What happens to a neighborhood's biggest room when it disappears for two years?
For the stretch between early 2024 and this August, the answer at First Avenue and Quebec was: boarded windows, a couple of RVs camped on the north side of the lot, and a building everyone in Lowry had an opinion about but nobody could actually walk into. The space that once held Tavern Lowry and the Soiled Dove Underground sat dark through two full football seasons, two Broncos playoff runs watched somewhere else, and a long list of touring acts that played Denver without ever coming near East First Avenue.
What Actually Closed
The restaurant went first, shuttered in February 2024 after a family ownership dispute and a failure to pay taxes caught up with the operation. The music venue below it, the Soiled Dove Underground, followed that May. For 20 months the property sat vacant, drawing break-ins until the former owners finally boarded every window. Then in October 2025, a local general surgeon named Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn bought the building for 3.5 million dollars. Glenn had performed at the Dove long before she owned it, and she has said the project was never really about reopening a venue.
"When it closed, the loss was felt deeply by the entire community."
That line matters because it explains why Glenn kept the layout almost entirely intact. No walls came down. No new walls went up. The one physical change to the Dove Underground's floor plan was a backstage restroom for musicians, an omission that had gone uncorrected since the room opened in 2006.
How the Neighborhood Filled Two Years of Friday Nights
Here is the part that generic coverage of this reopening tends to skip: Lowry did not spend 20 months waiting around. It adapted, and it adapted fast, spreading the business that used to concentrate in one building across half a dozen smaller ones.
Hangar Club opened in early 2024, the same year the Tavern went dark, turning a 22,000-square-foot former military armament school on the National Register of Historic Places into a sports bar built around ten TrackMan golf simulators, the product of a 2.5 million dollar renovation. Denver Beer Co's Lowry taproom, open since February 2023 in a 4,200-square-foot space with a 5,400-square-foot patio, picked up the community-calendar role that a neighborhood bar usually plays: Craft Mondays, a regular run club, outdoor movie nights that continue this month with an August 29 screening, and a 2026 Westword Readers' Choice win for Best Patio for Pets. BaekGa, tucked into Lowry Town Center, became the place people actually planned dinner around, built on chef-owner Sean Baek's lunch specials and banchan. The Lowry Beer Garden kept its Oktoberfest-style patio pouring from 16 taps.
Here is where all that displaced business actually landed:
| What the Tavern building provided | Where Lowry sent it, 2024 to 2026 |
|---|---|
| Sports-viewing bar with TVs on every wall | Hangar Club's ten golf simulators |
| Neighborhood patio, gazebo bar, fire pit | Denver Beer Co's 5,400-square-foot patio, Lowry Beer Garden |
| Regular dinner destination | BaekGa, plus Café Mercato and North County at Hangar 2 |
| A 300-seat room for touring live music | Nowhere. That room sat empty the whole time |
Everything on that list found a new home except the last one. A golf simulator bar and a beer taproom can absorb a lot of a neighborhood's social life, but neither one can book a national act, wire a stage for a real sound engineer, or seat 300 people facing the same direction. That gap sat unfilled for two years because nothing in the diffuse, small-format version of Lowry's food and drink scene was built to fill it.
What Reopened This Month
Rising Phoenix has been serving in soft-opening mode since June 19, running an American menu, burgers, pizzas, pastas, a couple of salmon and seafood plates, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The kitchen answers to Daniel "Chef D" Young, who spent 17 years as the Denver Nuggets' private chef before taking this job. General manager Joseph Augusto has said the response from the neighborhood has been strong enough that regulars are already asking for longer hours, and a breakfast buffet arrived around the same weekend the venue downstairs finally opened its doors.
That happened on August 15, when The Dove Underground held its grand opening with Hazel Miller headlining, a deliberate callback to the room's history hosting Miller, the Avett Brothers, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, and B.B. King over the original Soiled Dove's run. The 300-seat room now runs on a new sound system from Listen Up, new lighting, and that long-overdue green room bathroom. Talent buyers Jesse Wehling and Patricia Duncan are building the touring calendar, while comedian Terri Barton Gregg is booking stand-up, with karaoke and poetry nights also on the schedule. Westword picked up the reopening as a citywide story, the kind of coverage that usually goes to a downtown club, not a strip of Town Center retail in residential Lowry.
The One Thing the Golf Simulators Never Replaced
Two years is long enough for a neighborhood to prove it can function without something. Lowry proved exactly that. People still got their sports-bar fix, their patio nights, their regular dinner spot. What they couldn't get, anywhere within Lowry's boundaries, was a room built specifically to hold 300 people watching one stage. That is a different kind of gathering than a taproom movie night or a round of simulator golf, and it turns out no amount of distributed small venues actually substitutes for it.
That is the real shift this month. Not that a restaurant reopened, restaurants open and close constantly, but that Lowry got back a category of experience it had genuinely been missing rather than merely inconveniencing itself without. Whether the Dove Underground's calendar fills with acts on the level of its old lineup remains to be seen. The room, the sound system, and the ambition are there now in a way they weren't a year ago.
Lowry United Neighborhoods has already opened the floor for resident ideas on what comes next for the rest of Lowry Town Center, a sign that this stretch of First Avenue is still being actively shaped by the people who live around it rather than settled into its final form.
If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood where the social fabric gets rebuilt this fast and this specifically, or you're already here and thinking about what your own home is worth in a market that keeps evolving around it, Debbie Jacobs — Selling Denver can walk you through what's happening block by block. Book an appointment and let's talk about Lowry, First and Quebec included.
