The more than 100 homeless people living around the Triangle regularly vandalize the bar and use its courtyard as a toilet.
When Scott Coors and his husband resurrected Denver’s historic Triangle Bar in 2017, it quickly became known as a safe and popular gathering spot for the city’s LGBTQ community.
It billed itself as “Denver’s premium LGBTQ bar,” and it received national praise as one of the country’s best. The business thrived.
But Coors and his husband closed the Triangle Bar this week due to what they’ve described as ever-expanding homeless encampments that have “slowly suffocated” the business.
Drug-addled homeless people threaten and harass customers, Coors said. They vandalize the building, breaking windows to steal liquor. They relieve themselves by the parking lot and sometimes in the courtyard. They litter the ground with drug paraphernalia.
And too often, city leaders have done nothing to help.
A recent survey of more than 500 Triangle Bar customers found that 75 percent were visiting less than they used to, and more than 60 percent cited the homeless camps for staying away.
“The encampments surrounding us pose a health and safety concern to our staff and guests that has slowly suffocated our business,” reads an email announcing the closure.
Like many big Western cities, Denver has struggled to control and snuff out growing homeless encampments. In an interview with National Review on Friday, Coors blamed the Triangle Bar’s demise on a lack of action by Denver leaders and their seeming reluctance to enforce anti-camping laws and laws against public drug use.
“Our prior administration was completely worthless, and literally screwed the city and left it in a state of horrible disrepair,” Coors said of Michael Hancock, the former Democratic mayor who left office in July after 12 years at the city’s helm. Coors said that new mayor, Democrat Mike Johnston, is overwhelmed. “And he’s saying, give me six months to fix this, and I’m like, you don’t have six months with me. You just don’t. I don’t have that runway.”
The Triangle Bar near downtown had been closed for almost 20 years when Coors and his husband reopened it six years ago. They knew at the time that the neighborhood had a lot of homeless services organizations. But, he said, the homeless situation was “manageable.”
“You’d have a tent here or there, and you’d have a few people who were mentally unstable wandering around occasionally,” he said. “That just came with the territory.”
Customers were mostly able to navigate around those headaches. Denver media have described the Triangle Bar as “legendary.” The bar tried to be a good neighbor. On its website, the bar describes itself as “Denver’s eco-friendly LGBTQ bar,” that is “partially powered by wind power.”
But real problems began to mount during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the area around the Triangle Bar became what Coors described as “ground-zero for homeless encampments”
Homeless people started camping in a little green space with trees behind the bar. Rocks were put in the space to deter the homeless campers, but they simply ignored them or moved them.
“Then the city put in a fence, and they cut through the fence and made it into their own little gated community,” Coors said. They called it “Gutterhouse.”
“Once they got inside that fence and walled themselves in, the city did nothing,” Coors said.
With homeless addicts camping out and drugging up with impunity, the encampments grew. The situation deteriorated further when a nearby Firestone auto shop closed, and funding for planned apartment buildings fell through, Coors said. The empty lot became a magnet.
Coors said there are now more than 100 homeless people living on the streets within a few blocks of the Triangle. And with no city enforcement, they’ve been emboldened.
One homeless person threw the wheel of a car through the bar’s window, Coors said. The homeless campers have yelled out homophobic slurs at the bar’s customers. One man threatened to stab a Triangle Bar consultant who was taking pictures in the neighborhood, Coors said. A few weeks ago, a homeless person attacked a pedestrian with a baseball bat, he said.
Jarred McClain, a Triangle Bar manager, told the local NBC station that they’ve been “surrounded on four sides by homeless encampments and crime and filth.” Addicts try to use their outdoor heaters to light up. They litter the ground with tinfoil covered in fentanyl residue.
McClain said they’ve had to put metal grates over the windows because people were “breaking out the windows, reaching in and stealing liquor off the shelves because the bar is right there.”
“We had beautiful stained glass,” Coors said. “They would just come and break the glass and reach in and pull out as much booze as they could.”
Coors said he paid $100 an hour for armed security to keep homeless people out of the bar, where they would try to do drugs in the bathroom. He spent $20,000 on fencing to keep them off the property. “They would come over the fencing into our courtyard and, you know, use that as their toilet, should we say politely,” Coors said.
A fenced off corner of the alley behind the bar became a popular place for the homeless to pee.
“It smells like fetid urine every time I walk through that alley,” Coors said. “It’s just gross.”
Coors said he received complaints from patrons. He understands their frustrations.
“Literally, they were having to walk through tents just to get in our door, and people just stopped coming,” he said, calling the closing of the Firestone business the “beginning of the end for us.” “We’ve just watched sales plummet for six months.”
Other businesses in the area have also seen declining sales due to the encampments, according to Denver media reports.
Coors knew that the homeless camps were a problem, but he decided recently to survey customers to find out if there were other reasons why they were staying away. There weren’t. More than 60 percent said the homeless camps kept them away, while another 40 percent said parking. Coors said those two things are related.
“They don’t want to park their cars where they’re afraid they’re going to get broken into,” he said, “and they don’t want to walk through all that stuff to get to the door.”
The next biggest issue cited by customers was pricing, which was mentioned by 29 percent, Coors said. Part of the reason the Triangle Bar’s prices were high was due to the high-end cocktails they serve, he said. But it’s also because of the increased security costs.
Coors credited their city councilman, Darrell Watson, for taking an active role and trying to get help, but he said that Watson, too, has been frustrated.
Johnston, the new mayor, was elected in June, promising to end unsheltered homelessness in the city. He was able to consolidate the vote of far-left progressives by vowing not to arrest homeless people, even as a last resort.
Coors said he’s not ready to “drag the new mayor through the mud just yet.” He was happy in late September when the city came through the neighborhood and dismantled the camps.
“I was like, ‘Oh, thank God.’ For one day we had our neighborhood back,” Coors said.
A day later, he said, and the tents were all back. Coors and other business owners reached out to the police and to city leaders trying to get them to take action before the homeless camps were re-entrenched. “Nothing,” Coors said of the response.
“Another week went by, more tents. And I’m like, ‘We’re done here. We’re done.,’” he said.
At the very least, Coors said, he wants the police and city leaders to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
“There is a no-camping law on the books, and the codes state you can’t camp on the sidewalks. So, why has that not been enforced? Why is open drug use not being enforced?” he asked. “I don’t understand how these people can blatantly break the law and have impunity for it.”
Coors said he’s now receiving hate mail from people accusing him of being anti-homeless.
“I want to make a clear distinction that the people we’re dealing with are not people that are down on their luck and just lost their job and their house,” he said. The people who are a problem “are drug abusers who will not go into the shelters and the places that will help them because they have to stop using drugs, and they love the fact that they can run around, day and night, doing whatever they want to do with impunity.”
The Triangle Bar is planning to reopen briefly at noon on Sunday for a “Farewell to Triangle” send-off. Coors said he and his husband aren’t dismantling the bar or selling off its assets. They’re planning on keeping it idle, hoping they might be able to sell it as a turn-key business for someone else who might want to reopen the bar if and when the streets get cleaned up.
But Coors said he won’t be involved.
“I’m not going to be the one running it, I can tell you that much,” he said. “I’ve had it.”