Popination Correlation
A series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Corner Bar
The Hotel Boulderado is an old hotel, built in the late 1800s (I think? I’m not looking it up), and is one of the first established buildings in Boulder’s history. And it looks it—it’s gorgeously Victorian, with an ornate lobby filled with overstuffed chairs, wickers, and fireplaces festooned with whatever decorations are apropos to the season or holiday. The hotel’s rooms are all original and beautiful, and of course, pretty posh. When rock stars and other types of celebrities come to Boulder to share their thing, they’ll usually stay in the Boulderado. It’s an actual Boulder luxury.
I’ve stayed at the Boulderado only once, myself. It was in the bridal suite, after the reception for my first wedding. Turns out renting the Boulderado’s mezzanine for an event like a wedding reception is surprisingly affordable—well, relatively when compared to things like that. So as broke and me and my then-husband were, we were able to book it for a fun night of dancing. My mom ended up coughing up the chunk of change for it, and to this day is annoyed that not as many people showed up as we invited, and without RSVPing, so we had a lot of delicious food left over. Which is nothing anyone could have controlled.
I danced all evening in my handmade ivory raw silk wedding dress, drinking red wine, with not a single drop finding its way onto the silk, amazingly. Point is, the Boulderado bridal suite is included in their wedding packages, and so I have in fact stayed in the Boulderado. The suite itself was a gorgeous bed-canopied room of roses on the wallpaper and burgundy plush on the settee. I used to have some beautifully artistic pictures of me in the full length brass framed mirror, and our kimono-ed friend lounging on the burgundy-and-amber-wood chaise longue, but I tossed out most of my wedding pics in the divorce, the ones remaining that I scanned to a thumb drive, subsequently were lost along with all my ex-husband’s belongings as he later imploded on his own. But I digress.
Part of the Boulderado, occupying the ground floor corner on 10th and Walnut, just around the corner from the historic Pearl Street Mall, playing the role of hotel bar, is an equally brass-and-wood gem that boasts some of the best people-watching popination down the entire pedestrian mall’s length (and that’s saying something). It’s called:
The Corner Bar
Corner Bar is old-ish but I believe it’s relatively new compared to the hotel itself. I’m not actually sure about that, but as with all these popination pieces, I refuse to do research. So.
What I do know is, it’s a lovely place to idle away an entire summer afternoon. Many’s the day I’ve gone in with my local newspaper, ordered my (now defunct) Boulder Beer flavor du jour, a cup of the most amazing clam chowder you (seriously) have ever eaten, and posted up for a relaxing time. Whether it’s long chats with bartender Bruce, or sunscreen-scented afternoons out on the extensive patio for some epic people-watching. Friend Harold (who you’ve read about in Popination 1) and I would go there every so often when we weren’t at Mountain Sun for whatever reason, and it’s a go-to for when I’m going out with my parents since it’s a nice place to sit for a long time and it’s not too expensive.
A posh hotel bar is a weird place to strike up conversation as a near-native, since so many people are from elsewhere. I don’t even know why I put it like that; maybe it’s the sort of sensation that I used to get all the time when working at the Colorado Shakespeare Fest, and most of the casts and crew were from elsewhere. They’d be so in awe of Boulder’s oddities and beauty, and would want me to help them explore the place where I grew up, expressing such astonishment and appreciation all the time. I grew up in Boulder but without any money, so my experience of that town is very very different than most everyone else’s. Once, an actor I’d befriended asked me where I was from. When I answered Here, he went, No I mean originally—like where did you grow up? I said, No literally here. I moved here when I was two. We’d been strolling along Pearl, and at this point he stopped in his tracks and said,
“What?! No, this is Paradise. This is a place you visit, you don’t, like, grow up here. You make a pilgrimage to Shangri-La, it’s not your hometown.”
Yeah, well. /shrug/
All that is aligned with how I feel when see people wheeling their suitcases in and out of this luxury gem that’s so central to what Boulder is. There’s a Boulder tour bus that goes by Corner Bar frequently, and it always kind of made we weirdly wistful to see it. Corner Bar is actually a terminal stop for this tour, which takes tourists along to various historical, important, and otherwise beautiful Boulder landmarks. I’ve never taken the tour—a lot of us Boulderites that used to frequent Corner Bar used to muse that we should take the tour and offer corrections and our own additions, but we never ended up doing so.
That’s The Corner Bar. A cornerstone of Boulder itself. Long may it reign.
SIDE NOTE: there’s an older bar attached to the Boulderado—in its basement, in fact. It used to be called the Catacombs, a smoky, kind of grungy college-dollar-shots bar, which then later was fully refurbished into a speakeasy called License No. 1, with a whollllllle ‘nother vibe. Should I do that one too? I may have to tap my partner’s memories for Catacombs, as he was more of a smoker of that type than I was in our post-high-school-through-college years. But I danced burlesque in an alcove in it several times when it became License No. 1. Hm. I’ll think about it. More rich Boulder history there, though, all around.