Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Nathaniel Rateliff liked the bar enough to buy it. The Skylark Lounge at 140 South Broadway in Denver's Baker neighbourhood traces to 1943, when it opened a block north at 58 South Broadway as a wartime workers' bar named for a Hoagy Carmichael song - and it has anchored South Broadway's drinking life across eight decades since. Scott Heron bought the failing dive for about 82,000 dollars in 1998, secured its first cabaret licence, and remade it as an Americana, honky-tonk and rockabilly joint whose nostalgic photographs and checkerboard floors turned it into a Denver music destination. The 2003 move to the current two-storey building let the operation spread: Heron tore out dividing walls downstairs and cubicles upstairs, creating the horseshoe-bar ground floor and the upstairs concert room now known as the Bobcat Club. The 2021 sale kept it in family hands, spiritually - musician Nathaniel Rateliff, neighbour Bob Ashby and partners bought the venue, refreshed the paint and art collection with local work, and reopened in January 2022 without touching the lived-in, timeless character regulars feared losing. The format splits by floor: no-cover downstairs with karaoke, pool tournaments, pinball and weekend vinyl DJs; ticketed local and touring bands upstairs in the Bobcat Club, plus free Western Wednesday shows monthly, with most tickets between five and fifteen dollars. The Baker location keeps it stitched into the strip - the hi-dive and the Broadway restaurant row within walking distance - a 1943 neighbourhood bar still doing exactly its original job, now with better bands. The Bobcat Club's checkerboard floor and stage-facing layout fixed the old complaint that the music felt like background - the room is built around the band now - and the ownership group's music-industry depth keeps touring acts routing through a 250-capacity room that by rights should be too small to land them.