1866 brewery turned campus center, with Tivoli Brewing tap house · $ · since 1866
Tivoli Student Union
Denver's oldest brewery building, now the living room for three colleges.
Tivoli Student Union on the CU Denver Auraria Campus — Nove1986, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Tivoli brewed beer from 1866 (as the Colorado Brewery, then Milwaukee Brewery, then Tivoli-Union) until 1969, when it closed and sat empty on a campus that had been built around it. It reopened as a shopping mall in 1985 and, since 1994, as the student union for the Auraria campus: food court, bookstore, offices, and, since 2015, a revived Tivoli Brewing Company tap house pouring beer in the old brewhouse. It is the best place to feel what the Auraria campus is, a working neighborhood of 40,000 students that most downtown visitors walk past. Meow Wolf and Ball Arena are five minutes away.
Why go. A beer in a 160-year-old brewhouse, surrounded by students, five minutes from Ball Arena.
Come on a weekday afternoon in term time; the campus is dead on weekends and in summer.
A short walk from Tivoli Student Union
ArenaAuraria Event Center
$Where MSU Denver plays Division II basketball and volleyball, five minutes from Ball Arena.
Auraria & Ball Arena · 1201 5th St
Brooklyn's at Ball Arena
$$The sports bar in the arena's front yard, open before every Nuggets and Avs game.
Auraria & Ball Arena · 901 Auraria Pkwy
multi-purpose arenaBall Arena
Nuggets, Avalanche, Mammoth and the big tours, across Speer from LoDo
LoDo · 1000 Chopper Cir
Meow Wolf Convergence Station
$$$Four floors of alien-city art in a building wedged between the highway ramps.
Auraria & Ball Arena · 1338 1st St
The Celtic on Market
$$Guinness, early soccer kickoffs and legal horse betting at 14th and Market.
LoDo · 1400 Market St
Downtown Children's Playground
Small creekside playground below the MCA, reached over an old rail trestle
LoDo · 1698 14th St