Crestmoor's Summer Is Two Reopenings, One Mile Apart
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
The neighborhood you can walk around without seeing a storefront has spent the last two years quietly missing two things at once. This summer, both come back within about a mile of each other, and the loop that ties them together looks different than it did in 2024.
Crestmoor Park's Phase II improvements have been under construction since spring 2025, with completion scheduled for spring 2026, funded through the RISE Denver Bond and City Wide Accessibility Capital Funds. The budget is $1.8 million, which for a park most residents treat as an extension of their yard is a real number.
The playground being replaced was built in 2001. What that means in practice: the equipment your kids or grandkids climbed on is being pulled out, along with the segments of asphalt loop that had drained poorly for years and the picnic infrastructure near the shelter. Denver Parks framed the scope around modernizing and expanding the playground, updating the remaining segments of the asphalt loop trail, and creating a pedestrian park access from the Kearney and Southmoor intersection to the walking trail.
That third piece is the one worth watching if you live on the east side of the neighborhood. It's a small design decision with a large daily consequence. The park's community input reflected that: most respondents live within walking or rolling distance and visit the park at least weekly, with 88 percent citing exercise, relaxing, and dog-walking as their primary uses, and 83 percent living near the park. Which is to say, this rebuild wasn't designed for visitors. It was designed for the people who are already there, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a public capital project.
The nearest walkable-adjacent commercial district for most of Crestmoor is Lowry Town Center, about a mile east across Monaco. For a lot of households, the anchor there wasn't the coffee shop or the market. It was the Tavern building at 7401 E. 1st Ave. — the sports bar upstairs and the intimate music room called the Soiled Dove Underground in the basement.
The building went dark in early 2024. The former Tavern was shuttered in February 2024 due to family ownership strife and a failure to pay taxes. The property then sat idle for 20 months, with vagrant break-ins and eventually all windows boarded up, and RVs setting up camp on the north side of the property for about eight months. If you drove past it during that stretch, you know exactly what a two-year vacancy looks like on a corner that used to have a line out the door on a Broncos Sunday.
The turn came last fall. In October 2025, a local general surgeon, Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn, purchased the property. The initial plan she filed was ambitious in a different direction than the old use. Reporting shortly after the sale described plans to convert the bar and restaurant into classrooms and a recording studio for a local music school, with a small café and concerts continuing in the Soiled Dove venue in the basement; the owner later pivoted from those plans and opted to retain the bar and restaurant concept on the main floor instead.
The new full-service restaurant is called Rising Phoenix. The soft opening was planned for June 19. The music room downstairs came back on a slightly different timeline: the Soiled Dove Underground had a soft reopening on Fourth of July weekend in the newly renovated space at 7401 E. 1st Ave., with an additional outdoor stage now on the property. Glenn plans an official grand opening later this summer.
"I loved the old Soiled Dove's acoustics, its intimate atmosphere and the sense of community it created. When it closed, I felt that loss alongside so many others. Restoring this venue has not only been about renovating a building, but it's been about bringing back a place where people gather, celebrate music and create memories." — Dr. Jacquelyn Glenn
The names attached to the operation matter more than the reopening date, because they signal whether this becomes a durable neighborhood room or a nostalgia trade that fades.
The kitchen is being overseen and directed by Daniel Young — Chef D — who possesses experience opening and running several local restaurants and was the private chef for the Denver Nuggets for 17 years. A private team chef is a very specific résumé. It's cooking at scale for people who eat the same food six nights a week and get bored fast, which is closer to a neighborhood regulars problem than a downtown-destination problem. The planned menu is American cuisine featuring an assortment of burgers, pizzas, pastas, a couple of salmon dishes, a couple of seafood dishes, salads, appetizers, and desserts. That's a range built to be visited weekly, not once.
The music side has its own hires. The talent bookers will be Jesse Wehling and Patricia Duncan. The room itself is scaled for a capacity of about 300, with a state-of-the-art sound system, live recording capabilities, video production and livestreaming. And a new sound system was installed in the Soiled Dove by Listen Up, an upscale local audio company, with the Soiled Dove set to feature local, regional and national acts across many music genres as well as comedy. The GM running the floor is Joe Augusto, and the outdoor patio is being upgraded with a curved concrete stage on the north side for musicians and a triangular canopy from the building to the brick wall on the west side to provide shelter from rain and the Colorado sun.
Here is what a resident's Saturday looks like differently now than it did last July:
That fourth line is the one that hasn't been available since early 2024. For two summers, the closest sit-down room with a live show downstairs meant a trip to Cherry Creek North for dinner and then somewhere else entirely for the music. The reassembly of the two into a single address, one mile from the park, is a small piece of geographic luck.
The reason these two reopenings land in the same season isn't coordination. It's coincidence. Denver Parks put the Phase II timeline together in winter and spring 2024, with design in spring 2024 and construction starting spring 2025. Glenn bought the Lowry building in October 2025, unaware that the park a mile west was on the same finish line.
What the coincidence does mean is that if you moved into Crestmoor in 2023 or 2024, you are about to experience the neighborhood's amenity set at something closer to its full historical shape than at any point in your ownership so far. The park has been under construction fencing. The Tavern building has been dark and boarded. Neither of those was the version of the neighborhood a long-term resident would have described to you when you bought.
The version you get this August is closer to the version they meant.
Rising Phoenix isn't a Cherry Creek North restaurant, and the Soiled Dove isn't a Larimer Square venue. Neither is trying to be. What both are, at capacity of about 300 and a menu built for repeat visits, is a scale that matches what Crestmoor households can actually absorb into a weekly rhythm without it becoming an outing. The park rebuild works the same way. The playground isn't a destination playground. It's the one your kids will use on Tuesday afternoon and forget is new by October.
Small rooms and small parks, rebuilt for the people already there. That's the summer.
If you have questions about how the neighborhood is settling into its next chapter, or you're thinking about your own next move within it, Christine Nicholson would be glad to talk. Let's Connect.
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