Soaked Squire: Colfax dive bar to close temporarily after 3 feet of flooding

The Squire Lounge at 1800 E. Colfax Ave. is one of Denver’s legendary bars, awash in history. And on Friday, July 31, its basement was also awash in floodwaters after an afternoon deluge.

“Last night’s storm wasn’t even in the top 50 worst rain events we have had but we had over THREE FEET of water in the basement. Took out our water heater, walk in cooler, liquor and anything else we had in the basement,” co-owner Sudhir Kudva announced on his Instagram account. He has since estimated the damage to be around $30,000.

That just added insult to the injury of what the Squire has suffered since the Colfax Bus Rapid Transit project started almost two years ago. By February 2025, BRT construction had reached this stretch of Colfax, blocking the sidewalk in front of the bar. At the time, Kudva estimated that business was “around 40% down from where we were a year ago,” he told Westword. “There’s no parking. Foot traffic is down. Our visibility is gone. We’re definitely feeling it. We had to lay off our manager and one of our music bookers, but bands still want to play here. I’m telling them, ‘Hey, guys, I can’t afford to pay you, pay a sound guy and pay a door guy to have your band play.’… The Squire’s been around for almost a hundred years, but I don’t know if it’ll make it past this.”

In interviews and social media posts since the flooding, Kudva is blaming the BRT construction for the flooding as well.

“Colfax has been turned into a concrete jungle over the decades and the storm drains have never been updated,” he wrote. “The Colfax BRT construction has been, in my opinion, mismanaged. Lots of rework due to miscommunication just on the few blocks around the Squire. But what they did by covering up the storm drains and pulling out the hard clay soil around the building and replacing it with soil cells, has made the building uninhabitable during a rainstorm.”

He noted that past rainstorms would cause a few inches of flooding at best, far less than the 3 feet he experienced after Friday’s storm. While the bar stayed open after the flood, focusing on canned beer service over taps, it will need to close temporarily for repairs after it clears out its inventory. But it’s not clear whether the establishment will continue onward, based on Kudva’s initial reactions on his social media account.

“It will take thousands of dollars of remediation and I’m not sure if it’s worth it since the next remotely heavy rain will flood us out again,” he wrote. “The city needs to be held accountable and fix this. Until then, we will have to figure out our way forward.”

We’ve reached out to the City of Denver and Kudva for more information, and will update this story if we hear back. According to the project website, the stretch of Colfax in front of the Squire is expected to be complete by “Summer 2026.” Crews are currently working on the eastbound lane, directly in front of the Squire.

Over the past century, the Squire has seen numerous changes, including shops, a ballet studio and a bar with some of the worst bathrooms in the city, updated in 2013 when Kudva and co-owner Steven Alix, who’d bought the place in 2004, gave the Squire a slight facelift. When regulars squawked at that, Kudva printed T-shirts that read “New Squire Sucks,” complete with pictures of the old bathrooms.

Now he can change that to “New Squire Soaks.”