Downtown's District Tavern ending its 10-year run

Walk into The District Tavern around closing time Saturday night, and you might just find owner Nöel Chester dancing on the bar to Iggy Pop’s 1977 blaster “Lust for Life.”

“That’s what happens on a good night at The Tavern,” Chester said Thursday.

But Saturday won’t be just another good night at the downtown bar. It will be its last.

After 10 years at 260 E. Congress St., The District will have its final last call Saturday. By Monday morning, Chester will hand over the keys to landlord Scott Stiteler and begin a new chapter that may or may not include reopening in another location.

“I feel like it is OK for me to get off the beaten track because my clientele wasn’t on the beaten track,” she said of scouting a new location. “So I’m looking all over. I have an open mind; I’m thinking outside the box. And we’ll see where I land.”

Stiteler could not be reached for comment, but in a text message on Thursday he said he has had “many interested parties” reach out to him about the space.

“I am only interested in the space continuing as a dive bar with all of the unique character and experience that great dive bars capture,” he said.

Chester has known since early last year that The District’s days were numbered. Stiteler told her back then that he planned to significantly increase the rent, bringing it to the current $28 a square foot from the $14 she had been paying when she exercised a five-year option on her lease in 2010, she said.

Chester opened The District Tavern at a time when East Congress Street was all but dead. She put in a handful of booths and tables, a dart board and pool tables, and set out to become a neighborhood bar — a place where regulars like Mike Garza could drop in and grab a beer and a shot and sneak in a game of pool in late afternoon.

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“This little bar has served so many people,” Garza reflected on an early January weekday, taking his drink to a small table next to the jukebox. “You have your general craziness in every bar, but most of the people here are like family.”

Chester said it took a few years to build up a clientele. The best years were 2007 through 2009, before East Congress was partially closed for months at a time for the Sun Links streetcar track construction. “But we persevered and were able to stick it out and stay there.”

In the past couple of years, East Congress Street has transformed from the often-overlooked stretch of mom-and-pop restaurants and bars of a decade ago into hipster central today. Restaurants moved in to long vacant or neglected spaces and their owners pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into renovations, turning the street into a destination entertainment district that includes nightclubs charging covers and sports bars with dozens of flat-screen TVs. Stiteler also plans to build a 139-room, seven-story hotel near the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Congress Street.

There are no TVs in The District. There never have been. There’s a tabletop Ms. Pac-Man game near the front window and a jukebox in the corner where you can hear Warren Zevon, Sex Pistols or early James Brown. You get four songs for a buck or nine for two.

Occasionally an underground band on tour will pop in for a set, or a local hobby band such as Garza’s Spunk Dolls, which was set to play a gig at the bar two weeks ago, will give a show.

Chester has spent the past couple of weeks packing up a decade of memories. She’s leaving Stiteler the bar, which a friend of hers built. She’s donating the booths to Skrappy’s Tucson Youth Collective.

On closing night, you-call-it shots — which includes any liquor at the bar — will be $3 apiece. And when the mood strikes and she’s ready, Chester will jump on the bar and do that dance.

“The reason that we are here and the reason The District is here is that I have this very, very strong lust for life,” she said. “And that is what’s going to happen. That will be my trade for tears.”