Tomorrow night the marquee lights go on again at 7401 East First Avenue, the crescent-shaped room under Lowry Town Center that used to hold a stage where B.B. King and the Avett Brothers once played, three tiers of banquet seating, and a boomerang-shaped bar. For roughly two years that room sat dark. Now it has a new name, a new sound system, and a wrinkle nobody who spent a decade catching Tuesday night shows there could have predicted: a second version of the same bar, on the other side of town, using nearly the same name.
If you've lived in Lowry long enough to remember ducking downstairs from Tavern Lowry for a show, here's what actually happened, and what to say the next time someone tells you they saw "the Soiled Dove" last month, because they might mean a different building entirely.
What actually closed in 2024
This wasn't a quiet, planned closure. Tavern Hospitality Group, the company founder Frank Schultz built with his mother and co-founder Terry Papay, came apart in a legal fight that spread across more than a dozen Tavern-branded properties. The Soiled Dove Underground, the live-music room under Tavern Lowry, went dark sometime in the first half of 2024 as part of the fallout. What happened after that wasn't graceful. According to Lowry United Neighborhoods' recurring "Snarky Mark" newsletter column, the building sat empty for the better part of two years, drew a string of break-ins, and had RVs camped on its north side for eight months before the former owners finally boarded up the windows.
The buyer nobody in the neighborhood expected
In October 2025, the property sold for $3.5 million to Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn, a local general surgeon who, it turns out, is also a bass player who used to perform at the old Dove long before she thought about owning it. Her first plan wasn't a restaurant at all. Early proposals floated turning the main floor into classrooms and a recording studio for a music school, keeping concerts running only in the basement. She pivoted, kept the restaurant on the main floor, and gave it a name that says exactly what it's trying to be: Rising Phoenix.
The kitchen is run by Daniel "Chef D" Young, who spent 17 years as the private chef for the Denver Nuggets before taking this job, serving an American menu of burgers, pizzas, pastas, and a couple of salmon dishes. Rising Phoenix soft-opened on June 19, 2026. Nothing about the room's actual layout changed from the Tavern days. Same boomerang bar, same booths, just refinished. Downstairs is where the real work happened: a new sound system installed by Listen Up, new lighting, and a backstage restroom for musicians that somehow never existed in the original build. On the patio, crews poured a curved concrete stage on the north side and are planning a canopy that will stretch from the building to the brick wall on the west end. The underground room had its own soft reopening over the Fourth of July weekend. The full calendar, now operating as The Dove Underground, opens tomorrow, August 15.
Glenn told the Denver Gazette what drew her back into the building:
"I loved the (old) Soiled Dove's acoustics, its intimate atmosphere and the sense of community it created."
The other Dove, across town
Here's the part that makes this more than a simple reopening story. Frank Schultz, the man who built the original Soiled Dove in 1997 in LoDo before moving it into the Lowry building in 2006, lost that property in the Tavern Hospitality Group breakup. He didn't stop booking bands. In May 2026, three months before Glenn's venue opened its doors, Schultz launched a new stage inside Chopper's Sports Grill at 80 South Madison Street in Cherry Creek North, calling it the Soiled Dove at Chopper's. The Railbenders played the first show on May 9. Opie Gone Bad's reunion followed on May 14.
Schultz has been clear about what comes first at the new room:
"I want to make it clear that this is a sports bar first, and then live music."
He's planning four to six ticketed shows a month there, and none of them will land during Nuggets playoff games.
So as of this month, Denver has two rooms invoking the same nearly thirty-year Soiled Dove history, on opposite sides of the city, under different owners, and neither one holds a clean trademark. Schultz let the federal registration lapse but argues his long use of the name still carries weight. Glenn's team registered a related name, The Dove Underground, for the Lowry room, and Schultz has reportedly floated a cease-and-desist over it. Neither side seems in a hurry to back down, mostly because the name still means something specific to anyone who's spent time in Denver's music scene.
Which one you actually want
If a friend from out of town mentions catching a show at "the Soiled Dove," it's worth asking where, because the two rooms serve completely different nights out.
- The Dove Underground, 7401 E. First Ave., Lowry. A 300-seat room below Rising Phoenix restaurant, booked by Jesse Wehling and Patricia Duncan, with comedy nights handled separately by Terri Barton Gregg. Full range of genres including rock, folk, comedy, karaoke, and poetry, plus a new outdoor stage on the patio.
- The Soiled Dove at Chopper's, 80 S. Madison St., Cherry Creek North. A sports bar first, with four to six ticketed shows a month leaning toward classic rock, country, and roots acts, and dark whenever the Nuggets or Broncos have a marquee game on.
Why this matters if you live here
For roughly two years, Lowry didn't have a room like this at all. Half a mile away, Hangar 2 kept expanding through the vacancy, adding North County's Baja-style tacos, Café Mercato, Woodgrain Bagels, Officers Club, Lowry Beer Garden, Copper Door Coffee Roasters, and Rocket Ice Cream. Denver Beer Co.'s taproom on East Lowry Boulevard kept its Monday craft nights going the entire time. None of that replaced the one thing the neighborhood actually lost: a place to watch a game on a big screen with friends, then stay for a band. The Snarky Mark column summed up what the reopening actually restores about as plainly as a neighborhood newsletter can: Lowry got its sports-viewing spot back.
Whether you end up walking down to catch a Tuesday comedy set at The Dove Underground or driving ten minutes to Cherry Creek for a Railbenders show, Lowry's version reopened first this time, and it's the one built back into the walk-to-it routine this neighborhood was designed around from the start.
Lowry keeps proving that its identity runs on a short list of specific places, not just square footage and park acreage. If you're curious what your own corner of the neighborhood is worth while all of this plays out, the Linkow Baltimore Team knows this market block by block. Start with a Free Home Valuation.
