pizza."

There wasn’t even any table service – the salad was a serve-yourself buffet, and you ordered your pie and picked it up when your number lit up on the wall.

The Portland Organ Grinder was so popular that its founders dreamed of taking the concept national. And the first city they chose to expand to was Denver. In February 1979, an Organ Grinder opened at 2370 West Alameda Avenue, its awesome glass cylinder façade and very '70s slanted, wood side panels facing the street. The curious and the hungry, as well as those who loved organ music, lined up and then went through a tunnel-like entranceway to a vast dining room where they were enveloped by the sound of the pipe organ and the smell of the pizza.

The restaurant appealed to families, with employees dressed up in cute animal costumes and a section filled with arcade games to keep kids busy. But one kid – Richardson – wasn’t there to mess around with early video games.

“The Organ Grinder is responsible for making me an organ nerd,” he says, laughing, even if he's an organ nerd with a bright crimson mohawk. At 55, he’s thrilled to be able to tell the story of the Organ Grinder and its two locations in an upcoming feature-length documentary, Pipe Dreams and Pizza Crusts: The Rise and Fall of the Organ Grinder.

He’s been working on the project for almost two years, funding his passion with online donations, the support of friends and family, and a reduced workload as a web developer and marketing dude. He already has the entire arc of the film mapped out in his head, with chapters about controversies, celebrities who were friends of the founders, and companies that stole the idea (one in Toronto that used the same name will even get its own section).

The idea for the documentary was born when a friend told him about a fiftieth anniversary Organ Grinder reunion concert. "It was a benefit for Cleveland High School in Portland, which has a pipe organ in it," Richardson says, adding that musicians who'd played at the restaurant back in the day performed for an audience that included attendees of an organ guild conference.

“Most of the people there had no idea what the Organ Grinder was,” he admits. “But at the end of it, Dennis Hedberg, who was the man who built the organs and is one of the co-founders of the business, stood up and gave a five-minute PowerPoint presentation.” Richardson approached Hedberg and asked to interview him for what he thought would be a fun YouTube video. Hedberg didn’t want to talk at first, but Richardson pestered him and finally got an audience.

Since then, Richardson has interviewed a remarkable number of people who remember the Organ Grinder; many worked at the restaurant, played there or played a role in its founding. To do research, he’s traveled around the country, including Hawai’i, where the restaurant's entire staff was feted with an extravagant trip to a founder’s Maui mansion.
The Portland location, which was open from 1973 to 1996, was an institution by the time it shut down. The Denver shop only made it from 1979 to 1988, but it had its fans.

I ate there just before it closed. I recall that the pizza was okay, but don’t remember hearing a pipe organ take of “YMCA.” (There’s a three-CD collection of 38 organ classics, including “YMCA,” recorded at the Portland and Denver restaurants available as a film fundraiser for $80.) In fact, I don't recall any organ music at all, but in those last days it might have been silenced.

The local CBS affiliate interviewed Hedberg when the Organ Grinder opened in Denver. Hedberg was then the company's engineer, and he told the reporter that there were 20-to-25 restaurants across the U.S. that featured pipe organs, mostly pizza joints. Denver’s organ was upcycled from Portland’s Paramount Theatre, which Richardson says is a twin to Denver’s Paramount; it cost $350,000 to move and seven months to restore the organ.

The nascent chain spared no expense at the time. Richardson says the Denver spot was “universally regarded as having top-notch talent, and they even flew in musicians. They kept an apartment in Denver for visiting staff and performers.”

Hedberg and his wife wound up buying the company in 1984.

Richardson has already interviewed some Denver residents who remember the Organ Grinder and is looking for people with more memories, and possibly photographs or home movies (the place closed long before mobile phones made video easy). While visiting on a solo barnstorming tour this month, camera in hand, he filmed Denver artist Andrew Novick, who grew up in Lakewood and has eaten at Casa Bonita over 300 times.

While Novick remembers the Organ Grinder, he really raves about Vinh Xuong, the Vietnamese bakery and banh mi sandwich shop in Alameda Square where the Organ Grinder was once a landmark. “We filmed with that bakery behind him, because he knows the owner,” Richardson says. The shopping center is also home to the area’s only Costco Business Center, the Great Wall Asian supermarket, some shops, and Asian and Latino restaurants, including the bakery with the best banh mi in town.

Denver's Organ Grinder building is long gone. The Portland Organ Grinder still stands, though modified, and now houses a Chinese restaurant.

“There seems to be a lot of cross-pollination between Portland and Denver,” Richardson says. “One of my interview subjects who’s in the movie was at the Portland location on the night it closed, and he's the co-founder of Voodoo Doughnuts.”

Although there wasn’t a Casa Bonita in Portland (that chain was founded in Oklahoma), Richardson says many people who remember the Organ Grinder in Denver recall it with the same fondness as they have for the original Casa Bonita, which opened in 1974 at 6715 West Colfax Avenue. (At the time, I was a junior at Alameda High School a few minutes down Wadsworth Boulevard from the gaudy Mexican restaurant, and my friends and I ate lunch there at least three times a week.) Like Casa Bonita, the Organ Grinder was always more about entertainment than the food; unlike the Organ Grinder, it's still here — although now under the ownership of South Park's creators.

“I want to stress that this movie is about what a wonderful and wild and weird experience it was to go to the Organ Grinder," Richardson says. "The drama is part of it, yeah, but this wild experience is really the focus of the movie.”

He hopes to have the documentary done by next year and then show it at film festivals; while the Sundance Film Festival once it moves to Boulder in 2027 might be too high a target to hit, he's got his eye on the Denver Film Festival.
"My hope is to tell the whole Organ Grinder story including the past, the present and future, because I'm doing this for the next generation, I want to leave the audience with some hope for what's going on now. Can a place like this ever happen again? That's a question we're asking," he says.

"What attracts young people? I've interviewed a fifteen-year-old organist and a seventeen-year-old who is repairing a pipe organ in Illinois in a restaurant. So I want to leave the audience with hope, and the sense that you can do something weird in your community as well."

And that might lead to a new era of organ nerds entertaining people in restaurants.

The documentary's website is at PipeDreamsFilm.com

This story has been updated to correct Bob Richardson's name.