Drive past 7401 East First Avenue in the two years after the lights went out, and the building told you nothing good. Boarded windows. An RV parked on the north side of the lot for the better part of eight months. The kind of blank storefront that makes a neighborhood corner feel like it's holding its breath.
This month, the breath let out. Rising Phoenix is serving burgers and beer under the same boomerang-shaped bar. The Dove Underground is booking bands again in the same 300-seat room below it. And the thing residents are discovering, now that both halves of the building are running, is that nothing else that opened in Lowry over the last two years actually replaced what this one closed.
Two Years of Boarded Windows and an RV Camp
The building has a longer history than its recent vacancy suggests. Frank Schultz built it from the ground up in 2006, moving his Soiled Dove brand out of a cramped LoDo space and into a custom room designed for exactly what it became: Tavern Lowry upstairs, the Soiled Dove Underground below, 300 crescent-shaped seats and a sound system built for touring acts.
That version of the building shut down in February 2024, as ownership disputes inside Tavern Hospitality Group spread across the company's other locations. Shows paused, then never resumed. The property sat idle for roughly 20 months. Vagrants broke in more than once before the former owners finally boarded up every window. For a while, the biggest thing happening at the Lowry Town Center's most recognizable address was an RV camp on the side lot.
That changed in October 2025, when a local general surgeon named Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn bought the building. Her first instinct, according to reporting at the time, was to convert the main floor into classrooms and a recording studio for a music school. She reversed course and kept the restaurant concept instead, naming it Rising Phoenix, a fairly literal nod to what the building had just been through.
What Actually Came Back on June 19
Rising Phoenix soft-opened on June 19, 2026, with Chef Daniel "Chef D" Young in the kitchen. Young has spent nearly two decades as the Denver Nuggets' private chef and has cooked for names ranging from John Malone to Prince, but he's also the guy who opened Mimosas in Five Points and a late-night spot called Fat Daddy's back when he was building a customer base one plate at a time. That's the register Rising Phoenix is playing in: burgers, cast-iron skillets, sandwiches named after musicians. The Burger Phoenix runs ground brisket with sauteed mushrooms and aged cheddar. The Stevie Nicks turkey club, with avocado and bacon on the side of house-made chips, is already the item regulars order twice.
What's easy to miss, walking in, is how little actually changed. General manager Joseph Augusto gave neighbors a walkthrough in May and confirmed it directly: no walls came down, no walls went up. The same booths got new cushions and upholstery. The same three bars got new taps. The kitchen was gutted and rebuilt with new equipment, but the layout residents remember from a decade of Tavern nights is untouched.
A short list of what did and didn't change:
- Changed: new sound system from Listen Up in the downstairs room, new lighting, a backstage restroom for performers that somehow never existed in the original build.
- Changed: a curved concrete stage poured on the north side of the patio, with a canopy planned to stretch from the building to the brick wall on the west end.
- Unchanged: the boomerang bar, the booth layout, the building's footprint down to the inch.
- Unchanged: the address, and the idea that this is a place you walk to, not drive to.
August 15 and the Room Downstairs
The restaurant came back first. The music room took longer, and it reopened in stages. The Dove Underground had a soft reopening over the Fourth of July weekend, then a full grand opening on August 15, headlined by Hazel Miller, the same singer who played the room in its earlier life alongside acts like the Avett Brothers and Big Head Todd & the Monsters. Talent buyers Jesse Wehling and Patricia Duncan are curating the touring calendar, and comedian Terri Barton Gregg is booking standup separately, so the room is aiming for a genuinely mixed lineup: rock, folk, comedy, karaoke, even poetry nights.
That show happened two weeks ago. If you live in Lowry and haven't walked down to see the room yet, the calendar is already running.
The Other Soiled Dove, Ten Minutes South
Here's the part that trips people up if they haven't been paying attention. The name Soiled Dove now exists in two places at once, and neither one has a clean claim to it.
Frank Schultz, who built the original room, didn't stop booking music when he lost the Lowry building. In May 2026, three months before Glenn's venue reopened, he launched a new stage inside Chopper's Sports Grill on South Madison Street in Cherry Creek North, calling it Soiled Dove at Chopper's. The Railbenders played the first show on May 9. An Opie Gone Bad reunion followed the next weekend. Schultz let the federal registration on the name lapse at some point, and Glenn's team has since registered a related name, The Dove Underground, for the Lowry room, which has reportedly prompted a cease-and-desist conversation between the two camps.
Neither side seems in a hurry to settle it, mostly because the name still carries real weight in Denver's music scene. What it means practically for a Lowry resident: if a friend mentions catching a show at "the Soiled Dove," it's worth asking which one. They're different rooms, different bookers, and a ten-minute drive apart.
What Hangar 2 Was Doing the Whole Time
It would be easy to assume the neighborhood simply filled the gap while the Tavern building sat empty. In one sense, it did. Half a mile away, the Hangar 2 dining district kept adding tenants through the entire vacancy. WoodGrain Bagels started rolling out Montreal-style bagels by hand, open 7am to 2pm daily. Officers Club Lowry opened with a menu built around ten variations on the Old Fashioned and a Sunday brunch service. Rocket Ice Cream went up around a 50-foot rocket ship replica. Lowry Beer Garden expanded its Oktoberfest-style outdoor seating to accommodate 350 people under a covered pavilion. North County brought Baja-style fish tacos to the corner. Denver Beer Co.'s taproom on East Lowry Boulevard never stopped running its Monday craft nights, not even during the two years the Tavern building sat dark.
The One Night Out None of That Replaced
None of it replaced the specific thing the neighborhood actually lost, which is a walk-to-it room where you can watch a game on a big screen with friends and then stay in your seat for a live band. Bagels don't do that. A beer garden with picnic tables doesn't do that. Hangar 2 got bigger and better fed while the corner it was competing with sat empty, and the gap held anyway, for two full years, because nothing else in the neighborhood was built for that particular combination.
That's the actual headline underneath the reopening. Lowry didn't get a new restaurant. It got its specific kind of night back, in the one building on the corner that was designed for it twenty years ago and never really needed a redesign, just an owner willing to turn the lights back on.
What's Already on the Calendar
If you're deciding how to spend the next few weeks in the neighborhood, a few things are worth knowing before the season turns:
The Owls have been playing Thursday evenings at Sunset Park, at Pontiac and 2nd, through September 10. That gives residents one, maybe two more chances to catch a set before the run ends for the year. Denver Beer Co.'s Lowry taproom keeps its Craft Mondays going along with weekly trivia, and Lowry Beer Garden runs Geeks Who Drink trivia every Tuesday from 7 to 9pm, free to play, teams up to six. And down at 7401 East First, Rising Phoenix is now open six days a week, Tuesday through Sunday, with the Dove Underground's full calendar running below it for the first time in over two years.
The corner isn't dark anymore. It took a surgeon with a checkbook, a chef who's cooked for billionaires and Broncos ownership alike, and a sound company willing to rebuild a room from scratch to prove how specific the thing Lowry was missing actually was.
If you're a homeowner in Lowry and the neighborhood's changes this year have you thinking about what your own property is worth in the current market, The Hoffman Group knows this corner of Denver well enough to give you a straight answer whenever you're ready to ask.
