For twenty months, the corner of 1st and Xenia felt like the neighborhood's missing tooth. The Tavern Lowry sat boarded up after a February 2024 closure, RVs parked on the north side of the lot for the better part of eight months, and residents rerouted their Saturday walks. That building, more than any single storefront in Town Center, is what Lowry residents used to point to when out-of-town guests asked what the neighborhood was.
It reopens this fall as Rising Phoenix. And if you live here, the reopening changes more than one address. It restores the connective tissue between three parts of Lowry that spent the last two years operating on separate schedules.
The Hinge at 7401 East 1st Avenue
The short version, for anyone who missed the newsletter: a local general surgeon, Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn, purchased the shuttered Tavern property in October 2025 after the previous ownership shut down over tax issues. The kitchen is being run by Daniel Young, known locally as Chef D, who spent seventeen years as the private chef for the Denver Nuggets. The menu is American, with pizzas, pastas, burgers, salmon, salads, and a happy hour that has not yet been priced publicly.
The more interesting piece for residents is downstairs. The Soiled Dove Underground, long considered one of the best small rooms for live music in the city, was gutted with the rest of the property. It comes back with a new sound system installed by Listen Up, refurbished booths, new taps across three bars, and programming that leans into local, regional, and national touring acts along with comedy. If you last saw a show at the Dove in 2023, expect the room to feel the same and sound noticeably better.
The reason this matters beyond the food and the shows: Lowry's Town Center plaza, Hangar 2's dining strip, and the Denver Beer Co. lawn on Lowry Boulevard have been running on three unrelated calendars while the anchor sat dark. One reopens and the walking loop reappears.
Three Districts, Three Clocks
Read Lowry as one neighborhood and you miss how differently each pocket behaves on a Saturday.
Town Center: the plaza tempo
Town Center runs on family-hour rhythms. The plaza fronting Walter's303 Pizzeria & Publik House stays busy from mid-morning through the Timbuk Toys story-time hour, then thins out until dinner. Kimco, which manages the center, runs periodic sidewalk pop-ups, and Chewy's Bonetique layers dog activations on top of them: a doggie caricature artist on some Saturdays, sample tables from Colorado vendors like The Bear & The Rat. If your weekend involves a stroller or a leash, this is the block you drift through first.
What Rising Phoenix adds back is an evening reason to stay. The plaza has not had a late-night anchor since the Tavern closed, which is why the Walter's303 patio has been carrying more than its share of the after-eight crowd.
Hangar 2: the dining strip
The stretch along East Academy Boulevard at Rampart Way behaves like its own small commercial district. A short walk covers:
- Officers Club Lowry, which builds its identity around the mid-century military-base officers-clubs and runs ten variations of the Old Fashioned alongside classic American fare.
- North County, which pulls from the taco culture north of San Diego and is the go-to Baja option in this half of the city.
- WoodGrain Bagels, hand-rolled Montreal-style, open 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. If you have not tried a Montreal bagel next to a New York one, this is the closest side-by-side comparison available east of Colorado Boulevard.
- Lowry Beer Garden, the Oktoberfest-style outdoor pavilion with brats and pretzels, opens at 11 daily and takes on real weight once September turns.
- Rocket Ice Cream, orbiting a fifty-foot rocket ship, which is either the best or worst landmark in the neighborhood depending on whether you have kids.
Hangar 2 draws from a wider radius than Town Center. You will hear license plates from Aurora and Stapleton in the parking lot. That is the point of the district. It is Lowry's front door for visitors.
Boulevard One and Sunset Park: the taproom-and-lawn tempo
The newest slice of Lowry has settled into a taproom-and-park pattern anchored by Denver Beer Co. Lowry at 7070 East Lowry Boulevard. This is the only address in Lowry that publishes a full week of programming, and the calendar is dense enough that it's worth memorizing:
| Day | What's on at DBC Lowry |
|---|---|
| Monday | Craft Mondays |
| Tuesday | Geeks Who Drink Weekly Trivia |
| Some Thursdays | The Owls playing Sunset Park at 5–9 p.m. |
| Selected Saturdays | Lowry BAZAAR shop-and-sip market |
| Ongoing | DBC Run Club, Bingo Tunes, movie nights on the lawn |
The Lowry BAZAAR is the one to circle. When it returns to the lawn behind the taproom, more than eighty local makers set up with street food and live music, and dogs outnumber strollers by a wide margin. Denver Beer Co. Lowry took the Westword Readers' Choice 2026 nod for Best Patio for Pets, which is the kind of superlative that sounds soft until you try to find an outdoor table on a Sunday afternoon.
Sunset Park itself, one block over, hosts intermittent Thursday-evening music from The Owls through the summer. Dates are not published on a fixed schedule; the community calendar posts them week to week.
What a Reconnected Saturday Actually Looks Like
Here is the itinerary the reopening restores, in one walkable-plus-short-drive arc:
- 7:30 a.m. WoodGrain Bagels at Hangar 2, before the 9 a.m. line forms.
- 10:00 a.m. Timbuk Toys or Chewy's Bonetique at Town Center if you have kids or a dog. Otherwise skip to lunch.
- 12:30 p.m. Walter's303 patio at Town Center, or Officers Club if you want the room with the ten Old Fashioneds.
- 2:00 p.m. Denver Beer Co. lawn. BAZAAR if the date lines up, Craft Mondays or Bingo Tunes if it's a weekday.
- 5:30 p.m. Lowry Beer Garden at Hangar 2 for the golden-hour pretzel window.
- 8:00 p.m. Rising Phoenix upstairs for dinner, Soiled Dove downstairs for the show.
That last step is the one you couldn't take in 2024 or 2025. It's why the calendar suddenly reads differently.
The Community Layer Underneath
The commercial reopening lands on top of a quieter civic layer that keeps the neighborhood functioning between big events. The Lowry Foundation programs the historic Eisenhower Chapel at 293 Roslyn Street, including a HopeCycle bike-repair day with flat fixes, brake adjustments, and safety checks for anyone who rolls up. Lowry United Neighborhoods, the city-recognized registered neighborhood organization for the full district including Boulevard One, approved a new Alliance Program in March 2026 to fund community partnerships, and they also sponsor smaller one-offs like the free YogaSix class and a Summer Solstice African-Caribbean dance evening with Artie Thompson.
None of that shows up on a restaurant guide. It's the reason the neighborhood's programming does not go dormant when the taproom calendar quiets down in October.
The Thing to Watch This Fall
If you moved to Lowry in the last three years, you may not have known the neighborhood at full strength. The pattern to watch through September and October is whether Rising Phoenix pulls the Town Center evening crowd back from Hangar 2, and whether the Soiled Dove's booking calendar restores the small-venue draw that used to bring in visitors from Cherry Creek and Park Hill on show nights. Both are plausible. Neither is guaranteed. Either way, the block that spent two years dark is the one worth checking on again.
For residents who have been quietly wondering what their own home has been doing while the neighborhood retooled around it, or who are thinking about the next chapter here, Molly Weiss knows this pocket of Denver at the block level. Let's connect.
