It was four years ago tonight – Dec 13, 2015

At just about this time (5 pm) that Champs Downtown opened their doors for the very first time. They had been targeting the Santa Crawl as their opening night for a long time but kept running into hurdles that the borough threw in front of them. I finally got word late the night before the Crawl that I could announce their opening the next morning.

Remember this post, when I announced a true “bar special”.

Onward State picked up on it rapidly and the word quickly got out (that day set a record for traffic to the Santa Crawl website).

The management team had asked me if I thought I could bring enough people to make it worth opening. I took a little risk and said yes. When I stopped down at 11 pm and asked one of the owners if we had met our promise, his reply was “too much so”.

Here are pics from that night – sure looks different from how it does now.

As an aside to the grand opening, I had the pleasure of being Champs first paying customer as they let me sneak in and have the first beer before they opened the doors to the masses.