The Denver Drumstick opened on West Colfax Avenue in 1967 and served boxcar dinners of fried chicken and shrimp under a model train that ran along the ceiling, a novelty locals remembered as the biggest little railroad in the land. The restaurant closed sometime in the 1970s, and for decades the building sat as one more example of what West Colfax was known for in Lakewood: a corridor you drove through, not one you walked along.
Last weekend, that same building hosted the fourth annual Colfax Chicken Fest. The event has run every September since 2023, growing each year, and it now anchors the fall calendar for the nonprofit that has spent the past several years turning this stretch of Colfax into something the neighborhood didn't have before: a walkable arts district with its own trail, its own monthly ritual, and its own headquarters in a building that used to serve chicken dinners.
That continuity is the part worth sitting with if you already live near West Colfax. Nobody tore down the Drumstick to build something new. The old building became the new thing. If you want to understand what has actually changed along this corridor, that's the through-line: rehabilitation, not replacement, and a chicken restaurant is the proof.
The Building at 6501 West Colfax
The HUB Building, as it's known now, sits at 6501 West Colfax Avenue and houses three of the district's anchor galleries under one roof: Core Art Space, EDGE Gallery, and NEXT Gallery. A fourth gallery, CHAC @ 40 West, operates a few blocks away at 7060 West 16th Avenue. Together they form the backbone of what the 40 West Arts District calls its creative core, a state-certified Colorado Creative District built around historic West Colfax.
The chicken fest itself leans into the building's history rather than papering over it. The event centers on a drumstick exhibit, chicken-themed art contests, and a nod to the Denver Drumstick's old boxcar dinners, staged inside the same walls where the original restaurant served them. It is a small, specific kind of civic memory that only works because the building stayed in use instead of getting knocked down for something forgettable.
If you've driven past 6501 West Colfax for years without registering it as anything other than an old commercial building, that's the point. The transformation didn't announce itself with new construction. It happened inside the existing structure, gallery by gallery.
What the ArtLine Actually Changed
The bigger shift is the ArtLine, a four mile walking and biking route that runs through the district and connects three separate parks along the way. More than 100 public art installations sit along the route, free to see any day of the week, no gallery hours required.
That number matters because of what West Colfax used to be understood as in this part of Lakewood: a fast, wide arterial road, useful for getting somewhere else, not a place you'd choose to walk. A four-mile trail with a hundred pieces of public art strung along it is a different kind of infrastructure. It treats the corridor as a destination with a beginning and an end, not a pass-through.
For a resident, this changes what a weekday evening walk actually looks like. Instead of a loop around a single park, there's now a route that threads through three of them, with art to look at the entire way. That's a genuinely different daily-life option than existed on this stretch of Colfax a decade ago, and it didn't require displacing a single business to build it.
A Monthly Habit, Not a Special Occasion
The chicken fest is once a year. The district's real rhythm is First Friday, held every month except January, when the galleries along the corridor open to the public starting at 5 p.m. with staggered hours depending on the location.
If you want to fold this into a regular routine rather than treat it as a once a year event, the anchor stops are:
- Core Art Space, 6501 W. Colfax Ave, inside the HUB Building
- EDGE Gallery, 6501 W. Colfax Ave, same building
- NEXT Gallery, 6501 W. Colfax Ave, same building
- CHAC @ 40 West, 7060 W. 16th Ave, a short walk or drive north
Because three of the four sit in the same building, a First Friday visit doesn't require much planning. Park once, walk the HUB Building's galleries, then decide whether to continue on to CHAC. The district describes First Friday as a standing party with live music and light bites alongside the art, which is a fair description of what a monthly, no-ticket-required gathering point looks like when it actually sticks.
Why the Fourth Annual Matters More Than the First
There's a difference between an event that happens once and one that survives long enough to get a number attached to it. The Colfax Chicken Fest's jump from a first-time novelty in 2023 to a fourth annual fixture in 2026 is the kind of detail that's easy to miss and says something real about the district's staying power.
Neighborhoods accumulate a lot of one-off pop-ups that never come back. A recurring, growing event tied to a specific building's specific history is a different signal. It means the organization behind it, the 40 West Arts nonprofit, has enough community buy-in to keep staging the same weird, specific idea, chicken sculptures and drumstick exhibits included, year after year, and enough attendance to justify calling it bigger and better than the last one.
That's the piece a first-time visitor to West Colfax would never pick up on just by driving past. A gallery is a gallery whether it opened last month or five years ago. A festival that's on its fourth year, in the same building, built around a joke about a restaurant that closed fifty years ago, tells you the neighborhood has decided this is worth keeping.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this requires you to do anything differently tomorrow. But if First Friday has been a thing you've heard about without ever building it into a monthly plan, the HUB Building at 6501 West Colfax is the easiest place to start, three galleries in one stop, five o'clock kickoff, no ticket required. And if your usual walking loop has been the same park for years, the ArtLine is worth trying at least once, if only to see how much public art you've been driving past without noticing.
West Colfax's identity in Lakewood has been shifting for a while now, not through demolition but through reuse: an old restaurant becomes a gallery hub, a stretch of arterial road becomes a four-mile trail, a joke about a chicken dinner becomes an annual tradition. That's a different kind of neighborhood story than the ones about what got torn down and rebuilt. It's a story about what stayed and got repurposed, which is a detail worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who cares less about what's new in Lakewood and more about how the old parts of it are still finding new uses.
If you're weighing what a home along this stretch of Lakewood is actually worth, given a corridor that's been quietly building its own cultural identity for years, Brian Grace has spent his career reading exactly this kind of neighborhood-level change. Call Brian, and start with a conversation about your home.
