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

Denver dances inside an 1889 Episcopal church, under stained glass the congregation left behind. The Church Nightclub at 1160 Lincoln Street occupies the former St. Mark's Parish Church, designed in High Victorian Gothic style by Lang and Pugh - the firm of William Lang, architect of the Molly Brown House - and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. The parish story ran nearly a century: founded from the Mission of the Holy Comforter in 1875, elevated to parish status in 1887, the Lincoln Street sanctuary served Denver until 1987, when the congregation relocated toward Washington Park; the original tower had already fallen in the 1950s as the outer walls disintegrated. Nightlife impresario Regas Christou bought the building from the Colorado Episcopal Diocese in the early 1990s for 275,000 dollars and opened it in 1996 as a restaurant, coffee house and blues club that evolved into The Church - the anchor of his club empire and one of the most recognisable nightclubs in the American West. The interior turns the architecture into production design: multiple dance floors across several levels, bars tucked into chapels, DJ booths raised where the altar stood, all inside 17,200 square feet with a total event capacity approaching 1,900 and seated configurations around 350. The programming today is dominated by electronic dance music - international headliners, bass nights, reggaeton raves and K-pop crossovers week over week - making the room a fixture of the national EDM touring circuit, while weddings and corporate events rent the Gothic shell between club nights. Nearly three decades in, the club has outlived most of the scene that spawned it, and the reason is the building itself: no purpose-built room can offer what a High Victorian Gothic landmark does at one in the morning, when the lasers rake across the vaulted ceiling that Lang and Pugh raised for very different services.