A historic Denver gay bar is shutting down after the owners say violent crime and public drug use in a sprawling homeless encampment drove away customers.
The Triangle Bar, which dates back to the late 1970s and was reopened in 2017 by brewing dynasty heir Scott Coors, will close for good after a final toast Sunday afternoon.
“I was tired of putting my staff in the way, and I was tired of putting my customers in the way,” said Coors, the great-grandson of brewing magnate Adolph Coors Sr. Westworld.
He explained the final straw came at the end of September, when city officials, after months of pressure and pleas from the business, eradicated the encampment, only to have it spring back within 24 hours.
“We called the city and said, ‘You guys have to get rid of this (again),'” Coors said. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
The Triangle Bar, seen in 2021, is closing after the owners of the historic Denver gay bar said homeless encampments had grown out of control and made the business unviable
The Triangle Bar, which dates back to the late 1970s and was reopened in 2017 by brewery dynasty heir Scott Coors (above), will close for good on Sunday.
The bar announced its closure in an email to customers Thursday, saying a survey revealed more than 60 percent of their customers visited less often because of homeless encampments around the watering hole.
“It is with heavy hearts that we announce that, effective immediately, Triangle Denver will be closing indefinitely, largely due to the ever-growing encampments that have surrounded and suffocated the businesses in our area,” the email read, according to the Denver Post.
“We regularly injected funds into the bar just to keep the doors open while we pressured the media and the city to take corrective action which finally happened on September 27,” the email added.
‘For one single afternoon we had our neighborhood back. Less than 24 hours later, camps returned, and despite our pleas, the city saw no action to stop the resettlement.’
Coors explained to Westworld that the survey was key in the decision to close because it allayed its fears that the sharp decline in business was due to customer dissatisfaction with the bar’s events or product offerings.
He said revenue for 2023 was down about 30 to 40 percent from the previous year, and the bar has never turned a profit since paying $2.4 million for the building in 2017.
Coors said the homelessness issue exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people set up camp in a gated area near the Triangle Bar “and turned it into a gated community for themselves.”
“There was a whiteboard that put up drug deals, there was prostitution, there was trafficking going on in there, there was a murder that happened there,” he told Westworld.
Tents are seen across the street from the Triangle Bar, which the owners say is now surrounded by encampments, open drug use and crime
Coors said the issue of homelessness exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homeless people moved into a gated area near the Triangle Bar.
“There was a whiteboard that put up drug deals, there was prostitution, there was trafficking going on in there, there was a murder that happened there,” he said
The issue worsened when a tire shop across the street closed in May and the sidewalk in front of it was taken over by tents. “It was the main corridor that people used to come to the bar, and business dropped off,” he said.
Jarred McClain, manager at The Triangle Bar, tells KUSA-TV the closing was “heartbreaking” for himself as well as Denver’s LGBTQ community.
‘We are surrounded on four sides by homeless camps and crime and filth. And the ongoing problems with those embedded camps affected us and the guests who wanted to come here,” McClain said.
The manager said the camps were the source of ongoing problems, including break-ins to steal booze, and attempts to tamper with the bar’s gas line that could cause an explosion.
Open since the late 1970s, the Triangle Bar has served as a haven and retreat for Denver’s LGBTQ community for decades.
McClain explained that, during the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, some morgues or families refused the ashes of gay people who died of the disease, and the bar became their final resting place.
‘It’s also something that strikes my heart, that it could potentially be lost if it’s redeveloped or changed to someone else’s vision of what this corner should be, other than what our community wants it to be. And now, it will only exist in our memories.’