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Bondad Saloon bids adieu after 40 years
Cowboy, biker bar makes way for highway
Herald Staff Writer
Photo by NICK MANNING/Herald
Rich “Dirty” Jansen, a bartender at Bondad Hill Saloon, fills the register in preparation of the bar’s final night of business on Sunday. The Colorado Department of Transportation bought the bar to clear space for the widening of U.S. Highway 550 to four lanes. The converted house has served as a bar since the ’60s.
Bondad Saloon was billed as "bikers favorite cowboy bar/cowboys favorite biker bar."
The spot is the Bondad Saloon, which shut its doors for good early this morning after about 40 years under various names and owners.
Guy Kemp, who purchased the roadhouse in 2006, said the Colorado Department of Transportation purchased the property to make way for the highway widening.
"We will always remember this place. Always," said Kemp, a Florida transplant who decided to buy the bar after visiting the area on vacation. A couple years ago, he married a local girl, Kelly Cunningham, whom he had hired to tend bar.
Cunningham, now Kemp, said her uncle had owned the place when it was Bondad Dave's and her parents frequented the establishment.
"You hear all the stories of the gambling in the basement," she said.
Come spring, the couple finally will take a proper honeymoon - a cruise to Jamaica on the $3,000 worth of signed dollar bills that had papered the bar's aging walls.
"We're sad that it's going, but it kind of closes a chapter in our lives," Kemp said.
The bar's closing will be felt most saliently by rural residents who cherished having a welcoming watering hole so close to home.
"It's going to change our lifestyle," said Vicki Helms, who lives just up the road. "We don't drink in town."
She said she had been going to the bar since the '80s, witnessing its earlier incarnations as TJs and Bondad Dave's.
She and her husband considered purchasing the bar in 1989, she said, but even then people were talking about the likelihood of it being razed to make room for the highway.
The bar, originally a house, was constructed in 1924, according to La Plata County records. Locals say it was a kit home, purchased from Sears, Roebuck & Co. back when the company had ready-to-assemble houses for order from a catalog.
From a residence, it was converted into a small grocery and eventually, despite the protests of some neighbors, a bar in the mid-'60s.
But with growth pushing average daily trips on the highway to about 5,000, an expansion has been inevitable. Starting at the state line, the widening has inched closer and closer. To clear the way, CDOT has been buying rights of way.
Kemp said the deal with CDOT closed about two weeks ago. He plans to auction off furnishings and decorations from the bar. CDOT gets the building, he said.
On Sunday, bartender Rich "Dirty" Jansen was marking the occasion with an extra generous pour.
"I like a little coke with my Jack," a customer joked as Jansen filled his glass with Jack Daniel's whiskey.
Billed as "bikers favorite cowboy bar/cowboys favorite biker bar," Bondad Saloon was nothing if not inclusive.
"We got bikers. We got cowboys. We got citizens. They all get along," Jansen said.
Echoing the sentiments of many Sunday, he said, "It's the only bar like it in the area. It closes, that's it."
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