Danny Newman is a bit of a unicorn. He’s a self-made tech entrepreneur. And a cultural preservationist. And a full-on superhero to lovers of all things Denver cool. Or what’s left of it, anyway.

“I want to make ‘DANNY SAVES DENVER’ T-shirts,” said Collin Parson, the Arvada Center’s Director of Galleries. “He saves these local institutions that make Denver the place we’ve come to love … and come to miss.”

Newman, 40, launched the Denver Zombie Crawl in 2005. He bought Denver’s oldest bar (My Brother’s Bar) in 2017 – and, best of all, left it alone. Last year, he added the top five floors of the historic D&F Tower to his eclectic real-estate portfolio, which includes two former churches and an old auto-body shop along West Colfax Avenue.

And just last week, with his wife and business partner, Newman bought the iconic Mercury Cafe, again promising to keep it just as it always has been: A safe space for the exploration of organic food, the arts, politics and community. (And, for decades: Sunday-night swing dancing.)

His wife, TV producer and Denver actor Christy Kruzick, says Newman is anything but just another entrepreneur. “He’s in the business of preserving the magic and history of this city,” she said.

Newman, Kruzick and Austin Mayer have completed the $2 million purchase of the property at 22nd and California streets from Marilyn Megenity, the legendary purveyor of both the building and the vibe that has attracted the socially conscious, the poets and the gastronomes to the Mercury Cafe in its various locations since 1975. The relief on Facebook was palpable.

“This is such good news,” said Denver native Matthew Miller, now Senior Pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque. “Time and again the Mercury has been a place of return and redirection in my life. I am grateful to know that it will continue in its unique and wonderful place in the Denver theaterscape.”

The business was actually thriving despite the pandemic, Newman says, but, at 70, Megenity is ready to retire. The property had developers salivating, but Megenity ultimately chose to sell to the two arty love birds whose romance was nearly derailed by comically mixed signals before they even had their first date back in 2004.

Kruzick and Newman’s paths crossed throughout their young lives but, somehow, never at the same time. A teenage Kruzick performed as an actor for some of Denver’s most iconic theater companies of the day, including the Hunger Artists, the Changing Scene and The Avenue Theater. She badly wanted to be part of Denver School of the Arts’ first class, but her parents insisted she receive a proper Catholic education at Mullen High School instead. Newman, meanwhile, did attend DSA – the Denver Public Schools’ secondary arts magnet school.

They both hung out at the Merc. “For me, being so very drawn to theatre, to English and writing, I just thought it was such a magical space,” Kruzick said. “I practically grew up going there. But I also remember being intimidated by it because there were a lot of cool alternative people there. I desperately remember that feeling of having to look cool to go there.”

Newman remembers reading his creative writing at the Merc as part of a sixth-grade school project. Later, he was more attracted to the Merc’s punk, skater-kid vibe. “When I started going there, it was with the older, cooler kids in my school,” he said. “In my head, the Mercury was a cutting-edge, counter-culture, anarchist space that seemed like such a foreign place to be.”

They continued to circle in the same orbits as young adults. Both followed the local music scene and loved seminal bands like Joshua Novak, Hot IQs, Born in the Flood and Itchy-O. They frequented hotspots like the hi-dive, Sputnik and the Larimer Lounge. Just never together.

Coincidentally, three of their parents went to Lincoln High School. How did these two not meet?

“We just kept missing each other,” Kruzick said.

Until, inevitably, they started running into each other everywhere, and Newman started asking Kruzick out.

Problem was: “I thought he was a player,” said Kruzick, who, it turns out, knew two of Newman’s ex-girlfriends.

Make that: “She knew BOTH of my ex-girlfriends,” Newman clarifies with a laugh, “because those were the ONLY ex-girlfriends I had. Turns out, it was all a misunderstanding, but it was a pretty funny way to kick things off.”

Fast-forward to their wedding vows, which, Kruzick says, “were a little wacky.” One, she said, “was that I had to promise to live in weird spaces with Danny for the rest of our lives.”

Newman had converted an old Masonic Lodge slash church slash burrito factory into a loft in the Barnum neighborhood, complete with Skee-Ball, an indoor scooter and a salvaged rooftop sign for a bedroom door. Hipster theatregoers got a peek at it in 2019 because that’s where Kruzick starred in a production of the 9/11-themed play “Recent Tragic Events” – staged right in her own living room.

Newman just finds living in non-traditional spaces to be much more fun and exciting than living in a cookie-cutter house. In 2018, they converted a 1930s Greek Orthodox church into a loft where they now live in the Governor’s Park neighborhood.

“At first, I was like, ‘What in the world?’ ” said Kruzick, now a Story producer for HGTV’s “Good Bones.” “I had never seen anyone do this. But that’s what I signed up for. And soon, I fell in love with the process as well. We just love old architecture, and we have become passionate preservationists.”

As a businessman, “a whole bunch of different weird paths” led Newman to web frames and fortune, starting with learning computer and graphic design in high school. In the early internet days, he says, “I was really hooked on the online counterculture.” Learning web technologies early on prepped him to start founding small tech companies with Mayer, his longtime business partner. “We have created and sold a couple of our startups, and it was the sale of one called Roximity that enabled me to buy My Brothers Bar,” he said.

And, now, The Mercury Cafe, which will be run by Newman, Kruzick and Mayer – mostly silently. “We will be doing some behind-the-scenes things right off the bat, like we’ll take credit cards,” Newman said casually, as if not fully registering the enormity of his own words. Megenity has famously forbidden plastic transactions for decades, and for one old-school, bottom-line reason: “I can give them better prices if we don’t do the credit-card thing,” she told Westword in 2001 (three years before Newman and Kruzick met). “If people aren’t OK with that, nobody’s forcing them to come here.”

But Newman is changing that one thing because he’s, well … 40. “There were some great reasons for not doing credit cards in the past,” he said, “but it really makes everyone’s lives easier these days.”

Otherwise, he swears, Merc fans will barely notice a change, other than Megenity’s considerable presence.

“Everything about why that place has the draw that it does, and creates the feeling that it does, is all because of Marilyn,” Newman said. “That just can’t be duplicated, and we won’t ever let it be erased.”

At a time when old Denver has been rapidly disappearing to both progress and a pandemic, Newman and Kruzick pledge that the Merc will always be a place where creative people can come and be themselves.

“I feel like we have a big responsibility to be stewards of this place and to continue Marilyn’s vision,” said Kruzick. “But we have a big job ahead of us.”

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theatre critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media.