ASPEN – — Twenty-five years ago, Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass opened a large diner in the heart of Aspen, complete with hamburgers, shakes and a lot of complaints.
The complaints weren’t about the food, service or atmosphere inside Boogie’s Diner. Instead they concerned the so-called Boogification of Aspen and how the Baltimore-raised entrepreneur was driving a stake through Aspen’s soul.
For this wasn’t just any diner, like the kind romanticized in a Norman Rockwell painting or even one you’d find in Carbondale or Glenwood Springs. The restaurant’s interior was inspired by the classic diner of the 1950s, but the outside was a towering — by Aspen standards, at least — atrium smack in the middle of town.
Now 70, Weinglass seems more amused than anything about the “Boogification” charges and how they related to runaway development in downtown Aspen.
But last week, on April 23, Weinglass turned over his diner’s keys to two men and a chef he feels can usher the restaurant into a new era sans Boogie.
“I want to travel,” said Weinglass.
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