A historic gay bar in Denver is ceasing operations, after the owners said rampant crime and open drug use in a sprawling homeless encampment drove customers away.
The Triangle Bar, which dates back to the late 1970s and was reopened in 2017 by brewing dynasty heir Scott Coors, will close down for good after a final toast on Sunday afternoon.
‘I was sick of putting my staff in harm’s way, and I was sick of putting my customers in harm’s way,’ Coors, the great-grandson of brewing mogul Adolph Coors Sr, told Westworld.
He explained that the final straw came in late September, when city officials, after months of pressure and pleading from the business, cleared out the encampment, only to let it spring back up within 24 hours.
‘We called the city and said, ‘You guys need to get rid of these (again),’ Coors said. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
The Triangle Bar, seen in 2021, is shutting down 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 brewing dynasty heir Scott Coors (above), will close down for good on Sunday
The bar announced its closure in an email to customers on Thursday, saying that a survey revealed that more than 60 percent of their customers were visiting less frequently because of homeless encampments surrounding the watering hole.
‘With heavy hearts we announce that, effective immediately, Triangle Denver is closing indefinitely thanks primarily to the ever-expanding encampments which have surrounded and suffocated the businesses in our neighborhood,’ the email stated, according to the Denver Post.
‘We have been injecting funds regularly into the bar just to keep the doors open while pressuring the media and the city to take corrective action which finally occurred on September 27th,’ the email added.
‘For one single afternoon, we had our neighborhood back. Less than 24 hours later, camps returned, and despite our pleas, have seen no action from the city to stop the re-entrenchment.’
Coors explained to Westworld that the survey was key in the decision to shut down, because it dispelled his fears that the sharp decline in business was due to customer dissatisfaction over the bar’s events or product offerings.
He said that revenue for 2023 was down roughly 30 to 40 percent from the prior year, and that the bar had never turned a profit since he paid $2.4 million for the building in 2017.
Coors said that the homelessness issue exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people set up camp in a fenced area near the Triangle Bar ‘and turned it into a gated community for themselves.’
‘There was a whiteboard out front posting 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 that the homelessness issue exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homeless people moved into a fenced off area near the Triangle Bar
‘There was a whiteboard out front posting drug deals, there was prostitution, there was trafficking going on in there, there was a murder that happened there,’ he said
The issue grew worse when a tire shop across the street closed down in May, and the sidewalk in front of it was taken over by tents. ‘That was main corridor people had used to come to the bar, and business dropped off,’ he said.
Jarred McClain, manager at The Triangle Bar, told KUSA-TV that the closure was ‘heartbreaking’ for himself as well as Denver’s LGBTQ community.
‘We’ve been surrounded on four sides by homeless encampments and crime and filth. And the problems that persist with those embedded encampments came to affect us and the guests that wanted to come here,’ McClain said.
The manager said that the encampments were the source of perpetual issues, including break-ins to steal liquor, and attempts to tamper with the bar’s gas line that risked causing an explosion.
The Triangle Bar has been open since the late 1970s and has served for decades as a place of refuge and recreation for Denver’s LGBTQ community.
McClain explained that, during the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, some mortuaries or families refused the ashes of gay people who died from the disease, and the bar became their final resting place.
‘That’s something that really strikes at my heart too, that potentially if this is redeveloped or changed to somebody else’s vision of what this corner should be, other than what our community wants it to be, that could be lost. And now, that will only exist in our memories.’
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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