“Is there still a place for these bars? Are they still important? Yes. Every time one of these bars closes, it’s a loss of a part of Denver,” says Drew Bixby, Lecturer in the Department of English as well as Assistant Director and Writing Center and Distance Director of the Writing Center at International College Beijing, In 2009 he wrote Denver’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Mile High City, and now more than half of the 95 bars listed in the guidebook have closed. “A place can have a soul,” Bixby states, but it takes time. “Because of what it has lived with and who has lived in it, you cannot speed up the characteristics of a place becoming a dive bar.”

Dive or Die: Can the slow death of Denver’s dive bars be stopped?
DiningOut, Jan 25