Upstairs, Inside The Onion After Hours

The Red Onion is a restaurant on the Cooper Street Mall in Aspen, Colorado. Originally built in the 1890s, the downstairs' most prominent feature is a long wooden bar, which goes a long way toward explaining The Onion's authentic look and feel of an old mining-town saloon.

Back when I lived in Aspen, ownership changed hands often which, given the seasonal economic considerations of doing business in a resort town, translated to the reality that The Onion was very seldom (if ever) open for business ... and so sat neglected on its haunches behind the thin cover of newly-planted decorative trees, perhaps entertaining itself with recollections of a more ah, colorful past.

Back in the day, The Red Onion wasn't originally built to be a restaurant but a mining town bordello, with a saloon serving drinks downstairs to loosen-up patrons before its "painted ladies" escorted their marks upstairs for a few raucous moments of expensive diversion and sensual entertainment.
Apart from depictions in movies, there's not much left of the original Old West saloons around any more, and the one time I was fortunate to take a deep breath and venture up the stairs, The Red Onion was still full of itself ... and reeked its identity as the genuine thing.
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No no no, don't start jumping to conclusions or get the wrong idea: I worked graveyard as a security guard back then, the empty Red Onion was a client, and one night another guard somehow secured a key to the front door and with our flashlights, the two of us dared venture inside.

Despite numerous renovations and "improvements" (like plumbing and electricity) through the years, with the electric power disconnected and the only illumination coming from our flashlights, it was easy to belly up to the century-old bar and imagine that a hundred years' time had never passed.

That night I felt as close to traveling back in time as I'd ever get. Staring back at the reflection of myself in the dim mirror behind the outrageously long bar, I had little trouble imagining myself belonging to a moment that had passed five generations before I was born.

Sure, The Onion had been open under various guises to the public off-and-on since its first life as a bordello had expired, but the second floor had always remained strictly off-limits, and all that 99.9999% of people knew consisted of what they could see from street level outside ... or of what they imagined the upstairs had been like in busier times.

So when Pat, the guard with the key, jerked his flashlight toward the narrow wood stairs I had little hesitation about finding out first-hand what The Onion had been all about. We were going to pay a visit to upstairs, inside a real Old West house of ill repute ...