"Like so many businesses, we faced enormous challenges throughout our journey." That line comes from The 1Up Arcade Bar's own announcement explaining why it closed its Blake Street location in LoDo this past June, ending a 15-year run that started back in March 2011 as Colorado's first arcade bar. The company didn't fold. It's opening its largest location yet this fall, and it picked Belmar to do it.
If you've walked the Plaza recently and noticed the old Lucky Strike space still sitting dark, that's about to change. The 1Up is taking over that 13,000-square-foot footprint, bigger than any of its existing spots in Colfax, Greenwood Village or Westminster, all of which are staying open. The company says it plans to keep some of the underground, dive-bar feel that defined the LoDo original while filling the space with its biggest collection yet of arcade cabinets, pinball machines and redemption games.
The largest 1Up yet, in the space Lucky Strike left behind
There's a detail here worth sitting with. The 1Up didn't close because Blake Street stopped being cool. In its own words, the decision came down to changing conditions in downtown Denver combined with rising financial pressure across the hospitality industry generally. The move brings The 1Up's large-format arcade-bar concept to a suburban shopping district after its Blake Street location closed.
Lucky Strike's old bowling alley space had already proven that Belmar could hold that kind of tenant. When it went dark, the property didn't sit empty long enough to become a symbol of retail retreat. It became available real estate for the next big anchor, and that anchor is The 1Up, which plans to open its largest location there this fall.
This is what Belmar has always done
None of this is new territory for the district. Belmar itself exists because a mall failed. The site was Villa Italia Shopping Center before Continuum Partners redeveloped it in 2004, after the original mall lost business as the Denver metro area expanded outward and shoppers had more competing options. What replaced it wasn't another enclosed mall but an open-air mix of streets, plazas and storefronts built to function more like a downtown than a shopping center, which is part of why locals and city planning documents alike refer to it as downtown Lakewood.
That founding story matters here because it establishes a pattern rather than a one-off. Belmar was built to absorb what a changing retail and entertainment landscape leaves behind and give it a second life at scale. Today it holds more than 80 stores and around 20 restaurants across the corner of Alameda and Wadsworth. The 1Up's move isn't an isolated leasing decision. It's the same mechanism that created Belmar in the first place, running again in real time, just with an arcade bar instead of an entire mall.
The quiet stretch between two seasons
If you're judging Belmar by its event calendar right now, it might look like the district is between chapters. Music on the Plaza, the free summer concert series that's been drawing people out on warm evenings, winds down as the season turns. Over at Bear Creek Lake Park, the city's Trail Running Series, which runs weekly routes through the park every September, is finishing its run for the year. The Rink at Belmar, one of the largest outdoor ice rinks in the Denver metro area, hasn't opened yet either. Last season it opened November 21 and ran into early January, and this year's exact dates haven't been posted yet as of late September.
That gap between the last outdoor concert and the first skate session is easy to read as a lull. It isn't one. It's the exact window when a 13,000-square-foot buildout gets finished without a single festival competing for attention. The programming that draws people to Belmar in the summer and the programming that draws them in the winter are seasonal. The tenant shift happening in the Lucky Strike space right now is not. It's the kind of change that's still there in July, whether or not anyone's thrown a concert on the Plaza that week.
What actually changes when the doors open
When The 1Up opens this fall, the practical effect for anyone who lives near Belmar is a new reason to be on the Plaza on a random Tuesday, not just during Festival Italiano or the holiday rush around the Rink. Large arcade bars tend to pull steady evening and weekend traffic independent of seasonal events, which means one more anchor keeping storefronts around it visible on nights that used to belong mostly to dinner reservations.
It also means Belmar keeps adding to a specific category of tenant: experience-based, cash-register-heavy, built to survive on repeat local visits rather than tourist traffic. That's a different kind of stability than a retail chain renewing a lease. It's a bet that people who already live nearby will keep showing up on ordinary nights, adding to the reasons people visit Belmar beyond its seasonal events.
None of this shows up if you're only checking Belmar's events page for what's scheduled this weekend. It shows up if you've been watching which storefronts sit empty and for how long, and who eventually takes them. Right now, the old Lucky Strike space is set to become The 1Up's new location, after its 15-year run at Blake Street in LoDo.
If you've noticed other changes around Belmar or Bear Creek Lake Park this fall that caught your eye, June McKenzie would genuinely like to hear about them. She keeps close track of what's shifting in the neighborhoods she covers, not because it's the whole story, but because it's usually the part everyone else misses.
