Popination Excoriation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Terminal Bar.
Also, Little Black Church. Which isn’t a church. Unless you think it is one. What happens inside it, after all, is something of a bloodletting and meditative ritual. As much as anything Catholic is.
Terminal Bar is one of those places that is so precarious-seeming right now; one of those erstwhile 3rd places that was so important to me in the Before Times, having descended into decrepitude during the Plague, and now…it remains tarnished. It’s not the same as it was, and I don’t think it ever will be, or can be. Is that Hiraeth? Maybe. But it’s kind of sad. At the same time, I never use that bus terminal anymore, and downtown is not a good place to go wander and hang anymore. For several reasons, a current drug plague being only one of them. And so, I don’t know if I have the right to lament that it’s not so great anymore, since, well, I never go there anymore myself and how many others are like me and so of course it’s going to decline. It’ll age and die. Everything living does. And pubs are alive.
Terminal Terminus
In the days when I was a cross-city commuter, up to 4X a week, this place was a pillar to me, and to my partner too, when my back-and-forths began to include his home. The points of pause in this commute were fourfold: back to Boulder, it was Lazy Dog and Mountain Sun. In the Denver direction, it was Terminal and Slattery’s. Pub pauses in a travel time that could turn into two hours, depending on connections. Which is why the pauses were so necessary.
I’ve talked about Terminal before, way back in the very beginning of my Popinations, before I knew they would become a series. Here’s my description from Popination #1:
When Denver’s Union Station got all reconfigured and redecorated (and Market Street bus station closed), it became a beautiful destination itself right downtown, and the Terminal Bar one of the prettiest jewels in that crown. Even the functioning bus terminal itself was lovely, like a small European airport, and the historical train station above it was turned into a big ornate Victorian-esque hall, with little food stalls and boutiques lining either end, a luxury hotel upstairs, and the old-school brassy speakeasy-style bar as the highlight. It’s all brass and plush and dark wood and jewel tones and it’s got kind of a glam Victorian vibe.
Don’t ask me why I became a regular here: its bartenders were inattentive* if beautifully dressed, and all the drinks were overpriced. But it was such a cool place to go, and such good people-watching, and they had …how many taps? More than 20. I’m not gonna look it up. And there it was, at either end of my bus commutes from Boulder to Denver and back again. So why not? Too bad it descended into fentanyl-laced decline after the lockdown. Well, Terminal itself, the bar, is still nice, and overpriced, and beautiful, and etc. But the bus and light rail station connected to it is so crunchy and dangerous, that even I don’t use it anymore, but prefer to cough up the chunk of change for an Uber if I’m going to Boulder. It’s too bad, really—that whole area went from scary to hip and hopping back in the early aughts, and now it looks like the pandemic has kicked it back down the stairs to scary.
*To be fair, the bar is set up really weirdly, with an order window open to the big hall, right opposite to the long bar inside, with the tenders working basically back and front. I can’t imagine it would be easy whatsoever to be able to stay on top of it all, especially as in its heyday when I was a regular, it was so very teemingly busy at all times. But still.
I also talked about Terminal briefly in Beauty/Pain, too, though not really in enough pub-detail to warrant quote inclusion here. Funny, that one’s called Beauty/Pain, though, and this time I’m talking about having gotten a tattoo. Pain for Beauty, indeed.
Tattoo You
I have been wanting to get a hand tattoo for quite some time, and so I decided to take the plunge and try out a little weird corner of the rough and artsy part of downtown that was recommended to me and that seemed to have a bit of a cool gothy vibe. So, in the lashing wind one spontaneous afternoon, I pushed my way into the Little Black Church tattoo studio once me and the uber driver finally found it.
In 1996, I had just graduated with two bachelors’ degrees: a BA in English Lit and a BFA in Acting. I was working and living at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, had just gotten in (or was about to get in) to my first of many shows with Frequent Flyers, the local aerial dance company, had just successfully auditioned to be a sword fighter at the RenFaire. So why not do yet another dangerous thing I’d been wanting to do since the age of 14: a tattoo. Now this, being 1996 meant that it was just before tattoos were a commonly seen thing on people that weren’t scary punks or Navy vets. (Because of course, like every single artistic endeavor I begin, it’s always juuuuuust before the big trends. Sigh. Vemödalen, amirite?) And so I got a small one on my right shoulder blade. A place where it’d be very easily hidden, for all those acting jobs I was gonna start getting. Mm-hm.
My second tattoo I remember being a big deal–it’s dark and thick and elaborately Celtic-knotted. It’s also just around my elbow, below the sleeve line, which in 2002 was still pretty edgy for a professor.* But since then I’ve done things like get into burlesque, give up on auditioning to do my own work instead, and embraced my love of the harder stuff by getting more and more visible ink done, and buzzing off the entire lower half of my hair. And, to be fair, the world and its fashion culture has itself changed quite a bit too: even in my partner’s business world, tatts are far more acceptable to display than they ever have been. And in this new hardcore era, I’ve been wanting a hand tattoo more and more–I love it when the dark parts of my sleeve poke out of a long sleeved shirt, and have been imagining what I’d want on the opposite hand. Last week? It was time.
*I describe all my tattoos in some detail in one of my previous Popinations, an old Boulder brewery where I like to have a pint after going to Rising Tide for a tatt.
The Pot Calling the Little Black Church
I’d been hearing about the Little Black Church from a few different places, and it seemed like it had a cool vibe. When I got there, I saw that the hype was indeed to be believed: a darkly painted gothy theme, with religious iconography everywhere, including a display of homemade soaps one of the artists makes, planted in a large collection plate filled with communion wafers. There’s a big baptismal font in the center of the bigger room behind the host stand, and beautiful iconography in the bathroom. Arched ceilings with ornate sconces complete the effect.
The artists were warm and spiky and welcoming, at one point companionably gossiping over my bleeding extremity as though I were the water cooler. A really good feel and look to the place, methinks, and Duder, my artist for this session, was an absolute master, especially at fine detailed line work and delicate grayscale shading. It’s a beautiful piece, and I’m very happy with it. (Check my Insta and also his for more images.)
I wanted to go to a famous dive bar after getting my artwork done, because I’d heard so much about it. And it was supposedly close by. So I walked down there and unfortunately it was locked, even though the website said it was open. But it was in a rough enough place that I didn't feel safe standing there trying the door, so I decided to take a short walk in the wind to an old favorite 3rd place, the Terminal Bar. It’s not just me: apparently it’s always been that scary—when I mentioned it was closed, I heard from my partner and other seasoned Denverites that it’s always been a pretty terrifying corner, though inside lovely and genial. It seems to be a theme, especially for dive bars. And why do I have this repeated refrain of finding these bars in crunchy areas? Are all areas crunchy around here, are all bar lots crunchy, or am I just gravitating to the crunch, or? Anyway, that point is moot—I’ll save more stories of Bar Bar till I can I actually go there and gather some. Stay tuned.
Terminalater
The transformation of Terminal, from cool posh speakeasy to police at the bathrooms to this limping broken version of what it once was, was a bit heartbreaking for me to see. Like seeing an old friend and noticing how rough they look. Maybe when its construction concludes it’ll be better. Maybe not, though.
The sadness of seeing a place like Terminal go downhill, or shut down, hit me at this last visit—the place was such a staple in my world before, and now... And how many places like this have never opened up again at all, for plague or other reasons? I can think of two, fondly: Lazy Dog and the Robusto Room. But then, nothing really lasts forever, especially after a devastation. Maybe I’m just spoiled because so many old pubs in my hometown survive to this day. Then again, so many more haven’t. Maybe I’ll do a Popinations of Yore that covers a few of these dead pubs in one. Or would that be too depressing?
Can you hold a wake for a pub?