Bob Dylan Maybe Drank Here. The Nob Hill Inn Has Until Sept. 30.

Check your pocket the morning after a night at the Nob Hill Inn. If there is a two-dollar bill in there, you were at Nob Hill. That was the whole idea. John Plessinger, the guy who has owned this place for most of his life, started slipping twos into people's change so they would find one the next day and remember where they had been. That is the kind of bar this is. Or was. Or might not be for much longer.

Here is the situation. The Nob Hill Inn, 420 E. Colfax Ave., is set to close at the end of September 2026 unless it can raise enough money to fix the building. And the building is old. There has been a bar or restaurant on that spot since 1937, and it has carried the Nob Hill name since 1954. That is not a marketing line somebody dreamed up last year. That is nearly a century of people walking through the same door on Colfax.

One family, one bar, since 1969

Most people do not realize how personal this place is. Plessinger's father bought the bar in 1969 and put it in his son's name. John was 21 at the time. Think about that for a second. Your dad hands you a Colfax bar the year you can legally drink in it, and you spend the next five and a half decades running it. It has been in the family ever since.

Now Plessinger is getting ready to retire, and the bar needs repairs it simply cannot pay for after the revenue it has lost. So instead of just locking the doors and walking away, he did something you do not see much anymore. He gave the bar away.

He gave it to Christy Simonsen. She is Denver-born, a 15-year veteran of the place, the head bartender and the manager. She is the one Plessinger is betting on to keep the lights on. No sale, no big buyout. Just here, you love this place as much as I do, see if you can save it.

The BRT problem

So what actually happened here. The staff will tell you straight up. Bus rapid transit construction on Colfax cut deep into business. When they tear up the street outside your front door for months, people stop showing up. That is not complicated.

And here is the part that stings. The bar did not qualify for the city's Business Impact Opportunity Fund, the BIO Fund, which is meant to help businesses hurt by exactly this kind of construction. Nob Hill did not hit the 20 percent revenue-decline threshold to get in. And now that the construction has moved further east down Colfax, the bar is ineligible anyway. So they got hurt enough to lose money, but not on paper the right way, and then the window closed. That is the kind of thing that makes you want a two-dollar bill and a stiff pour.

Simonsen has organized a new GoFundMe for the repairs. And she is hosting a community meeting Saturday, September 5, around 5 p.m., to gather ideas for keeping the bar going. Not a wake. A working meeting. Bring your ideas.

They have done this before

Here is the thing about Nob Hill. They have been backed into this corner before and clawed out. Back in 2020, during Covid, this bar nearly went under. They survived on to-go drinks, pizza sold out the back door, and regulars throwing fundraisers to keep their bar alive. So if anybody knows how to fight for a place like this, it is these people. That is worth remembering before you write the obituary.

And there is a lot worth fighting for inside those wood-paneled walls. Regulars and staff will tell you Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac both passed through over the decades. Are the rumors airtight? No. But that is Colfax for you. The street has been swallowing legends since before any of us were born, and the Nob Hill is exactly the kind of dark, wood-paneled room where a young Dylan would have nursed a drink and nobody would have blinked.

There is a mascot dog named Slinky. Staff call him the bark-back. And the artwork on the walls? Plessinger painted a chunk of it himself, back when he was an art student at the University of Denver in the 1980s. So you are drinking under the owner's own paintings. You cannot manufacture that. A new bar can copy the aesthetic, buy the reclaimed wood, hang some vintage signs. It cannot buy a guy's DU art-school canvases from forty years ago.

Why this one matters

Look, Denver loses old bars all the time now. The lots get more valuable than the businesses on them, and the neighborhood dives that gave Colfax its whole reputation keep blinking out one by one. What makes the Nob Hill different is it is not closing because somebody wants to flip the real estate. It is closing because the street got torn up and the repair bill came due at the exact wrong moment, and a retiring owner handed the keys to the bartender rather than let it die quietly.

So. September 5, around 5 p.m., 420 E. Colfax. If you have ever found a mystery two-dollar bill in your jeans and wondered where it came from, this is the room. And it has until the end of the month.