That was the deadpan response Zachary Lamb received when he showed his self-built LEGO replica of dive bar Nob Hill Inn...to the bartender at Nob Hill Inn.
Granted, Nob Hill can be a pretty deadpan place — in addition to being an unpretentious, weird, uproarious, hushed, intellectual and/or idiotic place that once again landed on our list of the Best Dive Bars in Metro Denver last month and our Top 100 Bars list. But is it a place that deserves to be immortalized in plastic toy bricks?
Lamb's answer to that question is a resounding yes.
A bartender himself, Lamb has been a regular at the watering hole at 420 East Colfax Avenue for years. Like so many others who have bid farewell to brain cells at that infamous Denver institution of inebriation, he was devastated when legendary Nob Hill bartender Bart Case died suddenly in 2023.
Case had been a huge LEGO fan — "He had thousands and thousands and thousands of them at home," Lamb says —
and he'd been gifting Lamb with bags of his extra bricks in the years prior to his death. Lamb didn't grow up with LEGO; he was a self-avowed K'Nex kid. But soon after Case died, "he just got more and more on my mind," Lamb recalls.
He put two and two together, and then he put brick and brick together. Within a couple of days, and without drafting any kind of blueprint beforehand, he had painstakingly constructed a loving replica of Nob Hill's interior. There's the dartboard. There's the jukebox. There's the cash register. There's the door into the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, which Lamb, in his wisdom, left unbuilt. Of course, no mere assemblage of plastic could approximate Nob Hill's smell — but from a strictly visual standpoint, it's dead on. All of it in exquisite, innocent miniature.
Crazier yet, Lamb did it all from memory.
"I didn't use any photos," he says, "and I hadn't even been to Nob Hill for a few months. The only thing I looked at online for reference was a photo of the clown painting."
Ah, the clown painting. If there's one thing that the mention of Nob Hill instantly summons, it's the image of the ethereal, haunting, borderline horrific clown painting that hangs above a row of booths. The bar has even recently started selling hoodies with the portrait printed on the back.
Of course, trying to reproduce such a large image onto an area the size of a postage stamp is impossible using LEGO bricks, no matter how small. "It's more like my abstract, mosaic version of the painting, using the focal point of the clown's mouth," Lamb says. As if anyone needed it to be creepier.
Nob Hill is nothing without its people, and likewise, LEGO Nob Hill is nothing without its LEGO people. Called "minifigures" in LEGO language, those cute, colorful homunculi populate Lamb's diorama. Like the Last Supper as reimagined by Barney from The Simpsons, the tableau teems with patrons in the midst of guzzling, spilling, staggering, wielding knives, passing out. And peeking around the corner, there's, um...Spider-Man? Sure, why not? Stranger beings have been seen inside those walls.
Lamb, like any artist worth his ego, inserted himself into his masterpiece. He freely admits to installing a bearded, ersatz-Zach minifigure on one of the barstools — God incognito, getting wasted with his creations.
But there's one resident of LEGO Nob Hill whose presence is far more poignant.
"I put a little skull with long, flowy hair in the corner of the room, looking down on everyone," Lamb says. "That represents Bart's ghost and the influence he had on all those wacky people."
Although the task he took upon himself ultimately wound up being thankless, Lamb says that he did receive one small vote of approval when he first showed his LEGO replica to the shrugging bartender at Nob Hill. "Even though she didn't seem to care about it," he remembers, "she did give me a free beer."
