Carlo Amato sold the building and land that houses his business earlier this year. It was a good decision for a number of reasons — not the least of which, it’s a prime piece of real estate. Amato, of Denver, sits on the corner of 16th and Central streets, along the lip of land overlooking Interstate 25. The hum of freeway traffic washes over the neighborhood, a daily asphalt soundtrack, but this spot also provides a front-porch view of downtown, all glass and brick and sky punctuated by the white spines of bridges. From here, one is reminded that Denver is a pretty town, indeed.
The offer was $2.5 million, and the Amatos know a good opportunity when they see one. Then there’s Carlo’s health. Four procedures last year to correct circulation problems left by a 2001 stroke. He’s 62. Finally, it’s not as if the business itself is going away. Amato, purveyor of fine garden decor, fountains and statuary and planters, is just moving down a block. It’s relocating, in fact, to the house Carlo Amato’s dad, Frank, grew up in. The Amato sons, Anthony and Christopher, will take on a larger role in the business.
As for the old building, it will serve a new use as a pub, something a little more upscale for a hip neighborhood. Still, all buildings hold a history. Sometimes that building becomes intertwined with a family so that every part of it is associated with memory, and it is no longer a static thing. Sometimes a building becomes identified with a time or a person, and if you are Carlo Amato, sitting at the reception desk in that building, well, it feels necessary to acknowledge that.
His grandfather arrived on the S.S. Cameronia out of Naples, Italy, in August 1921. He was 36. The manifest records his name as Carlo d’Amato. Somewhere along the line, he became Amato. At some point, too, someone tried to persuade him to become Charles. This he would not do.
He came from Taranto in Puglio and had been a soldier with the Italian army in World War I. The war left him with a scar above his upper lip, and he covered it with a moustache. In his younger days, it was a rather extravagant affair, its sweeping ends twisted upward as if yearning to join his eyebrows.
Carlo came to Denver to join his brother, Giglio. Carlo was a mason and craftsman, and he opened his furniture- and cabinet- making business at 3600 Navajo St. in 1922.
“He was a disciplined man,” Frank Amato says of his father. “If he said he was going to work at 5 a.m., he was at work at 5 a.m. But he was also Italian, and every day he went home and had lunch with mama and then he’d take an hour and a half nap. That was his routine until the day he died.”
In 1934, the Amatos moved to the corner of 17th and Central streets. It was a wonderful place to grow up, Frank says. The freeway hadn’t claimed its blocks of homes, and Frank remembers the mom-and-pop stores and the fine Italian restaurant and the bar everyone just called “blood in a bucket.” His dad was a shrewd businessman, but a cautious one, Frank says. Amato the elder never bought what he couldn’t pay for in cash.
In 1944, he paid $600 for the land upon which he built the garden store that would become a neighborhood landmark.
Amato was 62 years old, and together, he and Frank constructed the building of cinderblock and concrete. As far as Frank can remember, his dad never had more than one employee, and as soon as Carlo the younger was able, he started helping out. But had you been there in the ’50s and ’60s and early ’70s, you would have found Frank in the middle room, where he set up an upholstery business, and Amato the elder mixing cement and pouring molds and hauling planters heavier than he was. He worked until he was 90 and was felled by pneumonia in 1978. Just two years earlier, he’d turned over the business to his grandson, Carlo.
A few weeks ago, Carlo decided to have a Mass celebrated for his grandpa Carlo and grandma Lillian (Lombardi). He called his father and his father’s sister, Rose, and some family and friends, which means a couple hundred people showed up. They gathered in the patio, amid all the planters brimming with flowers Carlo’s wife, Rhonda, planted. Carlo set out a large picture of his grandfather, and he gave a framed copy of the ship’s manifest to the new property owner, Ed Cerkovnik, who plans to pay homage to the family by incorporating statuary into the decor. “He wants to keep the name, too,” says Carlo. “He cares about my family’s heritage, and that means a lot to me.”
Still, these are emotional days for Carlo Amato, and he chokes up when he thinks of closing the building for good at 3 p.m. Sunday. He says when he locks the doors, he will sit with his daughter Brianna amid the statuary and the burbling fountains and he will think of his grandfather, and in this way, he will bid an era goodbye.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
