DENVER — When Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colorado) announced that bars could reopen at a limited capacity, Nob Hill prepared to reopen in a way that went totally against everything that had defined the East Colfax Avenue haunt for decades.
Owner John Plessinger said Coors came and exchanged 18 kegs that had gone bad during a months-long closure, and he bought thermometers that could take temperatures from a distance.
“We were only going to let 12 people into the bar, they couldn’t co-mingle, they had to come in with a mask,” he said. “It was really going to be as anti-Nob as you can imagine, but at least we were going to try it.”
Plessinger said he had the bar ready to open on July 1, but that never happened. On June 30, Polis once again ordered that bars close, meaning that Nob Hill’s famous storefront near Colfax and Pennsylvania street was once again shuttered.
“Now I think we’ll be lucky to open by January 1 the way things are going,” Plessinger said.
And that’s bad news for the business that Plessinger’s father first bought in his name in 1969. In the weeks since, the bar has started selling beer and pizza in the back parking lot. A GoFundMe set up by one of the employees has raised more than $7,000 as of this writing, and since the bar is closed, Plessinger said his landlord cut his rent in half.
By reducing virtually all the expenses and with help from the GoFundMe, Plessinger said he’ll likely be able to keep Nob Hill until January. What happens after that has yet to be seen.
“This is the hardest thing, in my 50 years owning the business this is absolutely the hardest thing,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do to overcome it, except for maybe encourage people to wear face masks. That’s about it.”
As a Colfax dive bar, the Nob Hill sees a crowd that ranges from millennials renting apartments nearby to people who work at the State Capitol. Plessinger said Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac are known to have stopped by.
“The Nob is really kind of a melting pot, it has all classes of people, from a street person to an FBI agent to a shoe cobbler, it runs the whole gamut, it runs all nationalities, it’s really unique in that way because most bars are really geared to a certain segment of society, but the Nob is geared to the whole community of Capitol Hill,” he said. “Whoever lives there comes to the Nob, they’re representative of the Nob.”
Plessinger said he’s the artist behind the famous painting of the clown inside of the bar, as well as other paintings that depict scenes outside of Nob Hill’s Capitol Hill location.
Once he moves on from the bar, Plessinger said it will stay in his family – if the Nob Hill is able to survive COVID-19.
“It would be a shame if it closed,” Plessinger said. “The governor has complete control over it, and I have none.”
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